ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
If I'm being flippant, I'd say that my observations of the internet wars were that both sides had major problems, but probably the biggest area that atheists felt like they were constantly getting crushed on was the argument from morality. They tried lots of things to try to fix this. Ultimately, I think they were so unsuccessful that they just did everything they could to bury the topic and ridicule anyone who even thought about morality as a thing.
...directly leading to exactly the phenomenon that you describe.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I was a bit surprised, too, when I first started checking him out. I have likewise been very disappointed by most other 20th-century-or-later French philosophers. Check out this series for a good introduction.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Ok, um, what do you think counts as "science"?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I think mistaking methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory is pretty darn near to the core belief for most atheists.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Nah, basic engagement with metaphysics would probably be sufficient.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
There's a difference between "focusing on" and "mistaking it for a metaphysical theory".
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I mean, I'm mostly gathering comparative data, and I can now include the way you've responded here as part of that data set.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Aaaaand here we have one in the wild, folks. This is like maybe five comments away from someone saying this is a weak/straw man.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I'm still not clear what you mean when you say that people are claiming science's constraints are constraints on reality.
They simply handwave away the possibility of any form of being/existence that is not squarely within the purview of one specific tool: science. That tool has significant methodological constraints, like observability, repeatability, testability, etc. There are others, and they can be presented in a variety of ways.
There was no Church of Atheism
I mean, I'm left asking, "Who cares," in return? Like, does the diversity of Christianity and the fact that there are a bunch of disparate groups somehow change things?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality?
I'm sure that the irrational confidence in the converse is irrational.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
What in the heck are you even saying here?
I've explained it in a few comments downthread. Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard. And basic metaphysics/philosophy of science.
atheism is correct in the sense that if there's not sufficient compelling evidence then people should default to a position of not knowing instead of just blindly believing things on faith
That would more accurately be described as a type of agnosticism. A particular type, in fact.
Implying atheism gave rise to wokeism is nonsense. The two were aligned a few decades ago, but they have very separate origins, goals, motivations, etc. which is why they split.
The claim is that wokeism was only able to rise so quickly and so broadly was due to the effects of atheism on the masses, not that they had the same origins/goals/motivations.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I mean, I'm not sure what I can say besides that I disagree? That I lived through the internet wars? That the OP attached to the comment I linked mentioned how shoe atheist was brought up "a lot", because it was a pretty massive thing that was seen all the time?
If anything, one could say that you don't see people say such things anymore, mostly because atheists don't get pressed on their beliefs anymore. They mostly don't have to explicitly say much of anything.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality. Rather than building an actual metaphysical theory, they just declare that their constraints handwave the whole problem away.
Why would it matter? The truth value of a statement or belief stands independent of whatever it may engender.
To be as flippant as the commenter two posts up in this thread, because the atheists are wrong. /thread
It's only bonus badness that their wrongness led to one of the very things the OP was complaining about.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I mean, so do a surprising number of liberal Christians, depending on the meaning of "practically" and "everything". Maybe if you tried to pin them down on some particular thing that you thought worthy of removing the kid gloves, you could get a different response, but I think we can here, as well.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I don't disagree at all. I would be curious to see where the current balance lies if we actually just asked them, "Is there an objective morality?" We might be so far along that we'll get blank stares to that, too.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Not really. It's more that science is built with assumptions that make it only relevant for certain types of evidence, certain types of objects, certain types of physical theories, etc. Within those constraints, the tool is extremely useful. The problem is that many people casually mistake those constraints on a particular tool as being the same thing as a complete theory of everything.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
specific methodological constraints
For example, science takes as constraints certain assumptions on observability, repeatability, testability, etc. There are different ways of formulating these assumptions, but they are constraints on what types of things the method can speak to.
Metaphysics, uh, kind of is? The core error is that we can just do away with any metaphysical questions, we can just boldly declare that the only one true possible metaphysical theory, must just be exactly the things that are within the constraints of this one particular tool. Now, this proposition can and has been argued for/against, but it's messy. Of course, beliefs of Christians have been argued for/against, and they're messy, too. It's better to not worry about those details; we have ridiculing to do on the internet!
the post in that link
Read the specific comment I linked to. I know it's long, but it very completely describes the problem long before it even uses the word "shoe".
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I think this can only be said to be due to the incoherence of wokeism and the impossibility of pinning such people down to making defensible claims rather than argument-by-protest. All I can offer is my own experience trying to determine if there was any substantive 'there there'. Goes all the way back to grad school, from the time before wokeness had taken over. I was starting to see the beginnings of something happening in the space and couldn't quite understand what was underpinning it. I had previously had the experience of looking at subjects like the Supreme Court's docket and SIGINT through the prism of popular reporting, wondering how any of it could make any sense at all, then digging in and learning that there was at least some level of coherence underlying the whole shebang, even if I didn't agree with all of it. So I thought maybe I'd do the same here, and I took use of our University's ability to audit courses. I wanted to go straight to the horse's mouth.
Whelp, best I could tell, there was very little there there. Maybe a little, but not nearly enough to support the whole edifice. Regardless, one thing that was very clear from my experiences was that they were utterly committed to the idea of relativism if you even tried poking at their philosophical underpinnings. It seemed like nearly a reflex to just deflect having to worry about it. Like, just go read Foucault if you want to know more about why relativism, but relativism means we don't have to give objective reasons for our moral positions, and oh by the way, you're a bigot if you disagree with our moral positions. They hide the contradictions just well enough and the masses are now just blinded enough to noticing broken philosophical underpinnings that they can mostly skate along without accounting for it.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
if you assume that operationalizes as a low initial credence in any metaphysical theory, until reasons to believe it over other metaphysical theories are offered
I don't think that assumption holds for the pithy Hitchens quote. I'm pretty confident we're supposed to interpret it in a different way. In any event, I agree with a lot of what you have to say.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
You might have missed the line about mistaking methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That's pretty darn close to the central claim of most atheists, especially the ones 'round the internets who would be most apt for not-kid-gloves treatment.
a lot of old-school atheists got really uncomfortable about "atheism+" or "New Atheism", and those are the steps that really defined the transition. I could also argue that this confuses correlation and causation if 2010s atheism was really just a corpse piloted by SJWs.
But that's kind of the whole point. They created the corpse! They knew what they were doing when they killed it. But like any social fad, they shrugged it off, thinking that nothing could possibly go wrong. Only after they saw the fruits of their labor did they start feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing. Let's put it this way, I've seen arguments that Christianity is to blame for wokeness, and some of those arguments are actually not all that bad. But if you look at, like, a random Protestant 'barely believer' church that is now headed toward wokeness, you probably wouldn't say that they caused the rise of wokeness. You certainly wouldn't use that in particular to claim that Christianity in general caused the rise of wokeness. But you might say something like, "Look at these churches who have basically abandoned any real faith, are honestly basically agnostic already, don't even really believe in any sort of real morality. Those choices have left a corpse of a church which was just too vulnerable to 'woke mind virus'." In a sense, those choices caused wokeness to rise up in those churches rather than in others. In the same sense, that's what a lot of the 2010s atheism did to large portions of the masses.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Opinion noted and data updated. Thanks!
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
"methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory"
This is actually a beautiful line from Rene Girard, skewering such poor reasoning.
atheism doesn't imply that shoes are atheists
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I have nothing but respect for your posts. That's a great read. Thanks!
I didn't say they were one in the same. I more directly attacked the inherent absurdity in atheism. It's just a bonus that the atheism movement very likely set up the conditions for the very thing OP was complaining about to spread so quickly and so widely.
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