Deism, an intellectually serious position in previous centuries, now must reject scientific explanations

[Wiploc]

Back in post 106, you say the argument is valid, but now you're saying they left out a premise? Can both be true?

Yes, both can be true, because the test for the worth of an argument is not its validity, but its soundness. An argument can be valid even if its premises are bullshit and the argument is enthymemetic.

I'm confused. How can an argument be valid if it leaves out premises?

 

[pood]

I'm confused. How can an argument be valid if it leaves out premises?

An argument is valid if the conclusion follows from the STATED premises. As I said, it does not matter if the stated premises are bullshit or if there are hidden premises. The test for validity is simply whether the conclusion follows from the stated premises. The examining of the premises and the uncovering of any hidden premises is what you do when you are checking to see whether a valid argument is also a sound argument.

 

[Learner]

Did you define "nature"?

Or begin or universe or god?

There wasn't one for 'real' either.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

We can't understand unless we accept falsehoods as true?

The behavior is its own truth.

A cowbird lays its eggs in another birds nest and the parent raises the cowbird chick, sometimes at the expense of its own offspring. The cowbird isn't being dishonest. Neither is a bald eagle being dishonest when its hunting strategy is to observe another eagle making a catch and then stealing the catch by brute force. Humans act no differently. Humans are acting in an environment in which they are trying to survive and are in competition with other organisms. When we get together to make laws there will always be those who for various reasons try to cheat those laws or change those laws so they can personally benefit.

I can use the laws to get a survival edge or I can not use the laws or can try to change the laws to get that edge. No one is being dishonest.

 

[Wiploc]

I've lied, and I've been lied to. Lots of people are dishonest. It happens all the time.

Your argument--if I understand it--is that because people have justifications and/or rationalizations for lying, therefore we shouldn't call it dishonesty.

I hope I haven't misrepresented your position. That was my best guess as to what you were trying to say. If I got it wrong, I'd like you to explain what you were really saying.

 

[bilby]

Such people you are talking about may indeed be good at logic and critical thinking, but they are dishonest.

I think to make sense of the human condition you must first accept that there are no dishonest people. Humans are the same as other species.

I would say that "honest" and "dishonest" apply to actions and statements, rather than to people.

Everyone is dishonest; And everyone is honest. The question is which they are being in a given context.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Your argument--if I understand it--is that because people have justifications and/or rationalizations for lying, therefore we shouldn't call it dishonesty.

If we think we do have justifications and rationalizations for negative behavior we're simply exercising a convention, a behavior that has been selected for, same as the perceived dishonesty. We should realize and understand that when we see dishonesty that doesn't mean something is broken. We each survive by using behaviors that gave our ancestors an edge.

And our species is just one of many despite what billions of our species may think. We all possess soft intelligence, the ability to manipulate the environment to our advantage, an adaptation not relegated to humans alone. I don't think many of us possess hard intelligence, the ability to know and appreciate the effect of those behaviors on the environment and ourselves. This lack of hard intelligence is what makes us no different than any other thing and any other organism. Recognizing and labeling dishonesty, however, is an expression of hard intelligence imho and a very desirable behavior because it considers the common good.

 

[stanley]

Deism was popular in 19th century America.

Jefferson was a Deist. He believed in a creator and thought he would be reunited with family in an afterlife. He put together a NT version minus the supernatural.

I'd call it a 'thinking man's religion'.

Deism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

200+ years ago it was "a thinking man's religion". Today, it is for people who have not thought about any knowledge/science of the past 200 years.

I thought deism was for otherwise rational people who are somehow baffled by the first-cause argument.I

Deism was popular in 19th century America.

Jefferson was a Deist. He believed in a creator and thought he would be reunited with family in an afterlife. He put together a NT version minus the supernatural.

I'd call it a 'thinking man's religion'.

Deism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

200+ years ago it was "a thinking man's religion". Today, it is for people who have not thought about any knowledge/science of the past 200 years.

I thought deism was for otherwise rational people who are somehow baffled by the first-cause argument.

I think the argument from design was more compelling to thinking people prior to the ToE. The seeming complexity and functionality of minute details of organisms. Locke starts out with what seems like a first cause argument, but then he goes onto specifically pointing to sentient beings like ourselves and saying that not only could we not have come from nothing, but the something must itself a being of some type to produce something else that is a being. That is a variant of argument from design. Thomas Jefferson referred to the beauty and order of the universe as the basis to infer a creator. The ToE seriously dismantles such arguments. Also, other areas of science including abiogenesis, naturally increasing complexity among inorganic molecules, and big bang cyclical cosmology undermine first cause arguments. Note the state of the evidence for these theories is largely a moot point. Arguments for god hinge upon there not even being any conceivable alternative to a creator creating the observed orderly complex universe. Thus, the mere existence of reasonable if yet unsubstantiated theories eliminates god as necessary conclusion, making it a conclusion only reachable by faith and not reason.

 

[pood]

\

I think the argument from design was more compelling to thinking people prior to the ToE. The seeming complexity and functionality of minute details of organisms. Locke starts out with what seems like a first cause argument, but then he goes onto specifically pointing to sentient beings like ourselves and saying that not only could we not have come from nothing, but the something must itself a being of some type to produce something else that is a being. That is a variant of argument from design. Thomas Jefferson referred to the beauty and order of the universe as the basis to infer a creator. The ToE seriously dismantles such arguments. Also, other areas of science including abiogenesis, naturally increasing complexity among inorganic molecules, and big bang cyclical cosmology undermine first cause arguments. Note the state of the evidence for these theories is largely a moot point. Arguments for god hinge upon there not even being any conceivable alternative to a creator creating the observed orderly complex universe. Thus, the mere existence of reasonable if yet unsubstantiated theories eliminates god as necessary conclusion, making it a conclusion only reachable by faith and not reason.

Nice post. It was Dawkins who said something to the effect that the ToE made atheism intellectually respectable. I think religionists all know this and explains why they battle so intently against that theory and fact in particular. I think the Enlightenment form of deism that obviously predated the ToE and modern physics was something that would have made sense at the time. I sometimes think of our ancestors some 50,000 years ago who made cave paintings, and were just as intelligent as we are but wholly lacking the knowledge base we have today. They made these cave paintings of the animals they hunted. I find it easy to imagine them thinking, “We can make cave paintings, but we have no idea how to produce the actual animals that we paint. How much greater than us, must be the creators of the actual animals.”

 

[stanley]

\

I think the argument from design was more compelling to thinking people prior to the ToE. The seeming complexity and functionality of minute details of organisms. Locke starts out with what seems like a first cause argument, but then he goes onto specifically pointing to sentient beings like ourselves and saying that not only could we not have come from nothing, but the something must itself a being of some type to produce something else that is a being. That is a variant of argument from design. Thomas Jefferson referred to the beauty and order of the universe as the basis to infer a creator. The ToE seriously dismantles such arguments. Also, other areas of science including abiogenesis, naturally increasing complexity among inorganic molecules, and big bang cyclical cosmology undermine first cause arguments. Note the state of the evidence for these theories is largely a moot point. Arguments for god hinge upon there not even being any conceivable alternative to a creator creating the observed orderly complex universe. Thus, the mere existence of reasonable if yet unsubstantiated theories eliminates god as necessary conclusion, making it a conclusion only reachable by faith and not reason.

Nice post. It was Dawkins who said something to the effect that the ToE made atheism intellectually respectable. I think religionists all know this and explains why they battle so intently against that theory and fact in particular. I think the Enlightenment form of deism that obviously predated the ToE and modern physics was something that would have made sense at the time. I sometimes think of our ancestors some 50,000 years ago who made cave paintings, and were just as intelligent as we are but wholly lacking the knowledge base we have today. They made these cave paintings of the animals they hunted. I find it easy to imagine them thinking, “We can make cave paintings, but we have no idea how to produce the actual animals that we paint. How much greater than us, must be the creators of the actual animals.”

I agree that deism made more sense in the Enlightenment than now. That is also why I would predict that many/most deists of that time would be atheists today. They were willing to leave behind the most of the religious assumptions of their culture and likely that they were raised to believe in the name of reason. That is the kind of disposition that leads to atheism or at least non-theism today. In fact, there were some atheists of that time, and I would bet that without the cultural pressure to retain at least the minimal trappings of theism that deism allowed, many deists would have gone full non-theism even back then. What Dawkins said is the the ToE allowed atheists to be more intellectually fulfilled. He meant that prior to the ToE, the choice was between filling the gap in our knowledge of how functional organisms came to be with either God or with nothing and just saying "We don't know how, but that does not imply God". The ToE gave a specific alternative to god. But even without that alternative, the theist and the deist were still relying upon a logically fallacious "argument from ignorance". And filling the unknown with preferred answers was anti-thetical to sound scientific thinking even back then. So, I don't let the deists completely off the hook, but they were far more intellectually honest than today's theistic intellectuals, especially the intelligent design crowd.

 

[pood]

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He meant that prior to the ToE, the choice was between filling the gap in our knowledge of how functional organisms came to be with either God or with nothing and just saying "We don't know how, but that does not imply God".

Basically, that was Hume’s point — “we don’t know, but that does not imply God.” And he demolished the argument to design long before Darwin showed up.