So are you just an anti-Foundationalist Skeptic? I don't know at all where you're coming from. — Dharmi

I am not a philosopher. I practice critical thinking with a philosophical bent. I'm not into labels. I have spelled out what I consider to be reliable and non reliable pathways to knowledge. I do privilege empiricism and methodological naturalism but I don't think we can be 100% certain of anything. To be called an anti foundational skeptic is thematically close, but way too grand and extreme. I am still working out what I am. Sorry if that sounds inadequate.

That's fine, but I'm asking you, what do you consider genuine epistemology? You can't have this double standard where I have to provide my epistemology but you don't have to provide yours. — Dharmi

I have provided it numerous times. No point repeating myself.

Just because an atheist has asked a question that might seem to go against atheism, it doesn’t mean you should just reject it.
— Franz Liszt

What do you mean by "reject it". You mean dismiss the argument? No, my main drag was not to dismiss your argument but to question your authenticity.

I admit, you can't do anything to convince me that you are not a theist. I may change my opinion as time goes on. However, you made a few statements OUTSIDE your argument, that an atheist well versed in philosophy would never say, but a theist well versed in philosophy would definitely say. For instance:

We believe that we are just biological animals or just chemicals grouped together through evolution
— Franz Liszt — god must be atheist

GMBA - nice work. I would say the same. FL may be an atheist but the trajectory of FL's ideas are word for word apologist-protesting-the-atheist-worldview 101. I find it unlikely anyone could have an atheist worldview with these sorts of classically described reservations.

FL is at best a theist-curious agnostic.

Like I said, the demonstration is through the third form of epistemology, which is consciousness. Through consciousness, we can know the Supreme Consciousness. This is what yoga aims to do. Yoga in Sanskrit means "unification" with ourselves, then the Divine. You have to do the proper yoga system under the guidance of a proper guru, that's the experiment. — Dharmi

Thank you, I thought you might have more detail. But this is fine for now.

I have no reason to accept that there is supreme consciousness - this needs to be demonstrated. The fact that Yoga means unification is understood, but so what? Sikh, for instance, means 'seeker of truth', is there evidence Sikhism has access to the truth? No. The notion that you have to do a proper Yoga system is exactly the kind of thing every cult, religion and belief system would maintain. How could they not? By what criteria do you tell genuine claims like this from phoney ones?

t's not unknowable. That's what I am saying. It's very knowable, you just need to do the experiment. What you're saying is like what people would argue about quantum particles and atoms in the ancient world. "We can't see them, we don't know they're there, they're unknowable, there's no known method to know about them, we have to raise our hands up and just give up!" This is the type of reasoning you're using. And I'm telling you the method. — Dharmi

You have given me no useful information about method or experiment or even what it is that is being tested. Just claims. By the way, ancient people would have been correct in not accepting something until it can be demonstrated. The bit about raising hands and giving up is not really related and seems to be surplus, emotive dramatisation. Main point: once we can reliably test for it then we know it is likely to be true.

Are you assuming that materialism is "natural"? That's question begging (or circular reasoning, I always get those two mixed up). — RogueAI

I'm comfortable with saying materialism is the natural world or physicalism.

I'm also comfortable with saying reason works as the most reliable tool we have to explore ideas. But I recognise that I am using reason to justify reason and that too is question begging. There are presuppositions we have to make and these have been addressed several times.

I think it's significant that you see the problem in terms of immaterial beings conceived as ghosts or souls. I see that as due to the influence of Descartes' particular form of dualism. As Edmund Husserl notes in The Crisis of Western Science, Descartes' intuition of consciousness as the fundamental ground of existence is profound and basically true, but he errs in treating the 'cogito' as an object, 'a little tag end of the world', is how he puts it.

The way I would explain it, is that the subject, the 'res cogitans', is never an object of cognition, except metaphorically. You can never actually make an object of the knowing subject. And there's no such thing as 'mind', either, except by inference. Mind is the subject of experience, or the subjective pole of experience, but is never an object of cognition, as such (which is why eliminativists insist it can't be considered as real.)

This has resulted in a deep-seated tendency in modern thought which was described by the philosopher Richard Bernstein as:

Cartesian anxiety, which refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". — Wayfarer

I only raise souls or ghosts because they often come up, and these ideas can stand in as place holders for pretty much any claim of access to a different realm outside naturalism.

I've already addressed the limits of materialism elsewhere and that is not the key subject. The subject/question is what can we demonstrate to be the most reliable source of information about the world? No one has offered anything alternate yet other than some vague claims and an undifferentiated whinge about empiricism.

So, it follows, that the only way you can prove "God-thing" is through a similar methodology? Do you disagree? — Dharmi

Yes, I disagree but I certainly understand the thinking and have often heard it before. For starters no one has established what a 'God-thing' even is to any agreement. It is unknowable how a phenomenological/personal experience type method of verifying something can work.

So let me ask you, suppose we jump forward in time 5,000 years and amazing technological progress has been made, but scientists are still stumped about how matter produces consciousness. Wouldn't you question materialism at that point? — RogueAI

No. Timeframes have no bearing on the truth of an idea. If however evidence of a supernatural is found. Then fine.

If we follow the yoga system, and have proper predisposition, then one can "know" God, and other entities too theoretically. But you have to do the experiment. That's the requirement. — Dharmi

That seems unverifiable. And Scientologists, say, would argue the same point. What method do we use to determine which occult system is true? If someone doubts matter on epistemological grounds, how can they accept 'knowledge of God' as a sound premise.

s ‘reliable knowledge’ a pragmatic construction that is simply useful in relation to human goals or an attempt to make knowledge
correspond to an independently existing external
world? Is science simply a relation between propositions or the relation between a proposition and ‘the way the world really is’? — Joshs

I don't know. Good questions. I do think an element of pragmatism ( a presupposition, if you like) is involved in as much as none of us can prove that we are not all simulations living in the laboratory of an extra terrestrial, who has created the illusion of our universe, complete with the illusion of physical laws.

Are you going to take up smoking and heroin use on the basis that we can't demonstrate to 100% that materialism is what our perceptions tell us it is?

The point for me is economical. It is not about endless parsing of the questions; Is all this a dream? What is perception? etc. It's that I fail to see how we have a choice but to accept that we live in a reality that we all share (despite the shades of grey in the word 'reality'). We need an epistemology in order to survive and make plans. What else can we use but methodological naturalism?

I fail to see how, for instance, mysticism, faith, religious visions, necromancy, astrology - insert alternative reality of your choice - can assist us in any way. The results are not demonstrable.

What reliable knowledge do you think methodological naturalism has provided us? That is to say, how do you know this sentence is false: "methodological naturalism does a great job of describing the dream world I've created" — RogueAI

There is no end of games we can play with language and ideas. I can't, for instance refute the problem of hard solipsism. The question for me is this: do I have a good reason to deny the physical world? Can I just walk out in front of a bus or drink acid? 'No' seems the most reliable answer - I would even venture to call this knowledge. Now I am not 100% certain of this knowledge, but I think it is a reasonable position that can be justified. Knowledge is never about ultimate truth, it is about what we can justify with reasonable confidence. What is the alternative?

What we empirically experience is not 'material stuff' but merely qualities of experience. Someone, somewhere, sometime, decided to call these qualities 'material' but there's no actual reason to do so. And as far as I know, nobody has ever given a reason to do so. — Dharmi

Yes, this is a robust and familiar argument against materialism. Bertrand Russell described this one well decades ago in the History of Western Philosophy. John Searle has a series of rebuttals to this argument which I will try to dig up.

I think the best we can do is say this - as soon as someone can find a way to acquire reliable knowledge outside of what we call methodological naturalism, let's hear it. Until then we have no choice but to assume that physicalism is all we have access to and can measure. It serves us well.

Qualities exist, what they are called is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant. The real question is: are these qualities true, and real? — Dharmi

For me it comes back to the question what alternative epistemology we should be using to decide what we will call true? (Bear in mind that a methodological naturalist generally does not believe in certainty or capital T truths, just truth we can justify.)

I think coming down too hard on religious people instead of being respectful and open-minded might qualify as bigotry? — Athena

One last thing. In the 1980's I knew some people from South Africa. I was against apartheid. They were not. They were devout church going Christians. I asked them why separate black people from white people. They responded, 'It is God's will. We have it on faith that black people are not equal to white people apartheid is a necessary step.' I will spare you the other views they held on faith. Over the decades I have met dozens of people (and we know there must be millions) who hold similarly inadequate views as a matter of faith. Faith has no quality control and because it is not based on reason, it is not open to scrutiny.

Materialism needs to acknowledge the things that appear to contradict it. — Gary Enfield

When they contradict, perhaps. But hey, I am methodological naturalist as I have said. Not a philosophical naturalist - that would also require evidence. Few people say that materialism is the whole story, Gary - what we say is it is the only reliable model we have access to.

What I hold is that all we have access to is the physical world and the only reliable knowledge we can acquire for now (and perhaps forever) is through this lens. If tomorrow we prove there are souls or ghosts with evidence, I'll be happy to accept it.

Let's not argue about whether or not my characterization is true for now. How should I have responded to you? — T Clark

Reflection is a good thing. I think there's an easy distinction to make - you comment on the ideas not the person's character. In this case you could have said, "To me this response sounds a little smug and satisfied.... and explained why. Reasons are important, as you know. This could then be explored.

And when I say, 'look out someone might get hurt' I am referring to the fact that when people meet ideas that challenge them, it often lands as an ontological shock. It's hard to mitigate against that.

I disagree and will continue to argue "faith" can have a magical effect including healing us and achieving more than we believe we can. The nature of faith proves to religious people, and especially Christians, that what they believe is true. Faith can be very empowering and I don't think we should underestimate that. So can self-confidence. — Athena

I doubt there is any evidence for what you say, but that said, faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have a good reason. What can you not justify with an appeal to faith? Faith is used daily by millions to justify any number of bigotries.

I think coming down too hard on religious people instead of being respectful and open-minded might qualify as bigotry? — Athena

Sure. But as I said 'where they happen' coming down on people too hard is not possible if they are homophobic, transphobic, racist and misogynist as some religious people often are and proudly so.

Many religious people (Christians especially) don't accept the big bang.

Big bang cosmology can be described to fit any version of God and visa versa. Since God, as a fictional character, can be said to be omnipotent and is generally described as the creator of the laws of physics then God can do whatever it wants.

I’m a sort of deist/atheist but the logical problem of evil is one I believe we should reject. I — Franz Liszt

You can only reject it if you are a mystic or deist wherein God is imprecise and ill defined.

Where there are specific faith traditions/scriptures that make the claim that God is good and perfect, the problem of evil is a critical one.

How could I answer. There are texts in the corpus of world literature that I think speak legitimately of Capital T Truth. But you’re not going to find the kind of evidence you’re looking for. — Wayfarer

Appreciate this perspective, thanks. Yep, we may be stuck here in the badlands forever. As you would no doubt expect from me, I would say texts are not evidence, they are claims. Claims need to be examined and tested to determine if they are sound.

How can you tell which text has capital T truth and which text is false? Surely the whole problem inherent in this worldview is the notion that telling good from bad, true from false rests on no sound epistemological basis.

Etc, etc.

Any particular texts you consider to be profound in this way?

Who said God was morally perfect? It is said that God has many human emotions as well including rage, jealously, compassion, etc. — Outlander

I understand the folk who said God had human emotions - rage, jealousy compassion also said God was morally perfect. But that was the Bible and Koran. Your God, however, may be of the more elusive, personal hard to pin down variety.

Your argument goes like this: "1. a person who believes in god 2. claims that he understands god and has direct evidence of god's existence in his mind." This is circular reasoning in one short step. Back to square one, without even ever having left it. — god must be atheist

I was unclear - I agree with you. My point was that believers keep making this old argument from personal experience . The problem with it is we may know it is BS, but how do we help them understand it is?

I once shook up a Baptist fundamentalist by saying - "Everything you've told me, every single point I have heard exactly the same from a Muslim in defence of Allah and the idea that Jesus is not divine but a human. How can anyone from outside tell the difference between your personal experience of truth and the Muslims?' There was a long silence and a frown, followed by, "I guess you can't.'

I'm simply commenting on the declaration that 'we' - presumably all of humanity - doesn't know Capital T truth - is presumptious. — Wayfarer

The reason I said who are you is presumably you might have felt not part of 'we'. You were speaking for others, perhaps 'enlightened' parties.

I think I can stand by this claim. What evidence do you have that someone knows capital T truth? What evidence do you have there is a capital T truth. I am presumptuous, but for the Left.... Sorry, old Woody Allen joke.

The whole experience of having a body affects us on a personal and social level. I am referring to the subjective experience of how we see ourselves and how others see us on a social level. — Jack Cummins

180 Proof is a hard act to follow and he provides a good roadmap of approaches. I would add media driven images of beauty and attractiveness as a continual influence, a kind of acid rain of images that fall into all our lives. I am interested in how people's self image often translate into whether they consider themselves to be good or not, or worthy or not. It's almost as if perceptions of attractiveness serves to build a narrative about what is or is not possible.

Who is 'we'? — Wayfarer

Who are you?

I have become boring and repetitive, I think i need to move on from this issue until there are some new ideas to respond to.

But Tom Storms response doesn't recognise the argument it's responding to. What I am calling out with reference to the quote by Richard Lewontin, — Wayfarer

Lewontin is just one of many people who have proposed this kind of response and I think I responded to it fine.

And an even more important point, is that the materialist view is not more 'proven' than any other worldview. It can't be proven, because it is not a specific, testable claim about a specific thing, or class of things, but a claim about the nature of the world. — Wayfarer

This is a disingenuous line of reasoning. I have repeatedly said we don't have capital T truth. We don't have access to ultimate reality. We don't even know if there is an ultimate reality. There's no doubt that ideas about materialism may come to be more complex and interesting than we currently understand it to be. But if it can be identified and measured, it is still materialism.

Worldviews are not all alike they are not equally valid, which is what your comments might lead some people to think. We currently do have access to propositions and approaches and models which provide consistent and reliable results and knowledge in the only world we can claim to know. Outside of methodological materialism and the scientific method, no one else has been able to do this.

Look at the Templeton Foundation's study on the effect of prayer on patient outcomes in the mid naughties. This particular worldview (Christianity) failed to provide any results and in fact some people fared worse when prayed for. Naturally enough, the worldview of scientific medicine saves lives every day and this can approach can be demonstrated empirically and repeatedly.

There are lots of games we can play about what we really know. As people boringly point out, you can't disprove that you are a brain in a vat and everything is an illusion. The problem of hard solipsism cannot be readily overcome. But is anyone here going to walk into the path of traffic on the basis that everything is an illusion?

If someone can provide good evidence of just one robust example of a supernatural claim being true, let's hear it. I'd love to be wrong.

IMO, there redundant and/or tautological and/or 'grammatical' in some Wittgensteinian sense — norm

Early or late Wittgenstein?

You may be right. I would like to hear a solid academic account of this. We know the axioms are tautologies. They are also called that by some.

I only commented on your response, which was disrespectful to Wayfarer and anyone with religious beliefs. I responded snippily. — T Clark

We are having a debate about complex and personal things. Look out someone might get hurt! That's how it works and I was only responding to something Wayfarer said about views like mine which was an equally robust jibe. Wayfarer and I get on just fine - I like him a great deal and we are simply talking shop.

You may notice that people who do not accept supernatural beliefs and assert methodological naturalism as the only reliable tool for knowledge tend to fall victim to a lot of pretty demeaning feedback about being narrow minded, unimaginative, blind, short sighted, judgmental, fundamentalist and dogmatic.

Smug and self-satisfied, but wrong, — T Clark

T Clark - have some respect and do not resort to name calling. If you think what I said about science destroying the fantasy life of many people isn't true or 'smug' then listen to the stories of people who attend Recovering from Religion a large world-wide peer support group who document precisely this phenomenon. That's where I heard this expression. Surviving religion is a very hard struggle for many people and to call this insight self-satisfied is quite wrong.

As a start, there are a number of single celled creatures which do show crude awareness and possibly even a small degree of intelligence without a brain. The single celled amoeba – Didinium swims around and preys on other cells – paralysing them with darts that it fires before it eats them… implying intent, targeting, and recognition. — Gary Enfield

When I said no consciousness without a brain I was not referring to simple celled creatures which may or may not have awareness or brains. Given I believe in evolution, there would no doubt have been a point when nascent 'not quite' consciousness went with nascent 'not quite' brains. Not really a useful distinction in my mind. Maybe I should have said where is consciousness without a material host?

And this single-mindedness is because scientific materialism is a direct descendant of the belief in the 'jealous God'. — Wayfarer

There's an awful lot of work put in by theists and other spear carriers for the supernatural to try to show that atheism is just bad religion. But this is no argument, it is just simple name calling. It's understandable, there's a lot of anger towards science because it has destroyed the fantasy life of many people.

The problem is no one has yet provided any evidence that there is a God or any kind of supernatural realm. And no one has found a pathway to any reliable knowledge other than though methodological realism. I would never say that science is 100% certain or that humans can have access to capital T truth. But we know what works and what is merely speculation or fantasy.

I hear you, Brother.

There is another hurdle for the theists: what is god's nature, and what attributes does it have? Nothing can be hung on him (no pun intended) that is not purely belief, or unsupported superstition. Nobody knows anything about the real god, if one exists, so how can some pretend to assume god is this way or the other way. This applies to all scriptures: fiction. Not substantiated, and therefore they contain less believability by empirical, speculative or a priori considerations, than conspiracy theories. — god must be atheist

I think this is a common view but not sure it has much impact on the debate. There are many people who believe they have access to knowledge about God and see evidence of God's works. All you are saying is you disagree. And there are many others who say God is meant to be a mystery. Read some sophisticated theology (if you can bear it) the debate is far more complex and nuanced.

Meaning and logic are human's tools to explain things. In and by themselves they don't exist. If there were no human minds, logic would not exist, nor would meaning. Meaning, in and by itself, is nothing but a process or else part of the process or else else a convention to recreate reality as models of reality in the humans' minds. — god must be atheist

So what? The point - they would argue - is that logic was created by God for humans. Of course it has no application for a rock. But neither has morality. And can you prove the axioms don't exist in heaven in some neo-Platonist realm? I have seen philosophers really struggle to manage this.

"Who is the absolute reactionary? The person who joins the Communist Party, and immediately upon acceptance for membership commits suicide, only in order to have one less communist party member." — god must be atheist

Nice joke. :up:

If there were a god, it would be overwhelmingly obvious that there is a god. — Banno

Problem is you are choosing your version of 'overwhelmingly obvious'. The believer sees God in all things. Feels God inside them. Says that God deliberately remains elusive for X reasons. Hence the problem. The fact that you and I require an actual God to show up and say, 'Here I am kids, I can clear this up in a second' has no impact on many arguments, like the notion of divine hiddenness. Or Deism wherein God created the world and then went away.

For me a hidden God is functionally exactly the same as no God. There would still be no good reason to believe.

Still, I'm not fond of the 'law' metaphor. — norm

I don't like it because it sets up the idea that if there are laws there must be a lawmaker. I prefer the term logical axioms. But as far as we can tell, they are absolute. You cannot have any discourse without them. As soon as you argue against them you are using them to do this.

To me this is a strange thought. Why should our logic be perfectly correct? — norm

It's not strange, it is a venerable academic argument. He may not know it but he is referring to the Logical Absolutes (I think Aristotle first articulated these) which it is argued are true, above and beyond human minds.

These are the laws of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle which allow us to have reason, maths, science. They are necessary presuppositions to have any kind of communication or thought.

There is a vast scholarship that addresses this notion and these axioms are used by some Christians and Islamic apologists to show that atheism is delusional (hence the title from the OP) because to them it is clear that only the mind of God can make these laws true. Kant expresses similar ideas in his Transcendental Argument, ripped off by many to make the point that God is a necessary precondition for our world to be intelligible.

In other words, we have the presuppositions of the laws of logic (which we all need to make) but it is said we need a 4th presupposition - that a God exists - for the first three to work.

My response above is that things that do not exist cannot be the cause of other things. If you want to show that God is the cause of something (logical absolutes or creation) you need to demonstrate that God is real. I doubt it can ever be done - a Nobel and Templeton prize, a fortune and everlasting fame awaits anyone who can do this.

So if God explains logic or meaning, you need to demonstrate 2 things. 1 that God exists and 2 how exactly God is responsible for them.

How do we know that meaning or logic are not a product of the natural universe? This would also need to be demonstrated.