AW! Epistles
From Karl 10
Abstract
Monday, 18 July 2005
“…I am a scientific ’realist’, you keep telling me, and so cannot accept any such thing as an ideal. Actual knowledge is knowledge that can be had about reality. Whether it can be had through physics or not is the point of this discussion. Ideal knowledge definitely cannot be had through physics.”
You are conflating two meaning of ideal. I explicity use the word “ideal” to refer to perfection, the purpose, the end point of the pursuit. I argue that objective knowledge remains an unachieved ideal. Hence, whether physics can achieve it is open to question. It is very much the point of the discussion whether it can be achieved through physics. It seems that you have missed the whole point of my book. You seem to be using the term ideal as meaning “in the realm of ideas” or “in your head” or in some “transcendent realm beyond the sensory”. Whatever. It may well be the case that your belief in the objectivity of physics (a science that you admit to have little knowledge about) may well be a product of your imagination. Furthermore, actual knowledge must be understood in the context that it is produced and thus is limited to aspects or parts of reality. But you also conflate two sense of “reality”. You use it to refer to the phenomenal reality of the world around is and also to refer to some underlying reality that makes the phenomenal reality possible. For example, you say, “When spirals seem ubiquitous in Nature, I think that natural processes are able to generate spirals, and spirals arise from the concatenation of certain relationships, described mathematically. If it is metaphysical then OK, but it seems to me to be nothing more than nous.” Of course, mathematics can describe phenomenal reality. No-one denies that. What is at stake is that claim (that you accept as self-evidently true) that mathematics describes some “underlying reality” that makes the phenomenal possible. It is that claim that I am critical about for the reasons that I have previously given and that I have given in my book. As I pointed out to you, in order to connect an “underlying reality” with “phenomenal reality” one requires a causal account. Mathematics does not provide causal accounts; it describes relations. Metaphysics is necessary to relate causal accounts of “underlying reality” with mathematical descriptions of “phenomenal reality”.
As I understand it, the cause of the spiral of a snail’s shell is its daily growth, and it is the growth of the animal with time that produces the spiral simply described by a mathematical equation relating the growth with time and the constraint that the animal cannot gow in a line but in a circle. The underlying reality of the snail’s spiral is in reality. You do not have to go beneath what is observed to find it, as you do with neutrinos and quarks. The mechanical realists you speak of are perhaps extrapolating beyond the limits of the data, and we all know that can cause errors, but the extrapolation is of a procedure which is entirely observable.
“Once the arithmetic and geometry started it, the rest [of all mathematics] followed from our neural architecture which has evolved to fit us to living in reality (as we have already discussed), and their continued use in solving actual problems.”
Neural science is still at the level of having enormous difficulty in understanding how the brain processes simple integers. It seems to me to be far fetched to conclude that it is a self-evident truth that group theory or n-dimensional topology “followed from our neural architecture which has evolved to fit us to living in reality”. Your claim is not based on real science. It is based on science fiction.
Any hypothesis is science fiction until it becomes science fact. Having to live in a real world conditions us to it, and if mathematics is part of it, then we shall be conditioned to mathematics.
“I was using the ’hypothesis of mechanical realism’ to mean your own theory— as Rogers’ ’hypothesis of machine realism’, or whatever the proper expression for human modelling with machines is. Presumably with this correction it is true since the metaphysics still cannot test itself whatever it is.”
Mechanical realism is the metaphysical foundation upon which scientific methodology rests itself as a means by which the artificial can be used to understand the natural. It is this metaphysics that cannot be tested. The process of modelling and mapping the interactions between human interventions and machine performances is that scientific method. Only specific models and techniques can be tested and falsified. My hypothesis, as you put it, is a historical description of the conceptual transformation that occured during the scientific revolution. As I have already said, its purpose is to clarify experimental physics (and to criticise positivistic philosophies of science), but, in itself, does not undermine scientific realism; it simply shows how it was conceptiually possible. The critical aspect is whether experimental physics can achieve objective truth about Nature.
“The mature dandelion grows seeds that the wind blows off to disperse. Is that a machine? When a peasant uses the wind to separate the wheat from the chaff, is he using a machine?”
No. Nether are machines. The former is an entity, the latter is a process. However, once you accept mechanical realism then both are machines and Nature is mechanical. After that conceptual transformation then you can understand Nature by building machines and explaining how they work.
“Well, I have done, but what I am saying is that you seem to destroy every basis for making your mind up about anything because everything depends upon metaphysical assumptions that are not testable.”
No I am not. Once again you are putting words into my mouth, rather than tackle the criticisms that I raise about your own position. I am saying that modern physics is based on untestable metaphysical assumptions. It will only apply to everthing else if you think that physics explains everything else. Do you?
We cannot test everything by experiments, and these are what have engaged your attention, but science is making careful observations, and proposing hypotheses to explain them that can be tested by more observations. We cannot observe everything and only have a chance of explaining what we observe, but it should be enough for everyone except those who want to explain what they cannot observe.
“That being so, I and the Christians, are left where we were before you pointed this out to us. We decide on what we can do. Christians will arbitrarily believe in their figment and scientists will continue to believe in theirs. But scientific belief seems to do what scientists think it does, even though you maintain they are doing something else— though that remains useful! My mind remains made up about what I prefer even if my metaphysical assumptions are wrong since they are no more wrong than anyone else’s, including your own.”
No man is wiser than Socrates. Did this mean that Socrates was wisest because he knew that he knew nothing? Or did this mean that all men, including Socrates, were equally foolish?
If the universe is infinite, then all men know nothing, but if it is finite, then Socrates is wisest.
“…if science is no more or less true than God, or any other system that can be devised based on other metaphysical assumptions. Since you have thrown us into the metaphysical ocean without a boat, we shall have to grab whatever we can, if we are practically minded, or pray, if we are religiously minded. I shall be grabbing at the flotsam. So, nothing has changed. If there is nothing better on offer, it is insane to want to change.”
Actually, you are in the same boat as everyone else. You are not superior to anyone else and no-one is superior to you. We are all just guessing about objective truth. Now if you want to become all nihilistic about it then that is your affair. Alternatively, I suggest that you swim and enjoy the water. Or float and enjoy the stars. But the one practical advantage in knowing your innocence is that there simply is no reason to try and navigate the boat because we have no basis for knowing which direction to sail it. It kind of makes the great human struggle to be the Captain of the Ship to be a bit pointless. Doesn’t it?
That sounds far more nihilistic to me. I saw a program on TV about some men who escaped from Alcatraz by making an inflatable boat out of raincoats! The men got away from the island, but the received wisdom is that they drowned. What is interesting about the human psyche is that men will get in the boat and sail off not knowing in what direction they are heading. Perhaps if they had not, you would not be thinking about it.
Mike, I have to admit that, to be honest, it seems to me that your evident hatred for religion and contempt for religious people has seriously clouded your judgement and impartiality. I have no doubt that you are very passionate about your studies and you are motivated against religious fundamentalism, but you seem to be allowing your emotions to dictate to your reason. If you do this then, even though your work is based on years of considered and reasoned study, it will be dismissed as the ravings of some atheistic fundamentalist with an axe to grind, rather than a serious critical historian of Christianity.
So it has, but sometimes we must accept that passions are what drive us even at the risk of clouding our reason, though I try not to let it.
The point about agnosticism is that it rejects the possibility of knowledge of the existence and nature of God. It is pointless to argue that some particular conception of God is illogical or is not substantiated by experience. According to the agnostic, all conceptions of God are the product of human imagination. To state that God does not exist is merely a linguistic construct.
I agree with what you say except the last sentence, but that it should be true that all conceptions of God are imaginary is simply explained by the non-existence of God. Surely the point about a God— with the capital G— is that He is all mighty and all seeing, and so on, being the creator of everything there is. If such a being existed, it ought not to be in doubt, unless He was deliberately staying aloof. I accept that an aloof God might exist, but His aloofness means there is no way in which He interacts with the world, and therefore no purpose in worshipping Him. We are back to parsimony. What is the point of all the religious paraphernalia and hatred when God is aloof at best, and probably does not exist at all?
You can raise whatever analogies that you like, whatever cartoon character or nursery rhyme character, but, at the end of the day you are just putting words together without any empirical referent. It is not an empirical statement. If the question of the existence of God is marginal to the purpose of your webpage, as you claim, and I have repeatedly stated that the question of the existence of God is independent from the question of the truth of any particular religion, which I describe as an interpretation, then it does not seem that agnosticism supports any particular interpretation. And that includes Shiva, or Aphrodite, or Marduk, or Krishna (I do not know who Priapus was god for). In fact, it denies the possibility that any interpretation could be known to be true. Whilst agnosticism respectfully reserves judgement on the question of whether God exists, someone could not be religious and agnostic simultaneously. Hence, I really fail to see what is so pernicious about agnosticism that makes it, and myself as an agnostic, so deserving of your abusive diatribe. I have repeatedly said that I have found your arguments against Christianity to be persuasive, and I have already told you that I am not persuaded by Christianity; I simply acknowledge the possibility that I (and you) could be wrong. Why are you so bothered and offended by this acknowledgement? I really do not understand why you think that it is necessary to insult me simply because I do not agree with you. Being an agnostic does not make me a hypocritical coward and an apologist for montrousness, murder, madmen, and liars. Given that I deny that they know what they claim to know, how could it? I said that I do not respect murderers and that I condemn violence, for whatever pretext (secular or religious), but, all I said is that, as a statement of my liberalism, I respect the right of other people to hold beliefs that I do not share and that they have a right to express their beliefs to anyone who’ll listen. Obviously, you object to the idea that people should have a rights to religious freedom and freedom of expression. This worries me. In what way do you differ from all the other intolerant bigots that the world has so amply spawned? One does not end up in the lobster pot, as you put it, for allowing fascists to express their opinions. One ends up in the lobster pot when one becomes a fascist by deciding who’s opinions are permissable for the good of humanity and who’s are not. It starts by making the extremists illegal, then the radicals are made illegal, and finally the critics are prohibitted from speaking, for the public good. There is fundamental distinction in law for freedom of expression and freedom of action, just as there is a fundamental distinction between condemning the foreign policies of the West and blowing up innocent people for any reason. My view is everyone should have the right to express their views, no matter how half-baked or loathsome I might find them, but no-one has the right to kill complete stangers in order to make a political point. So, while I affirm your right to universally condemn all religions (even though you admit that you have not studied them all) as being evil and based on lies, in my opinion, you are prejudiced because you are closed minded to the possibility that you could be wrong about your belief that God does not exist.
It is a long paragraph. The point about the cartoon characters is that they are imaginary. That is what they have in common with God, and because they have that property they cannot be proved to exist or disproved from existing. They cannot have an empirical referent because they are not material entities but figments of someone’s imagination. Someone can describe what they imagine, and we can speak of imaginary objects as if they were real, as we do with God. They have just the properties that God has.
My guess is that most non-religious people would say they are agnostics. I am not bothered by that, especially as most of them have not thought about it. It saves them from having to think and argue about something that does not interest them. But it does not make it a respectable position to hold, on the grounds that there is no evidence one way or the other. There could be no evidence one way or the other for anything imaginary, including Harvey, yet no one wants to be agnostic about Harvey. Everyone is quite happy to come to a conclusion about him.
Of course, some people object to diatribes unless they are their own. I write diatribes against Christianity because it deserves it. It professes to be what it is not—good! It is understandable that Christians should hide the true history of their own odium, but my purpose is the opposite, I shall seek to expose it, and whereas Christians think universal Christianity is the solution of the world’s problems, it is easy to show by history that it was not, even when it was universal, and that today still it is the frightful cause of endless suffering, death and torture. It is demonstrable, historically, and daily in the newspapers.
Yet you want me to acknowledge that I could be wrong. Should I be a liar? It bothers me immensely that I should have to be a liar so as not to offend Christians. I will not be a liar, certainly for such a vile reason, and if I have seemed offensive to you, it is because I cannot understand how the indefensible can be defended by clever men. Unlike typical Christians, Moslems and Jews of history, I am not suggesting that the answer is a mass slaughter to rid the world of these wicked people. All I am doing is arguing a case, even if for some it is too passionate for good taste. I cannot see why you think I object to freedom of religious expression. I do not. I am quite happy top allow people to hold views of all kinds, most of which I cannot share, but the propagation of superiority and hatred is not among them, and exclusive religious clubs are already on that slippery slope.
“One ends up in the lobster pot when one becomes a fascist by deciding who’s opinions are permissable for the good of humanity and who’s are not.” That is my point. It is precisely what religions have always sought to do. Consenting adults of any common persuasion should be free to do as they wish in private, but when they make public calls for others to do it, society has a duty to take an interest, and I agree with you, it must happen when anyone begins to respond to hate calls by doing loathsome things.
Now you freely admit that you do not respect murderers and condemn violence on any pretext. Me too, but nor can I respect violent organisations and the institutions of murderers whether they are called Nazis, Christians, Jews or Moslems. I take your point, though. Our present leaders seem to me to be looking for ways of introducing more and more repressive measures, and are stirring up “terror” in the world as an excuse, and one of their ways is by permitting the propagation of hatred. We have enough laws in the UK to stop any such propagation, but more are being introduced. It seems to me that when blacks are being strung up from trees, as they were in the 1920s, the point of action has been passed (though nothing much seemed to have been done at the time), as it has today by Moslem extremists, here in the UK and elsewhere. We agree on this, but the problem is quite where the line should be drawn. We are not short of laws, but of their selective application. Ricky Tomlinson, now known for his part in the comedy, The Royal Family, was arrested for conspiracy as one of the Shrewsbury Three. This catch-all law can be used for anything, but in the context of bombers, it has been forgotten. Instead, we are jailing people indefinitely without trial. That, in my book, already is fascism, but what are the churches doing about it? It is meretricious churchgoing labour ministers who are doing it!
Finally let me remind you again that I am do not universally condemn all religions. I condemn the patriarchal religions as being evil and based on lies. And I repeat, it has nothing essentially to do with the existence of God or not. These religions are historically wicked. The historical evidence is independent of the exustence of God. But, to me, their wickedness is evidence that they can have nothing to do with any conventionally good God.
There is not necessarily any contradiction between liberality and morality. Liberalism is based on a notion of basic human rights. As far as I am concerned, to use your example, the followers of Zarkon and Karzon can believe what they want, but when they start killing each other then that is murder, pure and simple.
Would it have been better to stop them spreading hatred for each other first?
As an aside, I really do not think that your view of Descartes’ scepticism is particularly based on a close reading of his philosophy. Otherwise, you just must have noticed the fundamental role that mathematics and God as a perfect creator have in his natural philosophy. Descartes not only believed that there was a God, but founded his whole epistemology on the idea that God was perfect— otherwise we could not have truth or clarity and we would not be able to have objective knowledge at all.
I expect that people brought up to believe in God, actually do it. People use the concepts they have to hand, as you have said before. It does not mean they are right.
You seem to completely ignore the Christian concept of free-will, in your comments to me at least (perhaps you have a discussion of it on you webpages— I’ll have a look at some point). Otherwise you would not keep assuming that the behaviour of humanity was God’s will. Now, of course, I am aware that this concept was something of an ad hoc solution to how to reconcile the notion of a perfect and good God (as well as a rational universe) with the wickedness of human beings (being created by a perfect and good God)— if I remember rightly this concept was first proposed in Christain theology by Thomas Aquinas (am I right?) But, if human beings do have the capacity to choose between good and evil, then the wickedness of Christianity could hardly be said to be the fault of God and thus could not be used to disprove the existence of a good and perfect God. Furthermore, as far as I understand it, Jesus is not considered to be God by Christians (although, the concept of the Holy Trinity is complicated), but is the son of God, the incarnation of God in a man. It has been a long time since I read the New Testament, but I thought that Jesus was quite ambiguous on this point. Thus, it seems to me that your claim that there is some inconsistency between the Christian view that Jesus is God and the sayings of Jesus in the Bible does not really fairly reflect what the Christian view is.
You seem to be trying to find coherence in Christianity, something Christian theologians have been trying to do for 2000 years. Christians, as usual, want it all ends up, and that is the point of their theology. Augustine (long before Aquinas) wanted things to be predestined because the Pelagians said humans were free, but most plain and simple Christians think we have free will, and that is why there is evil in the world, as you were suggesting. God cannot escape though, because he is omniscient. He can see the future, so he knew what He was doing when He made humanity, and that the humans would introduce evil into the world, but he went ahead anyway. The Almighty cannot get out of it. He brought evil into the world with His eyes wide open. The Zoroastrians had a properly good God. He made only good things, and his evil twin made the wicked things that spoiled the Good Creation. It seems altogether more coherent, if no better in the end. As for Jesus on the supernatural aspects of Christianity, you will read and believe what you like. The clearest thing however is that he directly distinguished himself from God, denying he was good, for no one is good but God. But that seems to me to make him a man, just as he seemed to be!
I have notice that you like making arguments based on analogies. This a quite a basic rhetorical tactic that can fool the uninitiated. Politicians use this tactic all the time. However, just as analogies have points of similarity, they have points of disimilarities. This is what makes them analogies rather than identities. Your analogy between unassisted flight and the existence of God in order to labour your mantra about the absence of evidence being evidence of absence is a case in point. Of course, one can see how one might be tempted to be swayed by this analogy. After all, unassisted flight might be possible. Peter Pan might be right and it is simply a matter of belief. However, before I take that leap off a multi-storey car park, it should also be noted that there is a crucial difference that makes the analogy fall flat. That difference is one of risk. Remaining open minded about God carries no risk. It can do me no harm whatsoever. However, be open minded about the possibility of unassisted flight carries considerable risk. A risk that I am not prepared to take. I refute your funny analogy between Schroedinger’s Cat and God. The point at which you analogy falls flat is that one cannot open the box on the question of whether God exists. Hence, it cannot be empirically verified whether God exists. You are simply guessing.
I hope I use analogies for illustration and not for arguments, since I am fond of disparaging Bishop Butler. This was not meant to be argument by analogy, but a demonstration that my mantra, as you call it (it is a Christian mantra in the negative), the absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, holds well enough in some circumstances, and cannot therefore just be dismissed as invalid. The risk is merely a factor you take into account in accepting the evidence or not. Here, the absence of evidence of flight is sufficient, combined with the consequences of ignoring it, for people to accept it as evidence against being able to fly. In other words, it is accepted as evidence even by those whose mantra is absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
“Your argument disparages evidence on the grounds that it is not all in, will change, and so we are left paralysed. That suits fascists. Rulers will not be paralysed. They will act to further their own interests, but the evidence of it we have might change, and so is invalid!”
Again, you rhetorically leap to a hysterical conclusion, rather than think about the implications of your position. I said that on your account, if the absence of evidence was evidence of absence, then, prior to the C20th century, then there would be no evidence to support the claim that atoms existed (a claim that dates back to Democritus, but was revived in the C17th by Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle) and thus that absence would be evidence that they did not exist. In the C19th Boltzmann commited suicide because of the total lack of interest in his life’s work, his statistical atomic theory of thermodynamics (a crucial theory for C20th physics), because of the disbelief in atoms. If we were to follow your mantra then no-one would have bothered to look for evidence of atoms. They would have presumed that they did not exist because there had been not a jot of evidence for their existence for thousands of years of speculation and two hundred years of experimental science. It is your view that wishes to prohibit belief and shut down speculation about areas for which there is an absence of evidence. On my account, people are encouraged to keep looking for evidence. Especially for such things as Atlantis. Who knows what might be found at the bottom of the Atlantic? Who the hell are you to sneer and scoff at the speculations and explorations of others? Okay, the Nazis were largely trying to use Atlantis as the origin of the Aryan race for propaganda purposes, but, as far as I am aware, neither Van Daniken or Churchward tried to force anyone to accept their ideas. They wrote books and speculated. And, just for the record, Blunkett, no doubt in his own mind adopting a pragmatic stance, wishes to be able to have people convicted “on a balance of probabilities” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt”, so before you, once again try to rhetorically pin my views to fascism, it is actually the case that your pragmatics is one that tends to server rhetoricians and fascists much better than mine.
On the Christian’s account the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I say that is false. It is not proof of it, but it is evidence of it. What purpose is to be served by proposing something for which there is no evidence? The only purpose is that it is good for the proposer in some way, as the proposal that God exists is good for professional religionists. Since absence of evidence is not proof of absence, it does not preclude anyone from looking for the evidence if they have some cause to do so. I would be inclined to think that cause to look must be some sort of evidence itself, so perhaps the absence of evidence was not truly an absence of it. Boyle thought the compressibility of gases was evidence of their particulate nature. It was. The absence of evidence of perpetual motion machines has never stopped some people from trying to make one. But, so far as I know, the absence of evidence of winged horses has been effective in discouraging people from trying to find them, and many similar legendary creatures. So, you are now being hysterical. I am not suggesting and have not suggested prohibiting any forms of enquiry, but simply that people who advocate exclusivity for some and violence for others should be deterred from it, as being a potential threat to innocent minorities.
I have no desire to encourage people to do silly but harmless things, but I am not in the business of stopping them. People are quite welcome to seek for evidence for God, if that is there aim in life, but they are not welcome to lie about finding it. I am satisfied that Plato was describing a utopia for his own political purposes, and to boost the Athenian ego, in describing Atlantis, but since it has become a pseudo religion to believe there was a place called Atlantis, with extraordinarily unhistorical powers and dates, somewhere in the world you and others are welcome to believe that too. At one time people were happy to believe it was a Carthaginian colony at Tartessus that had been swallowed by the Atlantic shoals. It is fine by me, but it is not what Plato described. Socrates is the wisest man but Plato apparently did not have the imagination to make up a story. Incidentally, I am as entitled to sneer and scoff at the speculations of others as anyone else, and that is on your account. And are you implying that I am, unlike Daniken and Churchward, trying to force people into accepting what I believe. What then is the form of coercion I am using to do it? There is a whiff of hysteria here. As for the criteria in making legal judgements, I am as suspicious as you are about them being changed by neo-National Socialist ministers, but I would prefer the judgements to be made in open courts based on known criteria than made in secret on no crieria at all.
My point was that we should remain open minded to the possibility that we are not yet evolved enough to know God. It is you who wishes to shut down this possibility. The only reason why I have a bee in my bonnet about the existence of God is because you refuse to accept that we just have a difference of opinion about this. You are the bee.
Furthermore, I really cannot see how you cannot grasp the ontological distinction between the existence of God and the truth of human claims about the nature of God. Of course, if the Bible was shown to be a work of myth and fiction (or even lies) then it would falsify the beliefs of Christians and Jews, but it would not have any bearing on the question of whether God existed. To contradict another one of you analogies, this is not the same as a centaur. Whether or not centaurs exist is an empirical question that can be answered by searching the world looking for them. The more of the world that is explored, without finding centaurs, leads us to reasonably feel that centaurs do not exist. The more places that are searched leads us to consider it to be increasingly unlikely that we’ll find a centaur. God is not the same kind of entity as a centaur.
I can grasp it perfectly well and have said several times that my objection is to patriarchal religions not to God. I do not find the idea of God objectionable, simply unnecessary, but these religions are objectionable. The trouble with the idea of God is that it encourages people to believe these religions whioh all claim to be His Word, and so we get deranged people thinking they know God’s will, and that is horrific. Most of my website is precisely to show that the bible is a work of religious fiction— myth. You assert that God is not the same kind of entity as a centaur, but you ought to know by now I disagree. Indeed, I thought we had agreed that, any God that actually worked in the world, in the way religions find necessary to satisfy their sheep, must be subject to empirical testing like the centaurs. I think that is so, and there is no such evidence. Ergo, God does not exist, or he is not interfering with the world in any detectable way, if He does.
“What preternatural ability lets us distinguish religious charlatans from genuine religious people who seek truth and meaning through religion. Christians cannot. The religious charlatans depend upon the fact that religious people seeking this truth and meaning cannot distinguish them. And, when any of them claim to have found this truth and meaning, how are we to know they are not liars or deluded from the manual of pure knowledge?”
We cannot. There is no such manual. That’s the point.
That is indeed the point I am making about these religions. In argot, they are scams.
When you say that “if my definition of knowledge is slack compared with your exacting one, it is at least one that leads us to understand something about the world”, you have missed my whole critical point. It begs the question of whether you actually understand anything about the world, or whether you merely assert that your beliefs are in fact knowledge because they are plausible on the basis of your interpretation of the available evidence. Whether you understand or misunderstand the world is very much the question. Moreover, you say “and however critical you are about the way society is developing, it is developing and not standing still by adopting the inexact definition of knowledge that is too poor for philosophers.” It strikes me that it is very much a question whether society is developing. It seems that it might well be retrograding. Of course, ideal knowledge is unobtainable in the real world, but that should leave you with some sence of modesty, rather than shifting the standard in order to transform opinion and belief into knowledge. Once again, following your analogy, of course the blind man would rather poor eyesight than blindness, but, if you were the partially healed blind man you would be claiming that your poor eyesight was good eyesight because it was the best eyesight you had. Rather than admit that you didn’t see too well, you would claim to be a good witness of events! As for me, I would admit that my eyesight was poor, but better than none at all. Once again, my point about the empirical facts discovered through experimental physics is an abstraction of alethic knowledge about our productive possibilities. This is very different from the empirical facts that an ornithologist might discovery about the breeding habits of seagulls in the wild. Of course, in order to understand these facts, we would have to know how the observer studied the gulls and interpretated their behaviour. From the onset I have stated that of course physicists bring new powers and machines into existence, but the question is whether they understand them. I do not deny that physicists invented X-ray machines and that it is possible to locate a broken rib using one, but it remains an important epistemological question whether the physicists understanding of this machine in terms of X-rays is objectively true because of this. You ask “What then prevented proper, correct opinion from developing and guiding the know-how properly?” The fundamental question experimental sciences such as physics is what has guided the know-how. My whole argument is that this has been developed within a technological framework and whether or not it provides us with correct or proper knowledge is something that it perpetually deferred to the future. From our present perspective, we simply do not know. Hence, you should be more modest about what you claim to know on the basis of experimental physics. This does not mean that “the discoveries of micro-organisms beginning with Pasteur and leading to hygeine, disinfectants, immunization and antibiotics is not knowledge because it depends on machine intervention and interpretation”, as you claim my meaning to be, but, rather, it means that how we understand health, micro-organisms, and hygiene is something that is mediated by technology and represented in technological terms. This transforms the nature of the knowledge that we have. We are not learning objective facts about Nature, but, instead, exploring our interactions within the world by intervening in that world and representing that intervention in technological terms. The discoveries of science are not misconceived, rather the claims made by scientific realists and empiricists about those discoveries are misconceived. Obviously, Bush and Blair’s propaganda machine is starting to worm its way into your brain (no doubt appealling to your loathing of Islam), but, I hardly think that a call for some degree of honesty about what we know and do not know makes me sound “like a philosophical mullah acting as a spokesman for a philosophical Taliban”. However, what I find most troubling about your email is the view of historical truth that your view seems to imply. You seem to hold that the interpretation of texts and artifacts has the same empirical status as direct perception. Thus you claim that it is as evident that Cyrus used propagandists on the basis of texts that claim that he did (which language were those written in? who were they written by? what makes you believe that they were telling the truth?), as is my ability to identify my own reflection in a mirror. Furthermore, your equation of your historical interpretation with scientific interpretation is very troubling to me. Once again, being hysterical, you find the absence of certainty as being an objection to historical analysis, but there is nothing implicit in what I am saying that prevents us from learning more. If anything I am saying that we can never rest on our laurels. Of course, you need to make something pernicuous about this with your rhetorical use of George Santayana quip that “if we do not learn from [history] we are doomed to relive it, and we constantly ‘do’ relive it because we ‘do’ refuse to learn from it.” [I actually thought that the quip was that ‘the one lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history’]. It seems to me that the important lesson of history that you have yet to learn is that history is always written by someone, with their own agenda, their own prejudices, and their own criteria for selection and interpretation. It is all interpretation and perspective. To treat history as if it were providing facts and truths is an error. One should always be sceptical about history because it does tend to be written by the victors and their scholars.
It is quite ironic that you should be telling me this while defending people’s right to believe whatever they like, when I am the one who has spent a good many years offering, to anyone wishing to read it, some of the reasons you offer why the Holy Word is not to be relied upon as being what the Jews and Christians suppose. The Christians think the prophets were messengers from God, but there is, in my view, good textual evidence to show that kings like Cyrus 2500 years and more ago used ’prophets’ as propagandists. This is exactly what I am saying: ‘history is always written by someone, with their own agenda, their own prejudices, and their own criteria for selection and interpretation’, but the history I am speaking of particularly is the so-called sacred history written in the Jewish scriptures and then extended by the Christians. Judaism is explained in terms of the Persian conquest of Babylon, when the tiny country of Judah became Persian and was later set up as a temple state to collect taxes. You tell me I have to learn an important lesson of history that I have been trying to tell Jews and Christians about. Why have I to learn these lessons that you are happy to accept as the beliefs of these others?
The scientific interpretation of history is just what you say. It is being skeptical. Believers are gullible. Postmodernists seem to be nihilistic. Skepticism is just right! The other point about scientific history is that one gets more sure of what appears in different and independent sources. Under the influence of Judaism, for centuries historians have accepted that Cyrus, a man who built in a thirty year lifetime of conquest, the biggest emoire the world had ever seen was a cuddly teddy bear. He must have been because he was kind to Jews and other people, allowing them to return and follow their own religion. In the last three decades skeptics have thought the picture was a bit incongruous, and there might have been more to it than they thought. Cyrus was a very clever operator, and so were the other Achaemenid kings. They were kind to people as long as the people were compliant, a perfectly sensible policy, but not cuddly. Like modern ’facilators’ they imposed their own rule while seeming to do what the locals wanted. It is an interesting story, but pious Jews and Christians would rather kill than accept it.
I doubt that I loath Islam more than Christianity. I group them, along with Judaism, as patriarchal religions, all of them having the same root in Cyrus and particularly Darius II. All of them con their believers into thinking God is with them, and no one else. That is monstrous.
My point about the Taliban analogy is simply that your definitions are so tight that you force the reader through a conceptual die. To try to avoid it is to be intellectually menaced. No doubt Islamists think they are being honest in some way or other too. Is it possible for us to know anything without intervening in the world in some way whether it is technological or by some other means, and whatever means it was, the same criticism would apply, that we are not actually discovering any objective facts but merely representing our interventions and interactions with it in that way? Your criticism might be valid, but it would always be so, because we have no way of getting objective knowledge without intervening in the world by some means. And until we have a genuine revelation from God we shall always be deferring our certainty about what we know until the future. Our knowledge is by nature cumulative, and cannot be finished until it is fully accumulated. That is true whether science is right or not. And you are making an important statement when you admit the empirical facts discovered through experimental physics is an abstraction of alethic knowledge about our productive possibilities are different from the empirical facts discovered about animals in the wild, because I can go at least part of the way with you on the experimental physics side, but cannot see that it transfers at all easily into the natural fields of observation.
“[Christians], you say, should attend to such things as I have compiled on my webpages even though it is no more than an opinion. That is the constant Christian refrain against their critics. Science is an opinion. Evolution is an opinion. History is an opinion. The Christian critic has an opinion, but it is no better than any other opinion, specifically the Christian one. It is precisely this sort of false equality that abandons all evidence and critical assessment that science and dear old Karl (Popper) were concerned about, and I thought most other philosophers too.”
As I said, historical analysis (as well as bringing interesting things to our attention) can show inconsistencies and falsehoods. That is why I considered your work to be troubling to a genuine Christian who wishes to understand their religion. The fact that you work is analysis and interpretation, all the way down, does not mean that we should abandon all evidence and critical assessment. You are being hysterical again. It means that you cannot rest content that you have grasped objective truth through historical analysis and interpretation. Your work is only a stepping-stone. It will be critiqued and interpreted by others in accordance with their perspective and purposes. The past is gone. We are left with only interpretation! Our standards for judging them (apart from whether it says what we want it to say) are based on aesthetic standards (of quality, subtlety, richness, coherence, texture, depth, etc.) and social conventions (about what is self-evident, acceptable, radical, controversial, or sheer lunacy).
I have several little essays on the pages about historical method, that say things like this for the benefit of believers who seem not to understand history at all.
As you say
“I am satisfied to accept that we are mere imperfect mortals not gods so that all the knowledge we have is imperfect, but not all the imperfect knowledge is equal, as the Christians want us to settle for, and we can demostrate it through reason and evidence.”
but an implication of this is that you also have to be satisfied that someone else, another imperfect mortal, may well come along with a less imperfect interpretation that yours, perhaps with better reason and evidence. Thus, bottom line, your conclusions are opinions.
It is a feature of the scientific method, that we have to revise our views when better evidence somes along or a better hypothesis. One of the troubles with the field of biblical history is that Christians just ignore what has been discovered. Spinoza’s ideas about the bible were ignored and still are even thpugh his contemporary put forward novel mathematical utilities at the same time that have been taught to schoolboys for decades. I refer to Newton and the calculus. This, in my view, is simply dishonesty. The trainee clergy are themselves taught these thing in their seminaries. They just will not educate their sheep. I suppose they judge sheep are undeducable.
“I do not remember claiming that I or science had achieved ‘objective’ knowledge, though you have implied it before.”
You have claimed that science achieves objective knowledge several times in the earlier emails, although, recently, you have waivered on this. But, more importantly, if science does not then this has enormous implications for the value of the scientific enterprise. Stating that science ‘approximates’ objective knowledge is ad hoc. If you do not know what objective knowledge is then you cannot know whether it is being approximated. Again, in the case of physics we have technological know-how and in the case of history we have interpretation. These are ongoing and tentative. They are not objectively true. No matter how much you would like them to be. When I said that you had good reasons for you beliefs, I meant that your reading of historical sources and comparing these to biblical interpretations have provided good reasons to be sceptical about Christian claims. When I said that your claim to possess knowledge ‘had philosophical and logical flaws that rendered it nothing more than assertion’ it was because I think that you move beyond good reasons for scepticism and start making truth claims on the basis that your interpretation of the evidence makes those claims to seem plausible to you. Thus your knowledge-claim is actually subjective and assertive; rhetorically leaping from good reasons to certainty on the back of your feeling of plausibility. There is something very wrong with asserting something if you are mistaken to do so. I’m not denying that you should not argue forcefully for your own conclusions. Go for it! But I am saying lay off the shoddy rhetoric and insults because they are not really very persuasive that you have a rational and reasoned case.
Well, I do not recall saying science had achieved objective knowledge but only that it aspired to it. Now, if it knew what it aspired to, then it would already have it. You are begging the question. The assumption is that the successive hypotheses converge on a truth about nature because they give us more precise predictions of what to expect. We seem to be converging towards a truth. The data support the idea. But you are right that we shall never know until the notional completion of all knowledge.
Here you again make a special statement—‘There is something very wrong with asserting something if you are mistaken to do so’. It is a precise expression of my objection to religion, yet you repeatedly tell me that I ought to allow people who make these very wrong statements to carry on doing it because it is their belief. I however am rebuked for doing it even though my reading of histotical sources is good. As for truth claims, whatever claims they are are presented as hypotheses, in the spirit of scientific enquiry and not as dogma. I have said it repeatedly. But since it is, in my opinion, the best we have at the moment, based on the evidence we currently have, I will present it as the truth as we know it. It is not arbitrary, but religious truth is, because it ignores all the evidence it does not like. No doubt it is true that others think some other view is better, in which case it is up to them to offer it. In the end the reader has to decide but I am trying to encourage readers of my pages to consider evidence as paramount and not just what they like, or would like, or what their pastor tells them they ought to like. In other words there is a critical purpose to it all.
“The only knowledge that can meet up to your superlative standard, so far as I can see, is know-how that you have obtained by direct experience. If that is so, and we are to be puritanical about it, we are cast back to our animal origins, because the thing that makes us human is that we have culture, a shorthand way of saying that we can learn from each other, and particularly from generation to generation. All of that, though, requires human intervention and interpretation. You yourself have chapters devoted to historical analysis and criticism of scientists from Leonardo to Morpurgo, and a good many philosophers too, all of which could be dismissed from your argument on your own grounds that your historical analysis and interpretation is not knowledge but your opinion. You cannot meet your own standards of proof.”
Firstly, I do not deny that my reading of my historical and philosophical sources is interpretation. I do not claim knowledge of the C16th and C17th. It is only my opinion about the opinions of others. Secondly, I have repeatedly said that there are many types of knowledge, one of which is alethic knowledge, and these can be passed from person to person and generation to generation. In my book (in chapter 4) I discuss at length how knowledge is learnt by students in a laboratory and how the apparatus is modelled in relation to culture. If you read this chapter of my book then you will see that I do not maintain some direct experience theory of scientific knowledge. In fact, from the onset, I deny it. But, I make no claim to proof.
“Finally, you speak of heartfelt beliefs. Well, many Americans have the heartfelt belief that the white race is superior to all others. The US Straussists have the heartfelt belief that the world should be ruled by ’philosophers’ and ’gentlemen’, namely themselves, and the rest should be slaves fed myths to keep them quiet. Many earnest Christians think the whole of humanity ought to be Christians and, if they choose otherwise, and object to the way US Christians, particularly, want to arrange the world, then they should be bombed en masse. Belief is to accept something as being true, the trouble being that no reason is needed for many people’s beliefs. In your purity of understanding knowledge, you are accepting either unfounded belief or well-founded belief as being equal because both do not meet your celestial standard, and so are not knowledge. It might feel superior up there, but most of us live here on earth where we have to live practical lives with practical standards.”
And, evidently you hold that rhetoric is a substitute for honesty. I repeatly have made it clear that I value reasoned over unreasoned belief. I have simply stated that neither are knowledge. It is you that becomes hysterical about this and throws out everything unless your beliefs are considered to be knowledge. I also live on Earth, needing practical standards to live my life practically, but, thankfully, my celestial standard helps me smell bullshit and spot shoddy rhetoric. It is clearly that case that you can have good reasons for believing something is true without knowing that it is. In most part we judge things on whether they are consistent and coherent, as well as the trustworthiness or credibility of the source, and these are all interpretations and evaluations. This is a crucial stage for the possibility of knowledge and hence has to be prior to the acquisition of knowledge (if it is ever achieved). An example would be when the space shuttle engineers give the green light to the launch. After their checks and cross checks they will only give the green light to the launch if they have good reason to believe that it is ready for launch (or, at least one would hope so). However, they cannot know whether it was in fact ready until it is successfully launched. Only then will their belief be tested and justified. On your account, especially given that you do not accept that objective knowledge is possible, it is hard to see how anyone could ever have good reasons for the beliefs and be wrong. On my view, it is always possible that someone could be wrong despite all their good reasons for the beliefs. People are fallible; they miss things and they make mistakes. And as any student of rhetoric will tell you, persuasion is only necessary in the absence of knowledge, otherwise what would be the point in trying to persuade anyone of anything if they would have to know something in order to be persuaded? I simply cannot believe that you could even ask “How can something categorized as untrue be persuasive?” It seems that you have lived a charmed life. It seems that no-one has ever lied to you and persuaded you that something was true when in fact it was not. But then I thought that Christians were supposedly persuading innocent people to believe lies. So it does seem that you can catergorise something as untrue and it was persuasive, providing, of course, the persuaded person doesn’t know that it is untrue.
I cannot see why I should be accused of dishonesty. So far as I am concerned obfuscation is dishonesty, and has been used from ancient times to confuse people. Far from any dislike of religion motivating me to all sorts of dastardly behaviours that you accuse me of, your own hatred of physics, presumably really a hatred of physicists, has utterly distorted your own judgement. You are irrationally determined to find obscure reasons to make physics the cause of the world’s ills. You might as well blame it on the wheel, or the discovery of fire. The ills of the world are caused by people not processes or methods whether they are physics or making pottery out of clay or machines. That is what you cannot seem to get into your celestial skull. And you continue to project your own failings on to me in justification. When did I claim my beliefs are knowledge? I claim no more than what you say yourself, I value reasoned belief but do not value belief without any reason. You get hysterical because I say that reasoned belief is knowledge, albeit qualified knowledge, but in your puritanism knowledge must be certainly known, so there is no such thing, as knowledge at all. Only God certainly knows anything, and God is imaginary or wants to be seen that way.
Bullshit is confusion and shoddy rhetoric depends upon it. For all I know, since you are the self proclaimed rhetor, your rhetoric might be perfect, but your explanations are utter confusion because they are so hidebound by qualifications that the words no longer mean anything that ordinary people can understand. That might be a problems for philosophers, but it is one that makes you hysterical, not me. If trying to make what I say comprehensible is shoddy rhetoric, then too bad. Maybe God is such a bad communicator because his rhetoric is perfect. You accuse me of being influenced by the Christian right like Bush and Blair, when it is part of my objective to warn people against it. You, on the other hand, defend these lunatics at their own grass roots level of belief while contradicting yourself almost in the same breath, muddying the waters about what is safe to believe and what is not, and ultimately defining knowledge as something only philosophers have. You actually sound like a Straussist.
I have said to you several times that knowledge is a spectrum, and that I do not myself claim to have any certain knowledge, something which is an ideal— a form of God— because all knowledge is derived, and I thought at first that your metaphysics was saying something on those lines, something that does not seem unreasonable, but essentially you abandon all knowledge for the masses, because it is too difficult for them, so is only in the grasp of the philosophers. That is Straussism. Practical knowledge is a balance of probabilities, whether the probabilitilies can be quantified or not. People are more or less sure of something based on the evidence they have. No evidence means no knowledge. Certainty is impossible, or tantamount to it. When the Brazilian electrician was shot a few weeks ago, astonishing witnesses came forward telling stories that proved to be manifestly false, yet they were eye-witnesses (something Christians claiming eye-witness evidence of the Resurrection should mull over). Even personal experience is fallible, and that is why science demands that work should be repeatable to be scientific. I accept that all of this is subject to evaluation and interpretation and say so clearly. You do not. You talk about valuing reasoned over unreasoned belief, but both can be excluded from the category of knowledge, and shoved in the dustbin of opinion. That seems to me to be dishonesty, paying lip service to the common understanding of knowledge while binning it in praxis.
Your space shuttle example shows what I mean. NASA officials can justly say that to the best of their knowledge the shuttle is ready to go. They are expressing the simple truth that they cannot be certain. They cannot have knowledge, in your view. The ship would never take off. You write, “given that you do not accept that objective knowledge is possible, it is hard to see how anyone could ever have good reasons for the beliefs and be wrong”. I frankly do not understand what you are saying. First, I repeat for the umpteenth time that science aspires to objective knowledge. It might be possible only in the sense that we approach it asymptotically, so never quite get there, but it remains the proper aim of science. Second, my view again repeatedly said, and part of the point of my diatribes against religion, is that the certainty that religious people think they have is false, because all knowledge is qualified, but some is better than other, depending on the evidence in support of it. The worst is that with no evidence at all, because it then is simply believing what someone told you, with all critical faculties numbed. You then say, “it is always possible that someone could be wrong despite all their good reasons for the beliefs”, as if it differed from my own view, when it actually expresses it. Our difference must then be that, for me, we have to act on the knowledge we have, and not on some hypothetical knowledge, but it seem that you would do nothing because we are not sure. That might be a proper response. We spoke earlier about human unassisted flight, and that no one would ignore the absence of evidence of it and jump of a high building. The risk is too great, and it is a factor that sensible people will consider in their decisions, but the risk is weighed against possible benefits. Knowledge of these outcomes is impossible, in your sense. We have to do the interpreting and evaluating, and decide on imperfect knowledge. It helps to make life interesting.
My question in response to your exclusive definitions of knowledge was, “how can something categorized as untrue be persuasive?” I cannot be persuaded by something I know to be a lie, but I can if I do not know it. You had said that my pages, for example, could be good and persuasive yet not be knowledge because they are not certainly true. But what is categorized as not knowledge is false and can be ignored, and cannot be persuasive. What you are doing in practice is the same as me. You are accepting for practical purposes that this non-knowledge can be treated as a degree of knowledge, indeed has to be if the world is to continue to function. You split knowledge up into categories but I keep it as a spectrum. For me, lies are things presented as if they were true without any evidence of it. It does not matter that something might be true without evidence. Unassisted human flight might be possible, but I have no reason to believe it is, and so will continue to think it impossible, until evidence for it is presented. That seems sensible to me. But then it is probably a symptom of hysteria.
“Proof provides us with certainty, and when we are certain of the truth of something, we have knowledge of it, but generally we do not have proof and therefore do not have certainty but only some likelihood of it. I am living in, and addressing people in the real world, not people in the stratosphere as you are, so perhaps my standards have to be different. More realistic, I would say, but maybe you are right, not so rigorous because such an over zealous definition makes us all into ignoramuses by ignoring the art of the possible. Opinion is belief, and belief can be well founded or not well founded, and this is what is possible in reality. Absolute knowledge is God, so to ignore knowledge unless it is absolute, or ideal, or however it is removed from human cognition, is to admit God in another form, and that is dishonest. It is begging the question.”
Again, more shoddy rhetoric. You standards are different because you cannot face the possibility that you might be wrong and so you will squirm about, misrepresenting the issues and hurling insults, just to detract from the arguments that problematise your own certainty. It has nothing to do with being realistic or idealist. You simply have a vested interest in being right. This makes you no different to anyone else, in the real world. But, from up here in the philosophical stratosphere, what makes you an ignoramus is not knowing your own limitations and reflecting upon them honestly.
More projection. All of this slander is calculated to detract from your own weaknesses, for I can see no other purpose in it. You persist, like a Christian, in attributing to me attitudes that I do not hold, setting up straw dolls to knock over, always a sign of desperation. Now I am squirming because I fear I might be wrong. Perhaps you would be good enough to explain why I have this irrational fear, and why, in fact, it is not you who have it. What is the vested interest you have noticed I have in being right? You hurl insults at me then say I have done it to you. You accuse me of misrepresenting issues when you have commonplace words for things so carefully categorized into your own shoeboxes that it is difficult to talk to you without any such accusation. It is news to me that I am supposed to be reflecting upon my own limitations in this discussion, although I have admitted to limitations on several occasions, something I do not recall that you have done at all, presumably because you have none. I fully understand that it is easier to denigrate a critic than it is to respond to criticism. But the unnecessary virulence of your latest reply suggests a deep scar somewhere on your psyche. Your limitations are obviously not the same as mine, but you should nevertheless take your own advice.
Rest assured, your remarks have not opened “any deep scar in my psyche”, but I do admit with becoming a little bored with your ad hominem arguments and misrepresentations of my position. I was kind of hoping that to receive a more considered response, given the delay, as well as, finally, some questions or detailed discussion about my book, that at least did me the courtesy of showing something more than the most superficial reading. I did have lots of comments to make about a whole host of issues raised in the previous emails and on the basis of my reading of your notes on Zoroastrianism, but for now at least, I shall make some effort to clear up some issues of manners. Throughout our exchange, I have been respectful, patient, and courteous with you (having taken the trouble to carefully read your books before passing judgement) and I expect to be treated likewise.
I consider I too have been respectful to you personally and have said so more than once, but respect for you does not mean I have to agree with everything you say. You say I have used ad hominem arguments against you when I have not, and you do not volunteer an example. I cannot, in any case see what use an ad hominem argument would be in a private discussion as opposed to the hustings since its only value would be in influencing a third party. Indeed accusing someone falsely of an ad hominem approach to debate is itself an ad hominem argument. I commented that the virulence of your last response “suggested” a scar on your psyche. Such virulence has a cause, and boredom does not seem adequate for it. I too am more interested in talking about the subjects we began with rather than this. If you have a lot to say about the subjects of our discussion, I would prefer to hear them. If you have a raw nerve or scar or whatever, I have no wish to keep prodding it, so let us do as you say and stick to the knitting. That is why I took time out from our exchange for a couple of weeks—to read a couple of books—so I was not compiling my thoughts on the previous discussion or on your book, but pursuing my regular hobby of collecting information to counter Christian beliefs. I told you that so do not know why you thought otherwise.
You accused me of “defending monstrous opinions in the name of liberty” when I simply stated that my liberalism defends people´s right to express their opinion, regardless of whether I agree with that opinion or not. As you well appreciate, there is an obvious distinction between defending someone´s right to have an opinion and agreeing with it, but, if you go over the emails, you will see that, on several occasions, you claimed that I am a defender of fascism and religious fundamentalism simply because I state that I am an agnostic and I respect other people´s religious beliefs, even though I do not share them. I thought that it is pretty obvious to anyone that it does not follow from the fact that one defends another´s right to have religious beliefs that one shares those beliefs.
I used it in a conditional clause, so I was not accusing you of it. My argument is not at all personal unless you want it to be. A liberal ideal is that all opinions should be freely expressed, but it is an ideal because some of those opinions do not share the liberal ideal. In practice, therefore, there is a totalitarian lobster pot waiting to trap you when you try to practise it. It is a danger that ought not to be ignored. As you point out, illiberal people find excuses, when it is not properly discussed and regarded by the demos, to curtail free speech. It is obvious that the ideal can be practised when those who would curtail it are unimportant. Now they are not, and it would be folly to pretend otherwise.
You repeatedly stated that I must hold that all beliefs are equally true because I respect people´s right to believe whatever they like. This is ridiculous and I´m pretty convinced that you are deliberately misrepresenting my position because you simply do not like the way that your own position stands on human rights, which despite your claim to respect people´s right to religious expression, does not in fact respect their right when you describe them as stupid, naïve sheep, liars, and ignorant. It seems a strange sort of respect when you refuse to accept the possibility that someone else might know something that you do not when he or she holds a view that you do not share.
You again accuse me of misrepresentation, something that you are not guilty of. Where then are the repeated places I have said this? I have not said it. What I have said is that your restriction of knowledge to that which is true means that all peoples’ beliefs are equal. Unless they are knowledge, they are all untrue! What I have said is that there are different degrees of knowledge depending on the evidence for it being true. As for human rights, you seem to be getting utterly mixed up in your determination to denigrate me. What motive have you found for my wanting to refuse people a right to hold silly beliefs, if that is what they want to do? I should add also, as long as they are harmless. When people insist on holding and moreover propagating beliefs that are not harmless, then I would exercise my own right to disagree with them. That is what I do. If people want to imagine they are eating the body of a god in a wafer biscuit, actually or symbolically, it is entirely up to them. They can do it—I respect that right—but I cannot respect the belief, and those who believe it seem to me to be stupid or ignorant, while those who persuade them to believe it while inviting donations for their wisdom are liars and confidence tricksters. And when these putatively innocent believers in primitive rituals then turn round and say such-and-such should be killed because he or they threaten our way of life, then I cannot respect their right to spread such an idea. At the ever-present risk of misrepresenting you because I base it on what you have said, you will continue to respect them until such-and-such is actually killed.
As I repeatedly stated, I am not religious, but I accept the possibility that I might be wrong and, hence, it is possible that religiously persuaded people might know something that I do not. They are welcome to try to explain it to me and even though I will be sceptical, I will also be open to the possibility of being enlightened. That is genuine respect of people´s religious expression.
If those are the characteristics of genuine respect of religious expression then my pages show that I am displaying it. I have engaged with Christians about their particular expression of religion. Nothing they have said has so far moved me to believe them or even shown me they have any sound reasons for believing. Indeed their constant boast is that they just believe, and that is it. I extend my liberality to you too. You are welcome to respect them for this, but I do not.
My stance was that I simply do not know whether God exists or not. Hence I am an agnostic. To which, you response was to call me a liar, a coward, and a purveyor of “a false liberality that belies your pure attitude on what knowledge is”, a cop-out and a pretence of a position. Not wanting to define words to suit my purposes, but would you not consider that response to be an insult?
If I had accused you of being a liar on the grounds you describe, then it would have been, but I did not. What I gave was a description of the agnostic position as being incompatible with the claim of being skeptical, the skeptic refusing to believe unless there is some reason to do so. I describe the agnostic position as being that of an atheist without the courage to say so, and so you say I am calling you a coward, as if it were a personal insult. The old response to such delicacy was, “if the cap fits then wear it”. You have made many more such pointed allusions to me that I have ignored, and I would prefer it if you resisted the temptation to be a primadonna and got on with the discussion.
