Faith & Revelation (How do you know? -- Part 2)

This post is a continuation of How do you know? (Part 1). In Part 1, I discussed the methods by which we collect information and how we process that information. We know through our senses and reasoning is the means by which we process this information.
Part II considers considers Revelation as a means to information and  faith as a means of processing information.

There are two aspects about knowing that the western theists believe about how we can beyond the ways of knowing I discussed in the previous essay: How do you know? Part 1.

The first way is that of revelation. Purportedly, God or gods or angels or djinns or what have you reveal knowledge directly to our brains. I say directly to the brain because most will admit that they do not hear God with their ears nor see him with their eyes nor smell, taste, or touch him. So God's communication comes directly to the brain, bypassing all sensory perception.

What should we make of this? How do we determine that any thing like this is actually occurring or has occurred? If something cannot be measured either directly by our senses nor by an extension of our senses such as a microphone or microscope, does it exist? Well, certainly there could be aliens out there in the universe and the fact that we don't know of them doesn't mean that they don't exist. However, in principle we could measure them. The problem with supernatural revelation is that we are to imagine there is an effect that we cannot detect due to a cause we cannot detect.

We know that physical effects are due to physical causes. If something acts as a cause, we can detect it. This awkward idea makes a supernatural being essentially physical if we imagine that it can change things in the physical world.

Do people have experiences that can be interpreted as spiritual? Certainly they do interpret them that way. But really I don't deny that they have experiences. What those experiences really are, however, is another question.

The first principle in interpreting data is Occam's razor. This principle is that give two equally plausible explanations, the simpler one is preferred. I'm not exactly sure what Douglas Adams meant, but I think this quote applies: Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? If evolution, for example, is sufficient to explain the diversity of life, then God in the God+Evolution equation is unnecessary.

To use our induction, anything we have ever seen happen has happened due to physical causes. Every physical event has been preceded by another physical event all the way back to the beginning of the universe. If we don't know the cause of the universe, a physical state of affairs seems infinitely more probable than a metaphysical one.

So if we have an explanation that stems from what we observe, then one that stems from that which we cannot observe even in principle can be dispensed with.

The relates to the question of revelation because we have an idea about these experiences that is observable. Actually there are two separate things that we know. If you, like me, sometimes deal with emotionally troubled people, you know that people are very capable of working themselves into an emotional state. If you've visited churches that emphasize the emotional, you've watched people work themselves into a euphoria. If you've visited the same type of church for longer than one Sunday, it is likely you've seen the same people do the same things week after week.

We also know very well that drugs can induce these feelings. And, too, we know that scientists have induced these feelings by applying focused magnetic fields around the brain. If there were a supernatural being communicating with a person, not only should we see areas of the brain stimulated but we ought to be able to detect what it is that is stimulating it.

So we know some of the causes, though perhaps not all, of such experiences. What we do not know is that there is any “spiritual” cause at all. (Indeed, we do not know that there is something called a spirit!) So why imagine something other than a physical cause? I can't think of any other reason beside wishful thinking. Again, there could be something spiritual, but why believe it without evidence? Or why believe something in addition to the physical if the physical is sufficient? I'm sure it would be argued that for some of these questions, the physical isn't sufficient. Nevertheless, without evidence of something else holding to it as dogma seems worse than the uncertainty of not knowing.

The discussion of revelation corresponds to the discussion of the senses in Part 1 of this essay. Reasoning's counterpoint for this essay is faith. Some would assert faith is a way of analyzing the world around us.

Let's suppose that some piece of information is directly communicated to your brain. Now you wish to articulate this to a friend. The very act of articulating the information, saying what it is, involves reasoning. Where is faith in this? Anywhere where faith is used to consider and evaluate data, it is indistinguishable from reason. Under those conditions, it is reason. Having another name for it is redundant. So what can faith be if it is distinct from reason? I can think of no other definition for it than wishful thinking.

This essay has been difficult to write. It is hard to say anything other than “if there is nothing there, why do you believe in it.” Or, “You can't measure it, so it isn't there.” (I should note that in philosophical discussions, it is generally agreed that it isn't just that we can't measure it now, but that we cannot measure the metaphysical even in principle.)

In short, there seems no reason to believe in the supernatural other than wanting to. I don't know that this a problem as long as one admits that that is the case.

How do you know? (Part 1)

The subject is epistemology. It is a question of knowing and how we do it. The longest portion of this essay will be about that. The shorter part is about how this relates to faith. In my last essay, I wrote that I was an atheist. The reason I bring up faith here is that there are those that claim to know by faith. I hope to be able to demonstrate that this doesn't make sense. I will do this in Part 2 as this essay is quite long enough.

The above paragraph may seem to imply that all atheists are rational. This is not necessarily the case. You may recall that all that is required to be an atheist is a lack of belief in gods. Being an atheist is a non-position. Though I wear the label proudly (mostly because it provokes) I aspire to be acknowledged as a skeptic and an intellectual. The terms imply that I give careful consideration to positions before accepting them. Atheism is the lack of acceptance of gods. It is a negative stance. That doesn't mean a bad stance. It just means that to define yourself solely as an atheist is to define yourself solely by what you are not. Skepticism and intellectualism implies something positive (not necessarily good): that I posses certain attributes.

So, how do we know? This question has been the subject of much debate for several thousand years. So it seems improbable that I'll answer that question definitively. Indeed, how the brain works is a subject as yet unmastered. I can't answer the question of how the brain stores and retrieves information. But perhaps we can address how we acquire knowledge and how we know that we really really know it.

The way we acquire information is through our senses. As far as I know, there is no other way. If we learn something by reading, we use our eyes (or fingers, if one is blind). If we learn something in school, we add to our use of eyes our use of ears. We learn that fire is hot through touch. We learn that skunks can smell bad through our noses and that chocolate is wonderful through taste. There is no information that we acquire that comes to our brains any other way. There are those that dispute this, but I'll deal with that in Part 2.

So information comes to the brain. What do we do with it? This is where reasoning comes in. Broadly speaking we may say that reasoning is the name that we give the process of analyzing the input. Some of us may have bad reasoning and some of us may have good reasoning. What distinguishes good and bad reasoning? Good reasoning is simply that reasoning which when we apply it to the world around us we see what we were expecting. That is, good reasoning is that which tells the truth about the world.

The pinnacle of reasoning is usually considered to be deductive reasoning. Two examples of this are seen in my last essay: modus ponens and modus tollens. In general, deductive reasoning is where we infer a conclusion from a set of premises. A sound syllogism (a group of premises with a conclusion) is one where the conclusion is correctly derived via the rules of logic. A conclusion may be false even if the syllogism is sound. Soundness is determined by whether the rules are followed. This can happen when the premises are false. The rules of deductive logic don't saying anything about where the premises come from. The rules are about getting to a conclusion from those premises, whatever they may be. So when you are engaged in a logical argument, if your opponent's conclusion is sound you can still win by attacking the premises.

The reason, I think, that deductive reasoning is considered primary is that it gives a certain amount of certainty. If the rules are followed, we know with certainty that the conclusion is true. Well, provided that the premises are true. That's the catch. How does one know that the premises are true?

There two ways that a premise can be established as true. The first is inductive logic (I'll deal with this a little later); the second is more deductive logic. A premise may be the conclusion of some other syllogism. This is very seductive. Perhaps we can demonstrate that everything derives from somewhere and everything that is true is also provable and absolutely certain. Wouldn't it be lovely.

As it turns out, this cannot be done. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published a book titled Principia Mathematica. The goal of this book was to ground mathematics in logic and to show that the logic was both consistent and complete. Unfortunately, after it was published, Kurt Gödel proved that it was impossible to be both consistent and complete. As far as I know, this conclusion is not in dispute. A short discussion can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica#G.C3.B6del_1930.2C_1931

This means that any consistent logical system of thought must rest on unprovable axioms—at least unprovable deductively. Some get around this by certain things are properly basic. By this, as best I can tell, they mean that certain things are self-evident and require neither evidence nor deduction. Something is true because it is true and everyone knows it. In the cases, I've seen this it seems obvious that this is an excuse to not deal with lack of evidence for propositions that the arguer wants to be taken as a given. For example, William Lane Craig wants the proposition that God exists to be considered properly basic. (A discussion of “Basic belief” can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_belief. You can find a 4-part lecture by Craig on Youtube.) I have my doubts that anything at all is properly basic.

An example of a properly basic idea is Descartes's Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” This idea isn't considered an axiom, per se, but rather incorrigible. That is to say, so persistent that we can't get rid of it. Here is why I disagree: the sense of self is something acquired by children as they grow. The narcissist, I think, is a narcissist because he fails to distinguish in his own mind the difference between himself and the rest of the world. In some sense, though this is more properly solipsism, we can see that the narcissist sees others as an extension of himself; they exist to serve him. Such a person gets unreasonably angry when one those that ought to be under his control won't do what he wants. I see this as a failure to grow out of infancy. An infant, perhaps, perceives his mother as an extension of itself. When it wants food, it gets it. When its diaper is dirty, it gets changed. As a child matures, it learns that its mother is a distinct person with distinct feelings and desires. This observation is not innate. It is acquired through induction and analogy. The idea of analogy can be seen in this ... um ... analogy: Somebody hits me with a rock, I cry; I hit someone else with a rock, they cry; ergo, they feel what I felt. Various psychological problems, I think, can be seen as a failure to make the analogy.

I remember when my daughter came into this awareness. She was about 8 as I recall. She and her mother were having a fight. My daughter kept insisting that my wife do something for her and that she should want to do that for her and how much it bothered her that my wife wouldn't. My wife kept telling her that she had feelings too. Every time my daughter would say something such as “But I wanted that,” my wife would respond, “But I didn't.” After sometime the light came on. She got it. I can almost remember a literal “ohhhhh.” Suddenly, she was able to put herself in someone else' shoes.

If someone understands the words “I think, therefore I am”, then I think they've ready inductively begun to understand his separateness. The idea is only incorrigible inasmuch as the person has already acquired it inductively and cannot conceive of not being or not thinking.

So what is this induction? It is the process by which we infer from what has happened before what will happen next. This is generally considered secondary to deductive reasoning because there is no absolute certainty about knowledge acquired this way. Indeed, this is known as the problem of induction. The fact the sun has risen every day of every year for at least 4 billion years does not allow us 100% certainty that it will rise tomorrow (speaking phenomenologically). I contend however that it is justification for believing it. Nevertheless, a asteroid of sufficient mass and angle of approach smacking the Earth could stop our rotation. But in the absence of information that contradicts our induction, we are justified in persisting in holding the conclusion.

Imagine that you overhear me counting “three, five, seven”, you might reasonably conclude that I was counting odd numbers. I would say you are justified in saying so. However, imagine that I then say “eleven.” Well, if you are somewhat mathematically inclined you'd probably guess that I was actually counting prime numbers. (For this example, you didn't here me counting until I said "three".) You would be justified. But suppose the next number was fifteen. That's not prime. You might puzzle for a while, but if you felt inclined to make a guess you might I had a pattern that involved the differences between the numbers. The first two differences were two. Now you have two differences of four, perhaps the next number will be nineteen. But it is likely you are wrong. I already had two steps of 4. Perhaps I will go back to two or perhaps I will go to six or even 8. And the guessing game could go on indefinitely involving cycles of repetition and layers upon layers. In each case you make an inference. In each case you are justified. But, in each case you could be wrong and in this example you were.

My point then is this. Everything that anyone might contend is properly basic is in fact induced. You might object that “1 + 1 = 2” is properly basic. Think about how you might teach a three year old this concept. You hold up a pencil and say “one”. Then you hold up a second pencil and say “two”. Then you repeat. If you are strategic in your teaching, you then pick up oranges to show that it applies to other things. What confuses the issue is the idea of categories or, more precisely, the naming of things that are. When there is one object, we say “one”. When there are two objects, we say “two”. It is the name of the circumstance that there are two objects there. Addition is the name we give the process of the state of “one” becoming the state of “two”. Children probably notice this subconsciously over and over again by the time someone tries to teach the words that go with observation. We call it obvious, but only because it always matches up with reality. Is this reality always the case? Actually no. Sort of. When we add one liter of water to one liter of water to one liter of water we get two liters. However, if we add a liter of water to a liter of vinegar (if I recall correctly) we get less than 2 liters of solution. Why? Because the molecules of one fill in some of the space between the molecules of the other. So we learn that if one wants to add two things they need to be in the same category and the answer will be in the same category. One object plus one object equals two objects. However, one apple and one orange is neither two apples nor two oranges. Since an apple is an object and an orange is an object, we could still say we have two objects, or even two specimens of fruit.

Some have argued that I should believe in God since I believe in love. The problem here is twofold. One is that even though I cannot measure love, I observe that which I call love. I don't observe whatever it is that people call god. The second problem is what love actually is. I aver that love is the name we give to a category of behavior. It isn't a thing at all. If people didn't behave in a way that could be called love as we recognize it in this reality then we wouldn't have a name for it.

So how do you know? You observe the world around you, you make inferences about how the world is, you act on that knowledge, revise, rinse and repeat. This is reasoning; this is learning; success indicates knowledge.

In Part 2, we will consider the claim that faith is a means of knowing.

Atheism, Agnosticism and Bears (Oh my)

I am an atheist. Most of my friends know what I mean when I say that, but there is enough confusion (or possibly dissembling) out there on the internet that I think it is worth spending some time on.

First, it is rather frustrating in internet debates to have someone who, by their own admission, isn't in the same category of thought as you are tell you what you think.

So this is what I mean and what most of atheist friends mean when we talk about atheism. To be an atheist is to be without theism. This definition derives straight from its etymology: a-theism -- without theism. It doesn't mean that I believe that gods don't exist. It means that I don't believe in gods exist. This may seem like a strange quibble, but it is not. Most atheists I know are willing to believe if there were enough evidence to do so. We do not assert that gods don't exist; we just don't believe in them.

Some might claim that to be an atheist is to claim that we can prove that gods don't exist. This is not so. It just means that we find no reason to believe in them. Now, it also true that if someone makes claims that contradict then those claims can be dismissed. A common debate is whether the omniscient Abrahamic god and the idea of free will are compatible. I'm not going to argue that here, but you can see that if you were convinced that these ideas are incompatible, you'd have to give up Yahweh's omniscience or give up the idea of free will. Thus if both positions were required for someone's religious stance and you became convinced that those ideas are incompatible, then you'd have to reject their position. This is important because some atheists (and I'm pretty close to being on board) assert that common positions on the gods worshiped by humans are self-contradictory. Perhaps the specifics may become the basis of another post.

Atheism, in short, is the position that the religious position is unconvincing. That's it.

Second, atheism and theism are both positions dealing with belief. The atheist does not believe; the theist does. Neither position is a religion. Religion generally has specific propositions for dealing with 'the other'. The other could be a universal mind, or nirvana, or fate, or Yahweh, or Poseidon. Theism in and of itself specifies nothing about how to cope with 'the other'. Nor does atheism. Thus neither is a religion. I bring this up because some arguers insist that atheism is a religion.

A side point here is that the whole argument that atheism is a religion or requires faith is rather backwards. (You can buy a popular Christian book called, I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, by a relatively famous apologist, Norman Geisler.)  Faith is supposed to be virtue. It supposed to be something a theist is proud of. So is the apologist saying we are as bad as he is or as good as he is? It seems that the apologist intrinsically saying that faith is bad. He is arguing with an inferiority complex.


If you have doubts as to whether the atheist position I've describe requires faith, ask yourself whether it requires faith to not believe in leprechauns.

Third, there are in fact those atheists that do claim to know that gods don't exist. Many of these, as I hinted at earlier, assert that no known definition of gods are coherent.

In any case, those that claim to know might be gnostic atheists. This position is also sometimes known as hard atheism. The position that the evidence is unconvincing but that gods might exist is agnostic, or soft atheism.

So then if atheism and theism is about belief, then agnosticism and gnosticism are about knowledge. One can be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. One can be a gnostic atheist or a gnostic theist. (Gnosticism here does not equate to gnostic Christianity which is a whole 'nother thing.)

Agnosticism however need not merely refer to the idea that "I do not know". It also relates to the idea of whether we can know. Thomas Huxley, who coined the term (atheism is much older), seems to have meant that metaphysical question are open to dispute, i.e., "I don't know." (Thomas Huxley's position on agnosticism can be seen here.) But when it comes to metaphysics, it is a real question as whether any such thing that is metaphysical can be known to exist at all let whether the properties of such a thing can be disputed.

So, I like the categories of agnosticism I've run across: hard agnosticism, the position that supernatural & metaphysical things are simply unknowable, and soft agnosticism, the simple admission that "I don't know."

Using the terms as I've defined them, I think of myself as a hard-agnostic atheist. I find so-called evidence for God (and gods) insufficient. I don't know that gods don't exist, but I think it improbable that it is logically possible to demonstrate the existence of the supernatural.

Consider if a being came down and offered to move Mt. Kilimanjaro into your backyard in order to prove that he/she/it was God...and then actually did it! Would you believe that that being was God? Though I would tread carefully around such a being, I would not believe. Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke's most famous quote is this: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Is it possible to imagine something you might ask of a powerful being that could convince you? Perhaps the most challenging thing you could ask is that the being create another universe. Even if it appeared that it did that, could you ever be sure that your mind wasn't thoroughly messed with. If such a being might take on that challenge, it might also simply convince you that it did succeed. Perhaps you might ask that just for a moment that your mind be opened and be possessed of all knowledge. Could you ever be sure that you weren't merely given a convincing delusion that you knew everything?

This is why I say that I call myself a hard-agnostic atheist. To be honest, however, part of this depends on the idea of the omniscient omnipotent god of Abraham. A super-powerful but fallible godling like, say, Zeus is very easily believed--and any of the beings I described above would certainly qualify. But they would not qualify for the ultimate everything of modern western religion.

One last point about logic and the plausibility of gods:

In logic, there are two fundamental syllogisms. The first is called modus ponens. It looks as follows:

• If p then q
• p 
• Therefore, q

That is, if we agree that if p happens, then q happens, then we agree that p did happen, then q also did happen.

The more interesting one (for this discussion) is modus tolens. It is this:

• If p then q
• not q
• Therefore, not p

If it follows that q must happen if p does, then it also follows that if q didn't happen, then neither did p.

If seems a major premise of western theism that god(s) is active in our world. If I do not see any effect that can be attributable to a god, then I am justified in supposing there is no god. I could be wrong. But given that I am unconvinced by so-called evidence for gods justifies my lack of belief in them.


Oh right, I almost forgot ... bears. Here ya go!

Profanity, swearing, cursing and being offended

WARNING: This post contains bad words.

There are several types of language generally considered offensive: Profanity, swearing, cursing, and in the western world, using God's name in vain. The question here is why are any of them offensive.

Swearing and cursing are terms generally synonymous with saying bad words and that is the emphasis of this post. Profanity and using God's name in vain is not really part of this post, though it is interesting that many Christians seem more concerned with the word fuck that with saying "oh my god." Technically, of course, "God" is not the name of the Abrahamic god (that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). But that is a different subject.

So on to bad words. Why are they offensive? Words, of course, are our primary means of communication. Body language, facial expressions, and the arts are all arguably communication, but if you really want someone to understand, you tell them. (There is a whole rant that could go along with this.)

Presumably, if we say something is a bad word then we are indicating that there is something offensive in their communication. Something about their meaning is taken to be ... what? Insulting? Rude? Why?

Often we take technical words, such as feces, and replace them with words that somehow seem less embarrassing, such as poop. For reasons unknown, however, words like crap and shit are deemed offensive. For the life of me, I don't understand why. Feces, poop, shit, scheisse, merde, et al., are refer to the solid waste product that our bodies and that of other animals produce.

It is notable that we don't seem to be offended if people use bad words in other languages. In the preceding paragraph, scheisse is German for shit as is merde in French.

A story a former employer told was that they had a Chinese co-worker who would sit at his keyboard programming all day long. All day long he would mutter to himself, "fuck". Finally, apparently amused, my former employer asked him what the Chinese equivalent was. His response: "Oooh, very bad word!"

My point here is mostly this: Any word is a sequence of sounds and cannot be offensive by themselves. A word is offensive because we deem it such. Also, if there is an equivalent word that is not offensive, then the 'slang' term should not be offensive nor censored. Shit should not be anymore offensive than feces.

Intent goes a long way to explaining our reactions to such things. If someone calls my mother a cunt, I am offended. Why? Because the speaker intends me or my mother to be offended. Somehow the speech would carry less weight if the speaker called my mother a vagina. If someone calls this essay shit, it isn't the brown stuff that makes this statement offensive, but that they don't find value in what I've written.

I wouldn't want to discourage the ability to express our displeasure with life or circumstances. In some cases, it would seem that profanity helps. See this article. But I think that taking offense merely from overhearing words that others speak especially when not directed at oneself is just silly. Fuck that.

Tinker's Damn: Intro

The origins of the phrase Tinker's Damn is somewhat in dispute. An alternative phrasing is Tinker's Dam.

In medieval times, there were traveling repairmen who fixed pots, pans, and various other things. The word damn or dam could either come from a tinker's propensity to curse or from the shoddy patches to holes in pots--a dam. A longer discussion can be found here.

In any case, a Tinker's damn isn't worth much. So the title of this blog indicates that this really is just my 2 cents.

My on-line persona has been Tinker Grey since 2000. So it all fits together...at least in my mind.

I hope you enjoy.