9 ms·

The most "solid" theology is just shaky philosophy, though.

sarabad2021 6y ago
I see no issues with Christianity from a philosophical standpoint. It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. I'm curious what you mean in your statement, please unpack your claim.
- postingawayonhn 6y ago
  For me it raises more questions than it answers.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  The parent is referring to the (actually, legitimately, really bad) philosophy that you can find in the most puffed-up theology books. It comes from the same process of domain envy that makes some philosophers put the worst math ever in their papers, except it started several hundred years earlier. To cut one slice through it, I can point you to a page of 100% fallacious arguments[0] that only survived as long as they did because they had a popular conclusion. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/
  - User23 6y ago
    The very page you link lists a logically sound ontological argument[1]. It appears to me that you're judging the argument fallacious because you don't like the conclusion. [1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#GodOntArg https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#Go...
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      The fallacy in that one is thinking that accepting those axioms is any different than directly accepting the conclusion. :) Stating a bunch of axioms and deriving something doesn't prove what you derived, except in a technical sense of the word "prove," not in a useful sense related to determining the truth. Even if we accept that Godel's logic was sound, there is plainly no more reason to believe in his starting point than there is to directly believe in the end.
      - CRConrad 6y ago
        This -- your reasoning -- seems so obviously true that I can only wonder if Gödel was joking, and anyone who takes this argument seriously is just plainly missing his little joke. I mean, heck, this seems to be just a re-formulation in proper high-falutin' philomasophical terms ("For any x, there is a B such that B[x] = A", yadda yadda) of the old kindergarten argument: 1) God is the ultimate good; he embodies and incorporates all that is good. 2) Existing is good, certainly better than not existing. 3) Therefore, God exists; he obviously must exist, because otherwise he wouldn't incorporate all that is good (in this case, specifically, existence). That's so laughably childish that these notes found after his death can't be anything but Gödel amusing himself, predating Sokal by decades.
      - medstrom 6y ago
        What? You contradict yourself several times. Does accepting the axioms obligate you to accept the conclusion or not? First you say it does, then you say it doesn't. And proving something is of course quite literally "determining the truth", you can't just dribble it away like that. This comment looks like word salad intended to let the reader believe whatever they want.
        whatshisface 6y ago
        Proving that some axioms imply a conclusion does not prove the truth of the conclusion, when the axioms themselves remain unproven. For example: Axiom 1) All comments by whatshisface are right. Theorem 1) This comment is right. Proof: Whatshisface wrote this comment. That's a proof in the mathematical sense and there's nothing wrong with it in that way, but that it has nothing to do with the truth of the theorem.
        medstrom 6y ago
        Axioms are not something you ever prove, as in, they're not provable even in principle. I would not call this an axiom, this is simply a premise. It can be determined. You'd trace this premise back up a chain of premise-based arguments, and if all are valid, you eventually reach some of the 5-10 (I forgot) core axioms that underlie all of logic. And those are not provable, but you'd generally be considered mad not to accept them. I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Claiming that Anselm's ontological argument "survived" for centuries is rather misleading. Being known as a thing did not mean it was viewed as a viable argument. It was subjected to some harsh criticism literally as soon as it appeared, and whenever it was brought up in later centuries (and not very often, because it was something of a curiosity) it was treated more critically than reverently.
- michaelt 6y ago
  It depends what philosophical questions you want an answer to. If you're asking "What happens to us after we die?" then the church has as good an answer as anyone, because nobody's bringing any hard evidence to the table. If you're asking "How should I act and think to be a good person?" then religion has some ideas - some of them really good ideas, like the golden rule - but it's a huge question touching on almost everything. And some of today's questions require a lot of extrapolation over and above the words of the bible. If you're asking natural philosophy questions, like "what is lightning" or "what do we need to do to prevent future flooding" then you probably won't reference religion at all (except perhaps when you get back to moral questions, like if your flood defence displaces people)
- psychometry 6y ago
  What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).
  - memling 6y ago
    > What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion). If we're in the business of bad-faith expositions of positions we disagree with, what's so attractive about the alternative that unfathomable aeons ago nothing exploded into something that coalesced in such an improbable way that a bunch of incredibly complicated chemical reactions happened (with no known mechanism for selection, mind you) to produce a biological organism capable of assembling electrons transmitted through the aether to another organism that could make snarky replies? I'm sure you can reduce nearly any argument into silly-sounding caricatures of itself, but it's not a useful method for actually understanding what's true (or if truth even exists).
- engineeringwoke 6y ago
  I would advise you to head down to your local university and take a religious studies course covering a bit of the Bible. It's usually split into OT/NT. What you will find there is that we know that the Bible is an amalgam of a script that was pieced together by many, many human authors. It is trivial today to tell because we can cross-reference Koine Greek versus translations and authors chose different words consistently for the same concepts. So, no. Not really beyond the natural/physical world at all. Just one lie of many competing lies.
  - objectivetruth 6y ago
    I would advise you to head down to your local church and meet some more Christians so you don't keep presuming we're all ignorant of Biblical studies, analysis, exegesis, and historical interpretation. What you may also find there is that telling a person that the amalgams of history, philosophy, and spirituality that make up that person's religion "one lie of many competing lies" is an incredibly disrespectful and ineffective way to discuss religion with that person.
- gspr 6y ago
  > It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. (1) These two statements seem to me to be incompatible. We live in the natural world. If something "outside the natural world" (whatever that nonsensical statement means) affects the natural world, then surely it's partly part of the natural world? (2) It is not my business to define what e.g. christians believe, but if I am not mistaken the actual resurrection of an actual man is quite central. How is this not a (bold!) claim about the natural world?
  - Digory 6y ago
    "Naturalism" posits that natural laws are the only rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural world. So "beyond the natural world" would be shorthand for alternatives to naturalism; the idea there are rules that govern the 'natural world' beyond natural laws or things that can be measured or observed scientifically. The resurrection is a prime example of rules "beyond the natural" impacting our natural world.
    - medstrom 6y ago
      Well, if the resurrection happened I'd actually class it, and its instigator, as part of the natural world.
    - gspr 6y ago
      So far we have not yet seen a single phenomenon that cannot be explained in the natural system, but can be explained in an alternative system. (No, "god did it" isn't an explanation.) If this is all that 1000++ y.o. religions can muster, I say good riddance, laughable attempts at explaining the world.
whatshisface 6y ago
That's like saying "the most solid philosophy is shaky math." Yes, while plenty of philosophers have physics envy and wish that they were mathematicians, it's not necessarily the best philosophy that is written from that perspective.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff. It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  Appealing to history's greatest minds is a weak appeal to authority. Several of history's greatest minds also spent significant time on pursuits such as alchemy. It does them no disservice to suppose that given modern tools and knowledge they would have formed different opinions. But now we have the ability to explain evolution, brains, astronomy, energy, weather, etc. Whatever your take on religion is, pointing to the opinions of people living in a much more inscrutable world is not good evidence. Personally I fall into the camp that omniscience omnipresence and omnibenevolence are just logically incompatible with the christian belief of a good god.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Excuse me. You will notice that I am not talking about authority. I'm talking about self-consistency in the theology of major world religious.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - yxwvut 6y ago
      This is the fundamental problem, though. There's an internal consistency so long as all evidentiary evaluation is predicated on the underlying assumption that the attestations are true. Confirmation bias does not make a firm foundation for truth-seeking. Once you realize that your standard of evidence could just as easily support any number of (contradictory) belief systems (were you to start from the premise that that particular religion, not yours, was true) the whole thing begins to crumble.
shadowgovt 6y ago
It's always fascinating to me to observe the small distance between the two in some philosophies. The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality. Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.

sarabad2021 6y ago

I see no issues with Christianity from a philosophical standpoint. It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. I'm curious what you mean in your statement, please unpack your claim.

postingawayonhn 6y ago
For me it raises more questions than it answers.
whatshisface 6y ago
The parent is referring to the (actually, legitimately, really bad) philosophy that you can find in the most puffed-up theology books. It comes from the same process of domain envy that makes some philosophers put the worst math ever in their papers, except it started several hundred years earlier. To cut one slice through it, I can point you to a page of 100% fallacious arguments[0] that only survived as long as they did because they had a popular conclusion. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/
- User23 6y ago
  The very page you link lists a logically sound ontological argument[1]. It appears to me that you're judging the argument fallacious because you don't like the conclusion. [1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#GodOntArg https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#Go...
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    The fallacy in that one is thinking that accepting those axioms is any different than directly accepting the conclusion. :) Stating a bunch of axioms and deriving something doesn't prove what you derived, except in a technical sense of the word "prove," not in a useful sense related to determining the truth. Even if we accept that Godel's logic was sound, there is plainly no more reason to believe in his starting point than there is to directly believe in the end.
    - CRConrad 6y ago
      This -- your reasoning -- seems so obviously true that I can only wonder if Gödel was joking, and anyone who takes this argument seriously is just plainly missing his little joke. I mean, heck, this seems to be just a re-formulation in proper high-falutin' philomasophical terms ("For any x, there is a B such that B[x] = A", yadda yadda) of the old kindergarten argument: 1) God is the ultimate good; he embodies and incorporates all that is good. 2) Existing is good, certainly better than not existing. 3) Therefore, God exists; he obviously must exist, because otherwise he wouldn't incorporate all that is good (in this case, specifically, existence). That's so laughably childish that these notes found after his death can't be anything but Gödel amusing himself, predating Sokal by decades.
    - medstrom 6y ago
      What? You contradict yourself several times. Does accepting the axioms obligate you to accept the conclusion or not? First you say it does, then you say it doesn't. And proving something is of course quite literally "determining the truth", you can't just dribble it away like that. This comment looks like word salad intended to let the reader believe whatever they want.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        Proving that some axioms imply a conclusion does not prove the truth of the conclusion, when the axioms themselves remain unproven. For example: Axiom 1) All comments by whatshisface are right. Theorem 1) This comment is right. Proof: Whatshisface wrote this comment. That's a proof in the mathematical sense and there's nothing wrong with it in that way, but that it has nothing to do with the truth of the theorem.
        medstrom 6y ago
        Axioms are not something you ever prove, as in, they're not provable even in principle. I would not call this an axiom, this is simply a premise. It can be determined. You'd trace this premise back up a chain of premise-based arguments, and if all are valid, you eventually reach some of the 5-10 (I forgot) core axioms that underlie all of logic. And those are not provable, but you'd generally be considered mad not to accept them. I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Claiming that Anselm's ontological argument "survived" for centuries is rather misleading. Being known as a thing did not mean it was viewed as a viable argument. It was subjected to some harsh criticism literally as soon as it appeared, and whenever it was brought up in later centuries (and not very often, because it was something of a curiosity) it was treated more critically than reverently.
michaelt 6y ago
It depends what philosophical questions you want an answer to. If you're asking "What happens to us after we die?" then the church has as good an answer as anyone, because nobody's bringing any hard evidence to the table. If you're asking "How should I act and think to be a good person?" then religion has some ideas - some of them really good ideas, like the golden rule - but it's a huge question touching on almost everything. And some of today's questions require a lot of extrapolation over and above the words of the bible. If you're asking natural philosophy questions, like "what is lightning" or "what do we need to do to prevent future flooding" then you probably won't reference religion at all (except perhaps when you get back to moral questions, like if your flood defence displaces people)
psychometry 6y ago
What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).
- memling 6y ago
  > What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion). If we're in the business of bad-faith expositions of positions we disagree with, what's so attractive about the alternative that unfathomable aeons ago nothing exploded into something that coalesced in such an improbable way that a bunch of incredibly complicated chemical reactions happened (with no known mechanism for selection, mind you) to produce a biological organism capable of assembling electrons transmitted through the aether to another organism that could make snarky replies? I'm sure you can reduce nearly any argument into silly-sounding caricatures of itself, but it's not a useful method for actually understanding what's true (or if truth even exists).
engineeringwoke 6y ago
I would advise you to head down to your local university and take a religious studies course covering a bit of the Bible. It's usually split into OT/NT. What you will find there is that we know that the Bible is an amalgam of a script that was pieced together by many, many human authors. It is trivial today to tell because we can cross-reference Koine Greek versus translations and authors chose different words consistently for the same concepts. So, no. Not really beyond the natural/physical world at all. Just one lie of many competing lies.
- objectivetruth 6y ago
  I would advise you to head down to your local church and meet some more Christians so you don't keep presuming we're all ignorant of Biblical studies, analysis, exegesis, and historical interpretation. What you may also find there is that telling a person that the amalgams of history, philosophy, and spirituality that make up that person's religion "one lie of many competing lies" is an incredibly disrespectful and ineffective way to discuss religion with that person.
gspr 6y ago
> It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. (1) These two statements seem to me to be incompatible. We live in the natural world. If something "outside the natural world" (whatever that nonsensical statement means) affects the natural world, then surely it's partly part of the natural world? (2) It is not my business to define what e.g. christians believe, but if I am not mistaken the actual resurrection of an actual man is quite central. How is this not a (bold!) claim about the natural world?
- Digory 6y ago
  "Naturalism" posits that natural laws are the only rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural world. So "beyond the natural world" would be shorthand for alternatives to naturalism; the idea there are rules that govern the 'natural world' beyond natural laws or things that can be measured or observed scientifically. The resurrection is a prime example of rules "beyond the natural" impacting our natural world.
  - medstrom 6y ago
    Well, if the resurrection happened I'd actually class it, and its instigator, as part of the natural world.
  - gspr 6y ago
    So far we have not yet seen a single phenomenon that cannot be explained in the natural system, but can be explained in an alternative system. (No, "god did it" isn't an explanation.) If this is all that 1000++ y.o. religions can muster, I say good riddance, laughable attempts at explaining the world.

whatshisface 6y ago

That's like saying "the most solid philosophy is shaky math." Yes, while plenty of philosophers have physics envy and wish that they were mathematicians, it's not necessarily the best philosophy that is written from that perspective.

fennecfoxen 6y ago

It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff. It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.

klmadfejno 6y ago
Appealing to history's greatest minds is a weak appeal to authority. Several of history's greatest minds also spent significant time on pursuits such as alchemy. It does them no disservice to suppose that given modern tools and knowledge they would have formed different opinions. But now we have the ability to explain evolution, brains, astronomy, energy, weather, etc. Whatever your take on religion is, pointing to the opinions of people living in a much more inscrutable world is not good evidence. Personally I fall into the camp that omniscience omnipresence and omnibenevolence are just logically incompatible with the christian belief of a good god.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Excuse me. You will notice that I am not talking about authority. I'm talking about self-consistency in the theology of major world religious.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - yxwvut 6y ago
    This is the fundamental problem, though. There's an internal consistency so long as all evidentiary evaluation is predicated on the underlying assumption that the attestations are true. Confirmation bias does not make a firm foundation for truth-seeking. Once you realize that your standard of evidence could just as easily support any number of (contradictory) belief systems (were you to start from the premise that that particular religion, not yours, was true) the whole thing begins to crumble.

shadowgovt 6y ago

It's always fascinating to me to observe the small distance between the two in some philosophies. The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality. Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.