Reformed Epistemology

[Ella S.]

Awesome. I was worried that I sidetracked your discussion. I didn't want to offend a fellow Vulcan.

I'm still down for discussing reformed epistemology. Hopefully a theist will come in here and "God-splain" it to me. Because I'm still calling it weaksauce at this point.

I'm always looking for good challenges to my atheism that aren't apologetics. We are something of kindred spirits in that way. I dig your whole angle on it. James is actually pretty decent as far as that goes. The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience have presented pretty solid arguments to me. (Both public domain). Leo Tolstoy has said some pretty convincing things too. But Tolstoy has that "spiritual not religious" thing going on that the kids are into nowadays. But still, he's super good. A very unique thinker.

I'm in the process of understanding Dostoyevsky; he seems promising. But that's pretty much the best I got as far as pro-theism arguments. I guess Kierkegaard and Buber register too, but I'm not super familiar with either of them. But the things I've read, I've liked. Not too much weaksauce from any of the thinkers I've listed.

I'm curious about your studies in logic. Are you well versed in symbolic logic, entailment, and all that math-adjacent stuff? If so, I'm impressed. I've always struggled with that sort of stuff. But I would like to achieve enough mastery of it (some day) to be able to do things like entailment without racking my brain too hard. I'm more of a syllogism guy.

I appreciate the recommendations.

I have read some Kierkegaard and, personally, what I read did not impress me too much. Perhaps I should go back to re-read his work, but he seemed to blend the Existentialist notion of creating one's purpose with the Christian concept of a leap of faith. It's an interesting argument for adhering to Christian traditions, but not quite an argument for the existence of any gods or supernatural interventions.

Doystoyevsky has been on my reading list for too long. My familiarity with Russian literature in general is paltry. I was learning Russian with a partner so that I could read the works in their original languages, but life got in the way of that one.

Symbolic logic and mathematical logic are actually what I am most familiar with, and I'm hoping to do my thesis on the interplay between these and mathematical statistics, but I am not quite there yet. That is the general area that I am interested in, though.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Under Logical Positivism, among other issues, the primary problem is that it stated that the only meaningful claims were the ones that had been verified to be true. Well, the issue with that is, the only statements that can be verified to be true are tautologies. Any statement about the external world is inductive, having a fuzzy truth value.

My definition of truth might not be the one used here. I like the correspondence theory of truth. A claim is true because it demonstrably maps onto reality as judged by the senses. I don't worry about objective reality, because it is a place none of us can ever visit. Reality for me is in here. Reality is the conscious content, which is partly a reflection of what I consider to be out there, and partly the way that the mind renders it, making an element of subjectivity an ineluctable aspect of reality for the conscious agent..

Focusing on what people call objective reality and considering that more real than the conscious experience is a mistake in my opinion. Mental models of what seems to be out there may be useful fictions. My dog thinks that there are other dogs in the TV set. When playing an arcade racecar video game, one might forget that he's not moving and that the wheel isn't connected to wheels - a useful fiction compared to the reality of a computer chip with no moving parts.

So, many ideas can be verified to be correct if by correct one means able to anticipate outcomes without troubling oneself dithering about what's really out there - ultimate reality, objective reality, which is what I believe is meant by true by the critics of positivism. I've posted this recently in this thread, but I'll repeat it here:

"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.

"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue."​

Here's how I verify that something is true, and it is not a tautology. Experience taught me that I live five blocks north and three blocks east of the pier. I can verify that by walking five blocks south and three blocks west from my front door and seeing where I arrive. If it's the pier, then the idea has been verified. It can be considered correct. If the critics of positivism are referring to anything else when they say verified true, then it's not an idea I can use.

The value of positivism (and analytical philosophy) for me was in its message about the metaphysical, which comprises so much of what people believe and profess. And look at how well I took the message to hard by discarding noumenal reality, also a metaphysical concept, probably the principal one, as it is meant to mean the totality of that which underlies experience but is forever outside of it and only known indirectly via the phenomena of consciousness. Phenomenology was also influential in my philosophical development. I believe that is where I came to assert the primacy of experience over that which it is imagined is being experienced, which is kind of the opposite of much if not most thinking about the nature of reality.

 

[vulcanlogician]

I still don't see the rationality in theistic ideas, although I see a practical benefit to belief even if the belief is false, but as I said, I don't find benefit myself there, and have already learned from experience the risk of holding such beliefs, so I avoid such thinking, which I call soft thinking. So, I guess I still don't really know what it is James has to say to somebody like me beyond to try to see some value in faith for others, which I already do, especially in those recovering from substance abuse, but also in those who take comfort in the thought of seeing a loved one again some day, or that somebody is watching over them when they feel vulnerable.

Another interesting way to read James is to consider those religious outlooks that don't necessarily rely on supreme beings or superstitions. Like Theravada Buddhism or Taoism (although, inpractice, superstition has a way of creeping in....). You could also consider modern pantheism or Henry David Thoreau who pronounced nature itself "holy." Thoreau wasn't just being quaint with words. He expressed a real mysticism. But it wasn't mysticism about God or any other questionable entity. It was mysticism about things we absolutely know exist (a pond, the sky, the trees the rocks).

James's way of seeing things is a method whereby we could pronounce Thoreau "rational" to have the beliefs he had. And that's all James wants to say here. You can't use James's arguments to prove any religion correct. You can only say that faith in some things can be considered rational. And James in no way wants to say every religious belief is rational. Creationism or any religious notion that is clearly false does not benefit from James's argument. His argument only applies to faith concerning things we do not or can not know.... and only THEN in cases where a belief can affect the outcome, or cases where belief is required first as a prerequisite to knowing.

On the other end of the spectrum are the zealous theists, people I don't envy or admire at all. They often seem troubled, and they don't think well. These are the people starting thread after thread trying to prove the existence of god, the moral and spiritual failure of atheists and atheism, or the problem with evolution without much understanding of what it is.

Yeah, I'm not very fond of that stuff either. Though I love to defend atheism in internet debates. If you ask me, atheism is a smashing spiritual success. At least compared the the musty basement of fear and child abuse that *is* fundamentalist religion. When I'm not in the mood for gloves-off debate, though, I've had plenty of interesting conversations with rational believers. I also like to read the old religious texts: Tao te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads... hell, even the Bible. The Bible does contain a ton of bad writing and outdated laws, but about 10% is amazingly excellent writing. Job, Ecclesiastes, Epistle of James, Gospel of Matthew... all pretty good. Even Paul has some outstanding poetic moments. But I read it from the perspective of a nonbeliever. I want to find whatever good ideas the text has, and throw away the bad. (Or maybe even learn from the bad. Reading the Bible is also a pretty good lesson in how horrible people can be to one another. (They project their feelings about others onto God. God's wrath is a lesson in how hateful some people are, because they obviously assume God is hateful too.)

I seem to remember a quote from Wittgenstein about casting metaphysical ideas into the fire, but can't find anything similar using Google. Do either of you remember anything like that?

I'm not super familiar with Wittgenstein, but I think the quote to which you refer speaks of his criticism of essences. To Wittgenstein, there is no essential thing (like goodness or justice) to which we may ever refer. To him, they are entirely constructs of language and ultimately slaves to language. He says that words don't express concepts, but rather they express a family resemblance. He gives the example of game. You might consider D&D, chess, and football... all games, but there is no single essence or core concept that unites them into the same category. Rather, says Wittgenstein, they only have a family resemblance to one another.

I disagree with Wittgenstein on that, though he makes a good point. I think I can muster up some arguments that essences do exist. But maybe that's what your quote referred to. And that's a big ol' conversation of its own anyway.

 

[Ella S.]

Here's how I verify that something is true, and it is not a tautology. Experience taught me that I live five blocks north and three blocks east of the pier. I can verify that by walking five blocks south and three blocks west from my front door and seeing where I arrive. If it's the pier, then the idea has been verified. It can be considered correct. If the critics of positivism are referring to anything else when they say verified true, then it's not an idea I can use.

"Verification" in this context has a fairly rigid and technical definition. Technically, you are sustaining a hypothesis here, not verifying a claim. It's corroboration, which is valuable, but not as straightforward as presented here.

Under this scenario, there are a number of other possible explanations for what occurred other than the claim being true. For instance, you could have been teleported to the pier without noticing it. Exceedingly unlikely, yes, but it is not necessarily impossible.

When a claim is highly likely to the point of almost certainty, we say it's confirmed, but it can't be verified unless it is absolutely, necessarily true.

The value of positivism (and analytical philosophy) for me was in its message about the metaphysical, which comprises so much of what people believe and profess. And look at how well I took the message to hard by discarding noumenal reality, also a metaphysical concept, probably the principal one, as it is meant to mean the totality of that which underlies experience but is forever outside of it and only known indirectly via the phenomena of consciousness. Phenomenology was also influential in my philosophical development. I believe that is where I came to assert the primacy of experience over that which it is imagined is being experienced, which is kind of the opposite of much if not most thinking about the nature of reality.

I agree, although this is something that preceded Positivism.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

If you ask me, atheism is a smashing spiritual success.

Agreed. See the following:

Another interesting way to read James is to consider those religious outlooks that don't necessarily rely on supreme beings or superstitions. Like Theravada Buddhism or Taoism (although, inpractice, superstition has a way of creeping in....). You could also consider modern pantheism or Henry David Thoreau who pronounced nature itself "holy." Thoreau wasn't just being quaint with words. He expressed a real mysticism. But it wasn't mysticism about God or any other questionable entity. It was mysticism about things we absolutely know exist (a pond, the sky, the trees the rocks).

I agree with James there, but don't consider such views theism. To me, it's theism when there is a conscious agent thought to be the source of the universe. Humanism has has a continual affect modifying theistic systems for centuries, one being to take the invisible man out of the picture, but often still calling what remains God, as Einstein did. My worldview is similar to Einstein's and virtually all other godless views such as the atheistic "religions" you mentioned (I don't call them religions if they aren't theistic). One can find reality improbable, mysterious, and awesome without a god concept. In fact, I often say that such an idea is an impediment to the idea of connectivity to the cosmos that characterizes authentic spirituality, especially in Christianity, which demeans matter and flesh and advises one to not be a part of the world, but rather, to redirect ones attention and gratitude away from reality.

To Wittgenstein, there is no essential thing (like goodness or justice) to which we may ever refer. To him, they are entirely constructs of language and ultimately slaves to language.

Yes, language conditions and constrains thought, but I don't see that as a problem. Reason itself constrains thought. Nevertheless, people can be creative and generate novel ideas and names for them.

Also, thought is often not in sentences for me. I have to find words for those ideas if I want to express them to others, and sometimes we can recognize that words just don't capture the essence of the idea, which must be nonlinguistic if they need to be rendered in words to communicate.

And the confusion that abstraction causes seems never ending, as when the theist argues for his god despite its undetectability by pointing to abstractions like the two you mentioned as if they were analogous to the idea of deity. The concept of justice itself is immaterial, but the actions that are considered examples of just behavior and from which the word was abstracted are not. The idea of a deity is not abstracted from anything concrete, and thus doesn't compare, and is why the theists have to tell us that their deity lives in a special place that cannot be detected. There's nothing to look at, nothing they can point to, which is not the case with love. We saw an excellent, concrete example of both love and courage when a mother at Uvalde rescued her children. We can't point to love or courage, but unlike gods, we can point to concrete examples of them and agree that they can be called that.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

"Verification" in this context has a fairly rigid and technical definition. Technically, you are sustaining a hypothesis here, not verifying a claim. It's corroboration, which is valuable, but not as straightforward as presented here.

OK, I didn't know that. I used the word in a nontechnical sense. I'll try to replace that with confirmation, a word I frequently use with the theory of evolution when told that it isn't proven. I'll often say that it's been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt.

Under this scenario, there are a number of other possible explanations for what occurred other than the claim being true. For instance, you could have been teleported to the pier without noticing it. Exceedingly unlikely, yes, but it is not necessarily impossible.

But would that matter if it were the case? I've already noted that it doesn't really matter what's out there as long as the rues of experience can be codified and used to successfully anticipate outcomes. I like to offer the hypothetical of somehow discovering that there was no external reality for a fact. Suppose you had a way of knowing that when you thought that you were putting a finger into a flame and feeling the pain of fire, that there really was no finger or flame, just ones mind, perhaps as a brain in a vat.

Now what? Will the phantom finger into the phantom flame and feel fire again. Even though external reality has been upended, the rules of experience haven't changed. Volition precedes an unpleasant conscious experience anyway, which harkens back to, "If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false." If that's still true, the external reality is underlying that experience is irrelevant to decision making for as long as the idea continues to successfully predict outcomes such as the pain of fire.

When a claim is highly likely to the point of almost certainty, we say it's confirmed, but it can't be verified unless it is absolutely, necessarily true.

 

[MikeF]

Faith is a loaded word, … . So we are being more precise (and less confusing) if we replace the term faith with "unverified belief." So let's do that.

Certainly we can substitute 'unverified belief' for the word 'faith'. That highlights that we are talking about belief, and as such, I feel the need to set out some preliminaries of my own. To my mind, James is blurring the distinction between our collective knowledge about the world around us and an individuals self-perceived emotional and psychological needs.

In my view, knowledge is defined as reasoned expectation based on experience. What we know of the world around us is through our experience of it, and importantly for human beings, the communicated experiences of others. These cumulative experiences allow us to develop a growing understanding of the world that allows us to make assumptions, predictions, assess odds of likely outcomes, and inform our beliefs. The greater our experience of or with a phenomenon, the more information we potentially have upon which to draw conclusions, which gives rise to greater understand, or knowledge. Essentially, since knowledge is gained through experience, and our experience can have limitations, the knowledge that we hold is held with some level or degree of confidence.

Belief I would simply define as an individual's subjective opinion about anything, be the matter objective in nature or purely subjective, and these beliefs can be influenced by more than objective evidence of the world. We are flawed and fallible creatures (and emotional, as James concedes) and for many reasons we can hold beliefs that are partially to completely inaccurate or false. We can draw incorrect conclusions from too little information, our perception of the matter at hand may be flawed. We can be instilled with specific beliefs through socialization, indoctrination, or coercion, regardless of whether the beliefs have adequate evidential support or reflect reality.

If the subject of the discussion is about objective reality, whether something is real and existent, then, in such a discussion we should disregard the consideration of individual beliefs altogether. James titled his lecture “The Will To Believe” and we know from experience that we all, even the brightest among us, can hold beliefs that are not true. We know that beliefs are malleable and can be influenced and shaped by many factors, some of which I listed above. It is this will to believe, this emotional need and desire to believe, that gets us into trouble. Let's look at the Wikipedia definition for confirmation bias:

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. …
The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
Confirmation bias - Wikipedia​

When it comes to religious belief, I think it is fair to apply the characterization of emotionally charged and deeply entrenched. James has built his rationalization for a belief in God on belief, and for that primary reason, his argument falls short.

If we must disregard belief, that means we are left with our knowledge gained through experience, in essence empiricism. From what I can gather from the Wikipedia abstract on “The Will to Believe”, James supports and is an advocate for empiricism, over what he seems characterizes as dogmatic absolutism. As I tried to convey in my previous post referencing the mountaineer hypothetical, I do not believe any of James's hypotheticals really represent unverified belief, but rather, all of them are grounded in, and informed by, experience. Certainly the outcome is not guaranteed, but the choice to act or the hoped for or expected outcome are all informed by experience. If one has insufficient information or experience and feels compelled to choose, then we characterize that as a guess, or a hope, not a true belief that is unverified.

Contrast this now with a belief in an entity or entities that we are unable to observe or directly experience (in a verifiable way) that exists in a realm that is undetectable by any means. If we believe in such entities and undetectable realms, then to my mind, this would constitute a truly unverified belief, for there is no experience either individually or collectively that can be used to justify the existence of these undetectable things. We human beings can imagine the imaginary and the impossible. We can assign properties and characteristics to imaginary things and think logically and rationally about imagined things within the scope of their assigned properties. But unless and until it is experienced in some way, it can only be considered imaginary or hypothetical.

For me, the 'real world' hypothetical beliefs James uses and religious beliefs are entirely dissimilar and for that reason, the thesis fails.

As to James's concern over excessive skepticism, I do not share his concern. As described above, I do not see knowledge acquisition in James's stark dichotomy of seeking true beliefs and avoiding or rejecting error. The way that I see it, error correction is built in to the knowledge acquisition process. For me, skepticism is assuaged with experience. The longer a conclusion comports with our experience, skepticism will continue to fade. The more experiences that conflict with, or contradict a conclusion, the more skepticism will rise. It is this latter case that has prompted the need for James to defend religious belief.

As an aside, James's father, Henry James Sr., was a Swedenborgian Theologian, and I can't help but imagine that this may have played a significant role in the development of William James's strong religious belief, as belief is subjective, emotional, psychological.

But, says James, what if this is such a case where having the actual positive belief "I can make the jump" influences the proceedings so as to make itself true. "Very interesting," says James, and I think so too. Because it seems to propose that, in principle, unverified inflictiocan (sometimes) be true simply because it is believed prior.

This sounds like the self-help mantra, “The power of positive thinking!”, which I believe is a legitimate psychological phenomenon, akin to the placebo effect. Positive thinking may enable one to maximize their potential, but it will not enable one to exceed it, or exceed the laws of physics, or make something physically real and existent simply through ones will.

So, for our mountaineer, the prior belief about the jump is neither true nor false. It was simply a subjective opinion and limited in it's impact on the outcome. Just as an Olympic track athlete cannot consistently jump their record distance every single time, if James made the mountaineer make the jump repeatedly, what might the odds of success be? Not 100% if the jump was truly at the limits of our mountaineer. No, the fact that the mountaineer believed she could accomplish it and did on the first try should be attributed to luck, chance, or serendipity, not the power of unverified belief.

 

[Ostronomos]

Ella,

Your intent is noble, but you are fighting a losing battle with the blind and ignorant atheists. If you want to see real logic I Would refer you to the writings of Christopher Langan and the reality self simulation principle.

 

[Ella S.]

But would that matter if it were the case? I've already noted that it doesn't really matter what's out there as long as the rues of experience can be codified and used to successfully anticipate outcomes. I like to offer the hypothetical of somehow discovering that there was no external reality for a fact. Suppose you had a way of knowing that when you thought that you were putting a finger into a flame and feeling the pain of fire, that there really was no finger or flame, just ones mind, perhaps as a brain in a vat.

Now what? Will the phantom finger into the phantom flame and feel fire again. Even though external reality has been upended, the rules of experience haven't changed. Volition precedes an unpleasant conscious experience anyway, which harkens back to, "If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false." If that's still true, the external reality is underlying that experience is irrelevant to decision making for as long as the idea continues to successfully predict outcomes such as the pain of fire.

This is a great point. In this context, no, I don't think it would matter whether an external reality exists.

In fact, I also don't think it matters for logic, either, since logic is also a methodology. Either way, one can continue following a method with pragmatic utility without committing to any metaphysical claims.

 

[Ella S.]

Ella,

Your intent is noble, but you are fighting a losing battle with the blind and ignorant atheists. If you want to see real logic I Would refer you to the writings of Christopher Langan and the reality self simulation principle.

I am aware of CTMU, but it has yet to create a predictive Theory of Everything, so it is still not decent evidence for anything.

I appreciate the input, nonetheless, and I do watch that project for any signs that it might go anywhere. I mentioned it on another forum in my list of things that might provide evidence for the existence of God, but for now CTMU is unfalsifiable.

 

[vulcanlogician]

In my view, knowledge is defined as reasoned expectation based on experience. What we know of the world around us is through our experience of it, and importantly for human beings, the communicated experiences of others. These cumulative experiences allow us to develop a growing understanding of the world that allows us to make assumptions, predictions, assess odds of likely outcomes, and inform our beliefs.

The greater our experience of or with a phenomenon, the more information we potentially have upon which to draw conclusions, which gives rise to greater understand, or knowledge. Essentially, since knowledge is gained through experience, and our experience can have limitations, the knowledge that we hold is held with some level or degree of confidence.

Dude. You are bringin' it! I love your attention to detail and willingness to describe exactly what bothers you about James's position. I like your description of knowledge as you see it (which is pretty much empiricism). It's a good, careful, and reasonable description of knowledge. And pretty much I agree with it. As you noted elsewhere in your post James is also an empiricist. Maybe even a radical empiricist -?- (More on that below.)

Let's look at the Wikipedia definition for confirmation bias:

Bringing in confirmation bias is an interesting strategy. Hadn't really considered that angle before. Let me think about it for a while. It's possible that it's a blind spot in James's thinking. He predates the Asch experiment and a great deal of things we've learned about social motivations for knowledge. So perhaps his judgments can be faulted for non-consideration of some important facts. I think I could drum up a defense for James on that account, though. But I need to do some thinking specifically on how confirmation bias affects James's notions of unverified belief before proceeding with an argument.

Belief I would simply define as an individual's subjective opinion about anything, be the matter objective in nature or purely subjective, and these beliefs can be influenced by more than objective evidence of the world.

I like this definition of belief. I also like "something a person takes to be true." I don't see any key differences between that definition and the one you provided. (Or am I wrong?) And like that you say, there are plenty of ways we acquire beliefs. I'm skeptical of ways of acquiring beliefs other than logic or the senses. I suppose "learning from trained empiricists, who are careful about what they say, and who also run diligent experiments" also fits into my criteria for belief, because I (more or less) believe most of what I was taught in school, especially when it comes to the physical sciences.

But, as you point out, beliefs are also transmitted socially, and often are centered around "some grand opinion or shaky claim" rather than some confirmable fact. How ought we consider such beliefs? How does James consider such beliefs?

This post is getting rather long. I wanted to respond to everything you said, but this thing is already monstrous.

The short answer is: James endorses skepticism in all things. That's why I said he was a radical empiricist. But (and here's the rub) in certain cases when skeptical inquiry cannot produce a good answer and a person is left not really knowing one way or another, THEN it is permissible to hold a belief that is unverified. Note that if skepticism DOES rule something out, James does not endorse holding the belief for any reason. That's bad.

There are also other criteria a belief must pass before James considers it worthy to be believed with out total verification. It must be what he calls a "genuine option." To be genuine an option must be "living, momentous, and forced" (these are criteria of James's own invention that he used to make his argument). Just any ol' belief about anything doesn't usually meet these criteria.

Since I've gone on long enough, I'll leave you with a plato.stanford.edu link that gives details on James's genuine option, as well as some details I might have missed.

Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Since you are asking really good questions and raising good counterpoints, I fear I may not be the most excellent source of information on James's thesis.

 

[vulcanlogician]

I appreciate the recommendations.

I have read some Kierkegaard and, personally, what I read did not impress me too much. Perhaps I should go back to re-read his work, but he seemed to blend the Existentialist notion of creating one's purpose with the Christian concept of a leap of faith. It's an interesting argument for adhering to Christian traditions, but not quite an argument for the existence of any gods or supernatural interventions.

Doystoyevsky has been on my reading list for too long. My familiarity with Russian literature in general is paltry. I was learning Russian with a partner so that I could read the works in their original languages, but life got in the way of that one.

Symbolic logic and mathematical logic are actually what I am most familiar with, and I'm hoping to do my thesis on the interplay between these and mathematical statistics, but I am not quite there yet. That is the general area that I am interested in, though.

Everything I know about Kierkegaard I got from text books, printouts, and secondary sources. I've tried to dip into his works, but I found him pretty difficult to read. It's been years since I've tried though. Maybe I should give it another go. I used to feel the same way about Kant, but I'm able to plow right through his stuff.

I haven't read any of Tolstoy's big novels. But his short stories and nonfiction are nice. Confession might have the sort of argument you're looking for. Tolstoy isn't rigorously philosophic, but he adheres enough to logic to speak to an atheist.

 

[Ella S.]

Everything I know about Kierkegaard I got from text books, printouts, and secondary sources. I've tried to dip into his works, but I found him pretty difficult to read. It's been years since I've tried though. Maybe I should give it another go. I used to feel the same way about Kant, but I'm able to plow right through his stuff.

I haven't read any of Tolstoy's big novels. But his short stories and nonfiction are nice. Confession might have the sort of argument you're looking for. Tolstoy isn't rigorously philosophic, but he adheres enough to logic to speak to an atheist.

Tolstoy does present some good arguments in My Confession, although they seem to fall along the same general lines of most mystical conceptions of God.

It's actually quite similar to the line of reasoning that had me abandon Nicene Christianity for esoteric Christianity, namely Neo-Sethian Alchemy.

On a personal note, I eventually realized that such a redefinition of God really isn't as necessary as Tolstoy seems to make it out to be. I am perfectly capable of finding meaning and value through secular philosophies, namely Modern Stoicism and Utilitarianism, without needing any sort of mystical concept like God.

Actually, to an extent, I think God is a poor solution mostly because it comes with a lot of cultural and theological baggage which, as a mystic, became nearly impossible for me to avoid whenever I would discuss God. I took to referring to God by the Platonic title of "the One," but even this still seemed to imply a great deal of supernaturalism that I was trying to avoid.

Although, to be quite fair, this is not really a counter-argument against the existence of God, since the mystical notion of God is more of an abstraction and not a concrete entity, anyway. I might even argue that Tolstoy is still technically an atheist by the end of the work.

 

[vulcanlogician]

I agree with James there, but don't consider such views theism. To me, it's theism when there is a conscious agent thought to be the source of the universe.

I think we can agree that the more "human-like" a god-concept is, the more absurd it becomes. But a god-concept in-itself does not qualify as absurd. (False, maybe. Imaginary, maybe.-- But not automatically absurd like the tribal god of the Israelites.)

It's interesting to note that, in some ways, the sun is more powerful than the ancient Israelites imagined Yahweh to be. It also has just as much creative power. If you look at it a certain way, the sun did most of creative work in developing life on Earth. We could ascribe consciousness to the sun, if we were being silly (or hypothetical) and it still wouldn't give the sun the agency you mention. AGENCY is what is required for the sun, as we understand it today, to qualify as a god. If the sun was choosing to do all the things it did to form life on earth, then hell. It's pretty much a god.

So, to me, agency (or more precisely FREE agency) is what separates things like deities responsible for creation of the Earth from the sun. Consciousness or human-like-ness does not enter into it. Free agency is the only aspect that matters.

If we accept this, then, interestingly, different metaphysical views come to bear on the issue. For instance if determinism (or hard incompatibilism) is true, then neither humans nor deities have free will. In that case, something like pantheism becomes more tenable. (And the sun becomes more godlike because it has the same amount of agency as a human--zero). So let's examine [deterministic] pantheism as it pertains to James's thoughts on skepticism.

A skeptical world view is never going to be able to decide one way or another between pantheism and regular old atheism. And nor do I think the choice between the two boils down to mere preference. Someone might be a pantheist for x and y reasons and their preferences have nothing to do with it. (Much of the time preferences play a role, yes-- but they by no means have to.)

Because skepticism cannot decide one way or another, James says that it's perfectly fine to let one's faith or intuitions be the determining factor here. If at some point skeptical inquiry decides the matter, then we ought to adjust accordingly. But until that time arises, we must rely on something besides skepticism to decide one way or the other. We must take one or the other on faith or not decide at all. A lot of people who are plain ol' atheists and also determinists probably don't think they are using faith to decide against the pantheistic view, but perhaps they are.

We can't point to love or courage, but unlike gods, we can point to concrete examples of them and agree that they can be called that.

The conversation about essences is interesting. I'm with the folks who deny essences for all intents and purposes. But I also think that essences are sold short in the heads of many skeptics. I think they get hung up on ontology, and because they don't like the ontology of, say, Platonic Forms, they want to write off all of metaphysics. I try to argue that while metaphysical issues will never be concretely decided, (which makes most folks very suspicious of them)... on the other hand, you CAN rule out certain metaphysical possibilities using logic. For this reason, I think metaphysical debates are worth having... if only to plot out the negative space of what is metaphysically possible.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

It's interesting to note that, in some ways, the sun is more powerful than the ancient Israelites imagined Yahweh to be. It also has just as much creative power. If you look at it a certain way, the sun did most of creative work in developing life on Earth. We could ascribe consciousness to the sun, if we were being silly (or hypothetical) and it still wouldn't give the sun the agency you mention for the sun (as we understand it today, to qualify as a god.

So, to me, agency (or more precisely FREE agency) is what separates things like deities responsible for creation of the Earth from the sun. Consciousness or human-like-ness does not enter into it. Free agency is the only aspect that matters.

Perhaps we're using the word agency differently. If I understand you correctly, you seem to impute agency to inanimate, unconscious entities like the sun. This is from Michael Shermer, and describes what I mean by agency, or as he calls it, agenticity:

"If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real. But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind — the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others — we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents."

The sun isn't thought of as an agent by this reckoning. But it likely is a creative force as you implied. From https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

"From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said."

Anyway, people's definitions of god are quite varied now, but mine remains something like what's described in the first italicized paragraph above. Once it becomes more like the second, I stop using the word god myself. It carries the baggage of agenticity. I still like to point to the mess Einstein made using the word to describe nature. How much better it would have been had he just referred to the laws of nature, or if he wanted to anthropomorphize it, Mother Nature. 'Mother Nature doesn't play dice with the universe' would have been preferable.

 

[vulcanlogician]

Tolstoy does present some good arguments in My Confession, although they seem to fall along the same general lines of most mystical conceptions of God.

Is mysticism a deal-breaker for you? Because, to me, mysticism is the only snowball's chance we can hope to have knowledge of something divine. I'm skeptical of mysticism, yes. But I'm way MORE skeptical of dogma and coercion. Dogma and coercion are the chief ways religious ideas propagate. Stood beside those two, mysticism is positively marvelous. AND it relies on direct experience (which is the way we get our ordinary knowledge).

So why do you say "although" in the sentence I quoted. Do you not like mysticism at all?

Actually, to an extent, I think God is a poor solution mostly because it comes with a lot of cultural and theological baggage which, as a mystic, became nearly impossible for me to avoid whenever I would discuss God. I took to referring to God by the Platonic title of "the One," but even this still seemed to imply a great deal of supernaturalism that I was trying to avoid.

Okay. So here you identify as a mystic (or former mystic?) Sorry, I just met you. Would you mind telling me more about which religious ideas you find compelling and which you don't?

I've always said that, as cool as the Neoplatonists are, they hung a lot of bad ideas on Plato's philosophy and Plato has to deal with more "guilt by association" to deal with than he ought to. I think one can easily elaborate a pantheistic concept from "the One." Though theists have overextended the usefulness of doing this. I see nothing wrong with thinking about the entirety of everything in existence as if it were one single object.

If you do that, what you are contemplating isn't all that distinct from what someone might call "God" if they witnessed the phenomenon all at once.

 

[vulcanlogician]

The sun isn't thought of as an agent by this reckoning. But it likely is a creative force as you implied.

My first draft was a bit vague. I cleaned it up with some edits... likely as you were composing your reply.

Agenticity is not what I'm talking about here. Agenticity, as I understand it (I just heard about it from you), concerns how we separate objects with motivation from those without. (like wind rustling the bushes from a hungry tiger in the bushes).

In no way am I saying that the sun has the same sort of agency that a tiger or a human has. What I'm saying is that in the case that there is no such thing as free will the sun may as well qualify as a god because then all we are left with is "an entity of great power that created life on earth."

According to a determinist a rock rolling down a hill has just as much agency as a person navigating their way through a job interview. They both have they same amount of agency-- NONE.

And, if you see things that way, (as some atheists do) then pantheism becomes more tenable. Without that caveat, pantheism is a very weak theory. But assuming that no such thing as free will exists, the difference between the great and powerful cosmos and a powerful God-creator that has no free will is virtually nil.

Am I losing you here? I'm not doing a great job of expressing my point, but, I do have a completely logical point that does not depend on any specific religious misgivings.

Also, to confuse the issue more, in real life, pantheists are often merely "atheists who have religious misgivings." I don't want to talk about them (though they very much do exist). As it pertains to James's argument I want to talk about a hypothetical pantheist who chooses pantheism over regular atheism because her intuitions indicate that pantheism is the correct option.

 

[vulcanlogician]

From https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

Fascinating article, btw.

 

[Ella S.]

Is mysticism a deal-breaker for you? Because, to me, mysticism is the only snowball's chance we can hope to have knowledge of something divine. I'm skeptical of mysticism, yes. But I'm way MORE skeptical of dogma and coercion. Dogma and coercion are the chief ways religious ideas propagate. Stood beside those two, mysticism is positively marvelous. AND it relies on direct experience (which is the way we get our ordinary knowledge).

So why do you say "although" in the sentence I quoted. Do you not like mysticism at all?

I have quite a few issues with mysticism in general. I would say that I do not reject the notion of mysticism altogether, but the issues I have seem to be wide-sweeping enough to apply to almost every mystical system.

I think that when mysticism turns out to be genuinely useful we call it psychology.

Okay. So here you identify as a mystic (or former mystic?) Sorry, I just met you. Would you mind telling me more about which religious ideas you find compelling and which you don't?

I do not find any religious ideas compelling anymore, as far as organized religion goes. I am also not a mystic anymore.

I do find some religious traditions and cultural philosophies interesting and insightful due to their unique perspectives, although this is mostly relegated to naturalistic religion. I think if your philosophy needs to posit the existence of some unproven substance, be it God or karma or chi, in order to ground itself, then that philosophy is usually not going to be very useful. There are exceptions to this, but it is something I generally try to avoid as much as possible.

I've always said that, as cool as the Neoplatonists are, they hung a lot of bad ideas on Plato's philosophy and Plato has to deal with more "guilt by association" to deal with than he ought to. I think one can easily elaborate a pantheistic concept from "the One." Though theists have overextended the usefulness of doing this. I see nothing wrong with thinking about the entirety of everything in existence as if it were one single object.

I once saw an interview conducted by a Theosophist with a professor of ancient Greek philosophy. It was quite normal until the professor mentioned Plato, prompting the Theosophist to ask questions about Plotinus, to which the professor sighed and gave a look of immense disappointment.

If you do that, what you are contemplating isn't all that distinct from what someone might call "God" if they witnessed the phenomenon all at once.

Perhaps, however, I wonder what the utility of doing this really is. You can call the universe "God" if you want, but why bother? The universe isn't a god. It has no agency or mind of its own. It isn't some discrete, concrete entity, but it is a collection of many things.

If you could replace the word God with more descriptive words like "universe" or "cognition" or "life," then why not use those more specific words to begin with? Why bother trying to define God into existence?

It seems that such an esoteric concept of God informs quite a few spiritual philosophies, where God is used as a sort of personification of abstract concepts. Much of these are part of ancient traditions which may have had the same approach. In this sense, perhaps God is a meaningful concept, but God still doesn't exist as a concrete entity, and using the word "God" to refer to these concepts in our modern society is ambiguous to the point of being misleading.

I respect those spiritual philosophies that take such an approach to God. Perhaps those are the religious ideas I find compelling, although rarely do I see such insightful and erudite philosophies being adopted by any religious organization. I just think their use of the word "God" is inadequate. I think they would be better off dropping the spiritual and mystical language altogether, which is something that a few modern Daoists and Stoics have done.

 

[MikeF]

Dude. You are bringin' it! I love your attention to detail and willingness to describe exactly what bothers you about James's position. I like your description of knowledge as you see it (which is pretty much empiricism). It's a good, careful, and reasonable description of knowledge. And pretty much I agree with it. As you noted elsewhere in your post James is also an empiricist. Maybe even a radical empiricist -?- (More on that below.)
Bringing in confirmation bias is an interesting strategy. Hadn't really considered that angle before. Let me think about it for a while. It's possible that it's a blind spot in James's thinking. He predates the Asch experiment and a great deal of things we've learned about social motivations for knowledge. So perhaps his judgments can be faulted for non-consideration of some important facts. I think I could drum up a defense for James on that account, though. But I need to do some thinking specifically on how confirmation bias affects James's notions of unverified belief before proceeding with an argument.
I like this definition of belief. I also like "something a person takes to be true." I don't see any key differences between that definition and the one you provided. (Or am I wrong?) And like that you say, there are plenty of ways we acquire beliefs. I'm skeptical of ways of acquiring beliefs other than logic or the senses. I suppose "learning from trained empiricists, who are careful about what they say, and who also run diligent experiments" also fits into my criteria for belief, because I (more or less) believe most of what I was taught in school, especially when it comes to the physical sciences.
But, as you point out, beliefs are also transmitted socially, and often are centered around "some grand opinion or shaky claim" rather than some confirmable fact. How ought we consider such beliefs? How does James consider such beliefs?
This post is getting rather long. I wanted to respond to everything you said, but this thing is already monstrous.
The short answer is: James endorses skepticism in all things. That's why I said he was a radical empiricist. But (and here's the rub) in certain cases when skeptical inquiry cannot produce a good answer and a person is left not really knowing one way or another, THEN it is permissible to hold a belief that is unverified. Note that if skepticism DOES rule something out, James does not endorse holding the belief for any reason. That's bad.
There are also other criteria a belief must pass before James considers it worthy to be believed with out total verification. It must be what he calls a "genuine option." To be genuine an option must be "living, momentous, and forced" (these are criteria of James's own invention that he used to make his argument). Just any ol' belief about anything doesn't usually meet these criteria.
Since I've gone on long enough, I'll leave you with a plato.stanford.edu link that gives details on James's genuine option, as well as some details I might have missed.
Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Since you are asking really good questions and raising good counterpoints, I fear I may not be the most excellent source of information on James's thesis.

No worries on the quality of your defense of James' position. You made it clear from the start that you were essentially playing devils advocate.

I read through the entire Stanford Encyc. Philo article you linked, and as you may have anticipated, I did not find anything there plausible or interesting from my perspective.

I did a quick look to see what was meant by “radical empiricism”. Here is Wikipedia's opening paragraph for quick reference:

Radical empiricism is a philosophical doctrine put forth by William James. It asserts that experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations. In concrete terms: Any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that.
Radical empiricism - Wikipedia​

Here is where the problem lies for James, and in my opinion, most of Philosophy. Both exhibit a very strong anthropocentrism. Since the classical Greeks there has been this intellectual understanding that gaining true knowledge is preferable over false knowledge or ignorance. However, once facts start to challenge the Philosophers anthropocentrism, psycho-social worldview, or the reliability and merits of that philosophers innate intuition, they develop rationalizations with which to defend and preserve their anthropomorphism, psycho-social worldview, and innate intuition.

The way I see it, there are two issues or problems to solve. The first issue is learning about and understanding reality independent of the human organism. Our empirical evidence strongly indicates that reality has been chugging along for quite a while before Homo Sapiens Sapiens came on the scene. Establishing the properties and conditions of the cosmos irrespective of our existence sets the stage or the framework in which we exist. The second issue is to then understand ourselves, how we function, what influences our behaviors and actions, and how we relate and are related to the rest of life. We must explore these issues within the framework of actual reality as opposed to imagining an external reality in relation to our individual subjective needs, wants, and desires.

If one is truly interested in understanding reality, what is real and existent, the process to achieve that should not be ham-strung with a requirement that the results of such investigations should comply with any culture, worldview, desire for meaning or subjective values. Reality is what it is and should be understood as it is. A valid process of knowledge acquisition must acknowledge the fallibility of the human investigator and it should takes active steps to mitigate that fallibility, irrespective of the field, category, subject of study. This is especially true in terms of trying to understand ourselves.

Not to cover James point-by-point, I will quickly address this issue of “ in certain cases when skeptical inquiry cannot produce a good answer and a person is left not really knowing one way or another, THEN it is permissible to hold a belief that is unverified. “. The problem here is that we are talking about the unknown. We cannot perceive a choice about something for which there is no information. We cannot render an opinion upon something for which we have no information to deliberate on. What James is really saying here is that it is permissible to create artificial constructs of reality and populate this construct with imagined entities in order for there to be no unknown. The danger here is that once permission is given to create an artificial construct of reality and believe in it and conform ones actions accordingly, you have created a valid space in which anyone can place anything they wish into this artificial construct and all versions are immune from challenge. No one can test, evaluate or confirm any claim, so no claim can be denied. Hopefully you see all the ramifications that ensue when there are competing or conflicting claims and associated requirements. Another negative ramification to creating artificial constructs of reality to satisfy unknowns is that you have now stifled incentive to further inquiry into actual reality (for now there are no longer any unknowns), which results in stagnating society.

Well, that's more than enough and more than you probably care to read through. Thanks for the opportunity to discuss my concerns with James' arguments.