lofhay

IS A SANE, CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUE EVEN POSSIBLE BETWEEN BELIEVERS AND NON-BELIEVERS?

Philosophy, according Webster, is the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge or conduct. Any discussion of philosophy eventually boils down to one or all of the following subjects: religion, sex, money, and power. Politics involves them all, and the one which presents perhaps the greatest hurdle to constructive dialogue is religion.

Here is the problem. Most, if not all, religions contain the idea of “faith” or “belief”. Webster defines these as: faith--belief that is not based on proof; and belief--confidence in the truth or existence of something not susceptible to rigorous proof. So, if we are going to give credence to, and claim as reality, things which we can only imagine, e.g. God, then what are the criteria for judging the merit of any idea? To have faith, or belief, is to deny reason and reality (even Webster is ambiguous about what reality is). If we can’t establish any mutually agreeable criteria for truth, what chance do we have for constructive dialogue?

roachboy

i think one problem with the webster definition is that it doesn't address the question of who gets to set the truth conditions.
i dont think it is the case that faith cannot be subject to demonstration...at least not necessarily.
that's a reformation thing, so among the criteria that protestantism initially advanced to differentiate itself from catholicism. and in a way the wars of religion were about the about a fight over truth conditions. well, they were more about the political realignments that protestantism enabled, but that's another matter.
i say this because it's not like aquinas or the whole scholastic tradition didn't happen. and one thing that unifies scholasticism is the idea that faith and reason are not incompatible and that the structured exercise of reason can result in an approximate knowledge of the god character. the structured exercise of reason proceeded by way of proofs--so premises, variables and rules for combination and/or derivation.

so i guess the first point would be that there is no single definition of faith.
secondly there is no *necessary* contradiction between faith and the exercise of reason (here in the form of proofs, you know?)

i think i'm writing like this because of my reaction to the term "truth criteria"--which formally is a pretty simple matter: a statement is true that is produced through the use of procedures in a way that does not violate the rules that shape the proof.
the problem is that any proof is subject to the characteristics of the axioms that enable it.
and axioms cannot be demonstrated from within a proof that presupposes them.

one way of thinking about the source of the differend (talking past each other) is that the difference between believers and others plays out over the question of axioms, over what counts as axiomatic, and not over the procedures that shape proof (now a metaphor for the exercise of reason) that are structured by those axioms.

so if you want a dialogue between those who believe in something like a god-character and those who don't and you want to imagine it being either enabled or disallowed by agreements over "truth criteria" you're talking about the wrong thing, working at the wrong level.
what you're talking about is a dialogue about axioms (in the case of a proof, which really isnt much of a dialogue).
what that would require in principle is the construction of a meta-game that would result in the production of acceptable axioms (again, the language of proofs) or that would result in assumptions and rules that would then shape the space within which a dialogue could happen.
of course there could be squabbles about the rules that shape the meta-game, which may require the construction of a meta-meta game for adjudicating problems that may arise within the meta-game.
and there's nothing to prevent the same thing from happening inside the meta-meta game.
so good luck with that.

but if i assume that the technical language you use in the op isn't being used in anything like a technical sense and read the op as asking what are the conditions of possibility for a dialogue between members of communities that operate with basically different language games (sorry...wittgenstein is clanging around in my brain) so basically different assumptions about what constitutes a "legitimate" argument or--more to the point--"legitimate" data...basically that's pretty simple. good will. the desire to have such a dialogue.

there's a tendency here for folk who do not believe in some god to assume that belief is a defect of some kind, and a counter-assumption (which you see less often here because of the demographic we happen to have playing the game of posting stuff) that the lack of belief constitutes a defect of some kind. it's hard to get to a space of good will through that.

the reason this is a problem is, i think anyway, that the basic problem with dialogue across this divide is whether and on what basis a god-function can get introduced into a discussion.
across conflict/discussion about that, i suppose the main question that comes up, sooner or later, is really: why do you believe?

i can imagine more and less constructive conversations happening about that as a function of who happens to participate and, frankly, the mood that they're in across the duration it requires to make a post.
but there's no formal way to adjust for that.

differends aren't necessarily bad things.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

LazyBoy

Sane, reasonable conversation is possible....but the majority believers and non-believers who frequent such discussions on the internet with such tenacity typically doubt their beliefs. They are not trying to convince others, they are still trying to convince themselves.

-Will

__________________
Life is nothing, everything.....and something in between...

levite

Dialogue to what end?

If what you're asking is, "Can religious folks and atheists ever hold a discussion in which both parties agree to judge their beliefs in light of a single common paradigm?" Then the answer is, IMO, no. Religion and Reason operate in two different paradigms, and they are designed to operate differently, because they exist for different reasons. In my experience, the only ones who don't accept this notion are fundamentalists-- either the religious variety or the atheist variety.

Religion will never be proven by logic and science because it is not about logic and science: it is about faith and hope and morality and ethics and spirituality and community and so forth-- stuff that has nothing to do with logic and science. Likewise, Reason cannot be judged, measured, competed with, or replaced by religion, because science is the tool our civilization uses to analyze the physical universe and the physical phenomena therein, and within the parameters of its inquiries, no other set of tools will ever consistently provide accurate answers.

In other words, as I have said elsewhere, you don't open a physics textbook to learn how to feel closer to the Creator, or how to judge moral issues, or to find guidelines for ethical behavior. And by the same token, you don't open the Bible to find answers relating to geology, cosmology, world history, or archaeology. Either case is a case of grievously misunderstanding what those texts are and are not designed to provide.

If what you're asking is, "Can religious folks and atheists share calm and polite discussion concerning why each believes what they believe, and what caused them to come to those conclusions, and how they feel about it?" Then the answer, IMO, is yes, although unfortunately, rarely.

If such a dialogue is entered into by non-fundamentalists, who are not trying to dissuade the other party from their respective points of view, but are simply interested in understanding the other, and being able to live together in peace, that can be a successful dialogue that bears fruit. Unfortunately, such dialogues seem nearly never to be entered into save by fundamentalists, who not only annoy the opposing party with their closed-mindedness, but all too frequently represent the absolute worst elements of their respective fields of origin. In my experience, I have run into far too many of these kinds of dialogues where the religious side is represented by the most intractable, bible-thumping, ignorant, literalist, intolerant yokels imaginable, who absolutely pervert the Biblical texts and the teachings of their religion in their attempt to argue their fundamentalism; and the side of Reason is represented by scientists who claim they are open-minded to all things-- provided any phenomena outside their experience helpfully cooperate by appearing consistently in someone's laboratory in order to be measured and gauged, and presuming that any phenomena in the universe we have not yet proven scientifically must surely be measurable and quantifiable by our current technologies-- and who claim that their opposition to religion stems from their desire to promote tolerance and peace in the world between all people-- except, apparently, themselves and those who believe in God.

Dialogue is possible, though: if done in a mutually respectful way, in order to enhance existence in a pluralistic society. I have seen it. Participated in it. So far it seems to be rare, but that's probably to be expected in a society overrun by fundamentalist leanings.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

ratbastid

You know, something occurred to me as I read that. I've always felt the same way--that religion and science ought to stay in their own sandboxes and everything would be all right.

Thing is, I've been reading a lot of neuroscience lately. All those phenomena you list there are being picked apart, modeled, and in some cases replicated from a neuroscientific perspective. There's even an area of the brain that, when electrically stimulated, reliably produces religious epiphanies.

I read that sort of thing, and I can begin to fathom the panic that must be lurking behind the fundamentalist rejection of science. It must feel like they're standing on a fast-eroding rock in the middle of the rushing rapids, and if they just shout loud enough about how solid the ground is they're standing on, then everything will be okay.

levite

I hear what you're saying. But I don't think it's that simple. I think that there are probably areas of the brain that, when stimulated, produce experiences like religious epiphanies. But the fundamental contentions of Western religion-- that there is a God; that He is capable of communicating or communing with us; that we have souls given by His grace, made of the stuff of Him, that resonate to Him and permit us to experience revelation-- are not things that can be accurately reproduced in a laboratory, no matter how refined our knowledge of neuroscience becomes.

It is, I suppose, somewhat analogous to telling a Catholic that, given certain scientific techniques, one could construct a matter-rearranging device (like, I suppose, a replicator from Star Trek), which, programmed correctly, could take a sample of wheat cracker and wine, and shift their structure into a morsel of flesh and blood whose DNA is a realistic projection of what archaeo-physiologists believe was the genetics of the Davidic line at the time of Christ's supposed existence: and therefore they no longer require a Church, because transsubstantiation can be accomplished in the laboratory. Even if what these hypothetical scientists were saying was both possible and true, that would not be what the Catholic was looking for.

To put it another way, figuring out the "scientific bases for religion" is (while in some ways interesting, and no doubt likely to produce food for thought) like creating a golem or an android. One can make it: and being made properly, it might look like a man, walk like a man, even act like a man. But it is not a man: it is the image of a man. Even so, these experiments may be an interesting mirror to hold up to religion-- they may even help us understand certain things about religion-- but they ultimately do not really replicate or reconstruct religion. No more than if, by electrically stimulating our brain to produce a memory of the scent of new-mown grass, we really are smelling new-mown grass. It is a real phenomenon, but it is not the phenomenon we might think it to be.

Or so it seems to me.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

ratbastid

levite, I think your answer is that of a person who doesn't have faith collapsed with truth. I think people who relate to their religion that way are in the majority, praise Allah. It's the other ones I'm concerned about, the ones who base their entire conception of the world on the inerrant truth of their book.

What I'm saying is... What if Paul's conversion on the road was a stroke or temporal lobe seizure or something, and Jesus was really just schizophrenic and was really some sort of pacifist Charles Manson? What if Elijah was just a really good magician? Then those who need a "real" foundation for their "faith" (despite that being an oxymoron) are in big trouble. And science is edging close to that. Which is why there has to be some sort of very shouty argument made for the "realness" of the god that people experience when their temporal lobe is stimulated. To be clear about this: many people in rigorously controlled scientific settings have left that experience very clear that they communed with a higher power. Nothing's happening that isn't explicable by electrical impulses in their brain, but they're SURE they've just shaken hands with the almighty. So... Where's your religious experience left by that? Whatever happens in the pew on Sunday--is that just neurolinguistic programming that has been refined over the centuries?

My point is, science is asking questions that make the "true" version of religion very uncomfortable. So they push back on evolution because it's concrete, and because there's no getting around "that's just your brain doing that". Once you're talking brain function, no subjective experience holds water anymore, because it can all be explained from inside the system you're housing it in.

roachboy

the question of what is "true" follows from a decision that is made before the demonstration starts about what information will and will not be included in the demonstration. for a believer, axioms would include the existence of some god. for a non-believer, it wouldn't.
and (again) you can't demonstrate axioms from inside demonstrations that presuppose them.

what this means, really, is that any statement called "true" can be run back to presuppositions which are arbitrary.

dynamical systems theories of embodied cognition show that this is the case through what they do to older assumptions about, say, the mind/body split or notions that cognition is top-down and works via representations and so is a matter of symbolic ordering. both of those approaches operated within framing assumptions that were introduced as a function of ambient cultural factors and which were dragged through all demonstrations. these assumptions were shown to be "true" across the demonstrations that they informed. dynamical systems theory is also a framework that operates with its own assumptions--so it can produce different types of "true" statements about embodiment, about the limitations of a skull-bound notions of being-in-the-world (because we're electrical systems basically)...so it can show all kinds of problems with older frames. but that doesn't mean that dynamical systems theory is not also a frame.

it's a problem. people seem to want "true" statements to obtain in a way that abstracts them from the procedures that produces them. i suppose in that there's a residuum of a religious committment. or maybe it's an american thing, a reflection of a kind of constructed passivity of some kind, an idea that certain statements are simply as they are, and by extension that the world can be captured across certain kinds of statements which are not problematic because they are, somehow, transcendent. you like, like a believer may think god is.


o yeah: if you look at cognitive linguistics, which operates in a register kinda parallel to other modes of exploring the implications of notions of embodied cognition, it's pretty obvious that being able to model (and so talk about) the neural-net underpinnings of ordinary experience does not mean that folk have any direct access to this mode of interaction with the world in the context of their usual experience---they see the world across the results, which are mediated categorically. so you could say that these processes are as we imagine them to be.

there's more, but i gots to feign interest in work stuff for a while.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

lofhay

To: roachboy,tarzan, levite and ratbastid

I can't tell which of you are believers of a sort and which are non-believers. Assuming that you are some of both, I am encouraged by the respectful discussion you are having, and this partially answers my question about whether such a thing is possible. Nice work!

Vigilante

I usually simply say "I agree to disagree" and leave it at that. I'm not out to convince anyone of anything. Likewise, I'm generally not really interested in what people have to say on it, on either side of the fence. I've found that finding my own path in life has the best results, and the rest can find theirs' as well as far as I'm concerned. That may be a simplistic and isolated approach, but that's what works for me.

As for science and religion, I leave that to people that care.

__________________
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
-Winston Churchill

levite

I have never heard this expression before: I believe I get your gist, given the context, but I am intrigued-- is this your turn of phrase, or does it come from another writer? If I understand it correctly, I think it is a fairly felicitous phrasing.


Ah, yes. The radical, but vocal, fundamentalist right wing. They are indeed an unfortunate collection of specimens. It has done a world of hurt to religious believers of sound mind that we so consistently hear from people who lack so much creativity, lack so much of what I (at least) would call true faith (since true faith permits questioning, mystery, and even a lack of complete answers), and so consistently confuse the possession of truths with the attainment of Truth. The former is common to most religions, and is something that can include shared overlap with atheists and agnostics; but the latter is a blinding misunderstanding. No one religion, no one book, no one people or faith tradition can have a total monopoly on Truth, for the simple reason that total Truth about God's existence, nature, motivation, His creations, and the universe(s) would be, like God, infinite. And we human beings, who are finite, and physically occupy finite space in a finite universe, cannot ever be so foolish as to imagine that any segment of our populace, or even all of our populace together, could contain and comprehend the infinite.


I'm not sure how much profit there is hypothesizing these points. My feeling is, whether Jesus was schizo and a dab hand with magic, or whether he was a wonder worker reformist and potential prophet (I personally cannot believe he was the Son of God, because my theology does not permit such a concept; and according to my understanding of messianism, he did not do any of the things the messiah, Son of David, is supposed to do in order to fulfill that role, which means he was not the messiah) is irrelevant. His teachings are, overwhelmingly, positive and helpful. Why ought it to matter if he was truly prophetic or a little insane if what he did was to further what I understand to be a Godly agenda? Taking care of poor people, giving aid to the helpless, the downtrodden, and the sick; telling people that wealth comes not from owning possessions but from enriching one's community with good deeds; emphasizing spiritual awareness and simple prayer: all of these seem entirely excellent teachings to me: so what should I care whether his inspiration to teach them really came from God or from a neurochemical imbalance?

As for the prophets of my own tradition, much the same holds true. But if you are asking, what if all of the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures, all of the prophets and the priests and the judges and the rabbis who made the Jewish tradition, all had this same condition, my response is skepticism. We're talking about many hundreds, if not many thousands of people, over the course of a couple of thousand years-- many, many more, if we include all of the normal, everyday folks who had a revelatory experience, but did not go on to contribute something dramatic and new to the tradition. It strains my credibility to suppose that in each and every case, they all had identifical, comparatively rare, seizures or imbalances or malfunctions of the same specific area of the brain, in such a way as to cause them to have shared deeply similar experiences, producing results all constant with the general trends of Jewish thought. That may be an argument against God and religion, but with all due respect, it doesn't strike me as any more objectively reasonable than any religious doctrine.


Yes; but in former times, when psychedelic drugs were still a novelty in Western society, people took LSD and mescaline and came down and swore up and down they'd had revelations of God. Prior to that, there were those who claimed revelations of God while on heroin. And prior to that, other substances. And as awareness of those drugs permeated the society, and among their effects, the illusion of revelation became known to sometimes occur, those who took the drugs casually became increasingly likely to either dismiss their experience as "trip" hallucination, or at least to be in doubt about the literal veracity of their spiritual experiences. My supposition is that this phenomenon of electrical brain stimulation, if not relegated to the realm of neglected scientific curiosities, will similarly come to be understood for what it is, and future participants will experience similar lack of surety or credence.

While I would not presume to guess what motivates idiots who refuse to accept the law of evolution of species, I can also understand that arguments relying heavily on hypotheses having to do with objective reality versus our perceptions due to neurochemistry or neuroelectric signal can be perceived as irritating from . Especially because they are a two-edged sword and are being wielded quite selectively. Sure, we can have an hypothesis that each and every one of the countless millions of revelatory or supernatural religious or spiritual experience all over the world, throughout human history, have been and are the result of neurochemical or neuroelectrical malfunction; but there is no reason that any human experience could not be so hypothesized. How can we, at that point, not question all reality around ourselves as potentially being shared neurochemical or neuroelectric malfunction. The very words on our computer screens could be suspect, if we cannot trust our brains at least the majority of the time.

I mean no disrespect, but to consign all the religious and the supernatural and the spiritual into neural failures to me smacks of Scrooge's rejection of the reality of Marley's ghost:

"Why do you doubt your senses?'' The Ghost asked.

"Because,'' said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!''

In the end, I can't help feeling that if religion can manage without complete answers, and can acknowledge that there are things we may never know in our physical lives upon this plane of existence; why cannot scientists merely pursue their research, and not attempt to disprove religion?

I still feel that the best solution is for fundementalists to stop being fundamentalist, whichever side of the debate they may be on. Folks who think that their holy book is 100% literal need to wake up and smell the coffee-- not only is their book not 100% literal, but chances are, it wasn't even written in the language in which they're reading it. But folks who cannot let the Mysteria Divina (Divine Mystery, the mystery that is God) go, without attempting to prove it's a hoax or a sickness or a psychological defect or a conspiracy to control people, also need to wake up and smell the coffee. There are non-fundamentalist religious people, who have nothing against science or reason, for whom such attempts are nonetheless offensive. Not everyone has to believe the same things. We just have to be tolerant enough to let each other live in peace.


**added note: I actually did not intend this last paragraph as a response to what you wrote, ratbastid, so I sincerely hope it didn't sound like I was being accusatory toward you. That wasn't my intention, and indeed, you have been nothing but genteel.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)

Zeraph

I actually think everything boils down to some kind of truth, or reason, or logic, or faith; in effect they're all the same. This is coming from my own perspective of a real live person btw, and not some system (as I have occasionally argued from in the past, big difference). Anyways, they're all just based on different types of meaning, which is all us humans can really do, apply meaning. We aren't true machines of logic.

What I'm kind of trying to say is that we invented rationale in the first place, we are therefore by definition rational in one way or another. We may not always be able to recognize that in each other because our view points can be in such different areas, but that doesn't change the fact we are still all rational. Of course we can be wrong, but individual instances of being wrong does not change our overall rational systems.

If you think about it religion is based on the truth that we are small creatures in a huge and amazingly incomprehensible (as a whole) universe, therefore there *must* be some kind of higher power. Now most religions go a little nuts in my opinion on the details after that, but essentially I still think they're on to something. I don't consider faith to be based entirely without reason. Life is too amazing to imply otherwise. Overall there is less difference in how a religious human perceives the world vs an atheist person and a dog.

I think that came out a bit funny, I mean with all our differences we are all far far far far similar to each other than any other species and I think we like to fool our selves quite a bit when we point fingers and get into arguments or worse (war) with each other over our little imperfect perception systems.

ratbastid

All me. Glad you like.

I'm not being entirely clear, I don't think. I'm not hypothesizing anything in particular about spiritual experience. I've had them, I'm for them, they're powerful and empowering and life-bringing things.

I'm saying that I can see why the fundamentalist, literalist, "my beliefs are fact"-ist faction would be having a shit fit, given the sorts of things science is poking its nose into these days.

The real thing I don't understand about fundamentalism is why a person would put your faith on such a tenuous foundation as "fact". Facts change as our understanding of the world changes. Faith is powerful and unshakable.

levite

Ah! Now I understand you. Sorry for being dense.

Yes, I agree entirely. But if one is going to be so foolish as to adopt a viewpoint that is so inflexible and so fragile that it can tolerate no other truths, and suffer no questioning-- even the metaphysical "introspection" of its members, then it is all too likely one will frequently find oneself in the uncomfortable position of attempting to shut out the world entire, to say nothing of more than occasionally being hoist upon one's own petard. It is unfortunate, but, I confess, draws little sympathy from me. This is what comes of presuming that religion is there to provide one with Answers, rather than to function as a guide and support in ensuring that one is able to ask the right questions to arrive at one's own answers.

Perhaps I should feel more sympathetic-- or at least charitable; but I don't. Fundamentalism is an abuse of religion and of reason, and if its endangerment is stressful for its adherents, they have none to blame but themselves.

...IMHO....

Willravel

Sure.

girldetective

No.
Refer to papa ratbastid postings in this thread, particularly his first.

__________________
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata

ratbastid

Yeah, I'm kind of saying no as well, but it depends on the sort of believer. A believer who is adamant that their believing something makes it a fact is beyond the capacity for reasonable discourse. It's my estimation that that's the minority of "believers", though.

lofhay

roachboy said:there's a tendency here for folk who do not believe in some god to assume that belief is a defect of some kind, and a counter-assumption (which you see less often here because of the demographic we happen to have playing the game of posting stuff) that the lack of belief constitutes a defect of some kind. it's hard to get to a space of good will through that.

IMO, belief in a deity for the purpose of finding some degree of comfort in in a rough world serves a useful purpose; but when it takes on dogma and becomes exclusive rather than inclusive, it frequently results in violations of civil rights, e.g the prohibiting of atheists to hold public office (which exists in several state constitutions) and the opposition to the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. The sad part of all this is that the "belief" is based on what I can only call a fantasy, since it can not be proven any more than the belief of some ancients that Ra was the sun god who must be appeased. Have I added to the difficulty of a constructive dialogue, or have I made it easier?

Mantus

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Constructive Dialogue". Can you give an example of a situation that you wish resolved?

lofhay

Sure. Atheists and non-believers are often discriminated against because of their non-belief. Several states in the US have clauses in their constitutions which prohibit "atheists" from running for political office. South Carolina is one of those states. In the last few days the news has had a story about a would-be councilman in Spartanburg, SC who was refused permission to run for office because he is an atheist. He has brought suit, but this will take months, if not years, to resolve, and the state pays to defend its position with taxpayer dollars.

Any resolution of this kind of discrimination must begin with some kind of dialogue between the different factions, but I am not optimistic that this can be done constructively; yet it is worth a try. I know, and the state knows, that the federal constitution prohibits any religious tests for public office, but the state statutes remain anyway because state legislators refuse to take the risk of supporting a constitutional amendment which they know would not be popular.

For more info on this, see Prof. Herb Silverman's article "Atheists in office: Deja vu all over again" in The Washington Post yesterday.