Entelecheia
9mo ago
driving is a strictly superior means of transit for distances over a mile or so
Strictly superior to what? Walking? Sure, but that's because long-distance walking can be tiring, not because driving itself better than other modes of non-walking transit. To safe and well-kept public transportation of the kind that exists in, say, Switzerland? If your destination is along a rail route then that seems false, because you can sit and do what you want to do instead of having to keep your attention on the road, and you don't need to find a parking space, you just get off the train. If it's not then that's an argument for better rail coverage.
If you're talking about non-urban locations where there isn't enough demand for infrastructure to build sufficient rail coverage, then sure, driving is a fine option for that.
Entelecheia
9mo ago
There is a lot of paper wealth in the US but if you want to buy back a comparable quality of life to a middle class European (i.e., live in a safe, walkable, clean city with good public transit and little crime or disorderly behavior) a lot of it evaporates pretty fast, so the differential ends up being less than it looks on paper. I could be wrong but my sense is that there's just about one city in the US that meets those specifications and it's Boston (very expensive).
If you can compromise on one or more of those factors (safe, walkable, clean), then yeah you can make and save some money here at the cost of potentially living the "American lifestyle" (commuting and driving everywhere with all the cost, time-sinks, and social alienation that entails), which may or may not be a problem for you. NYC is I guess decently safe in a statistical sense and walkable, but not clean. A lot of others are safe and clean but not walkable, and there are cities that are walkable but not particularly safe.
I'm seriously considering leaving the US for London for this reason.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Cool, would love to hear what you think of it!
Entelecheia
1yr ago
The new tactic is presuppositional apologetics
The new tactic where exactly? I have no idea what presuppositional apologetics is; probably a more fruitful tactic is real engagement with the history of philosophy and with the arguments that have been proposed by the best thinkers in it. Cosmological arguments for example are absolutely treated as worthy of serious engagement by even atheist philosophers of religion.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
They demurely posit their invisible god
This is redundant; the necessary being cannot be corporeal because what is corporeal can be corrupted, and what is not corporeal cannot be visible.
who isn't really associated with any particular religion
That's a feature, not a bug; everyone, not just people who have encountered a particular religious tradition, can know God.
who doesn't really do anything
In classical theism, God not only does things, but everything that exists at any moment exists only at that moment insofar as God makes it exist, so this is wildly inaccurate.
seemingly motivated more by a desire to at least be treated as Serious People rather than any urge to actually prove that anything in particular exists
The arguments you're talking about were developed throughout the history of philosophy by people who had no particular motivation to appear any way in internet debates thousands of years later.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Not that one, no, but I mean to pick it up at some point.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
In the classical schema, the knowledge of God is presented as the apex of theoretical contemplation, which does not need any external justification but is itself the foundational good of human life. From Aristotle's Protrepticus:
To seek from all knowledge a result other than itself, and to demand that knowledge must be useful, is the act of one completely ignorant of the distance that from the start separates things good from things necessary; they stand at opposite extremes. For of the things without which life is impossible those that are loved for the sake of something else must be called necessities and contributing causes, but those that are loved for themselves even if nothing follows must be called goods in the strict sense. This is not desirable for the sake of that, and that for the sake of something else, and so ad infinitum; there is a stop somewhere. It is completely ridiculous, therefore, to demand from everything some benefit other than the thing itself, and to ask "What then is the gain to us?" and "What is the use?" For in truth, as we maintain, he who asks this is in no way like one who knows the noble and good, or who distinguishes causes from accompanying conditions.
One would see the supreme truth of what we are saying, if someone carried us in thought to the islands of the blest. There there would be need of nothing, no profit from anything; there remain only thought and contemplation, which even now we describe as the free life. If this be true, would not any of us be rightly ashamed if when the chance was given us to live in the islands of the blest, he were by his own fault unable to do so? Not to be despised, therefore, is the reward that knowledge brings to men, nor slight the good that comes from it. For as, according to the wise among the poets, we receive the gifts of justice in Hades, so (it seems) we gain those of wisdom in the islands of the blest.
It is nowise strange, then, if wisdom does not show itself useful or advantageous; we call it not advantageous but good, it should be chosen not for the sake of anything else, but for itself. For as we travel to Olympia for the sake of the spectacle itself, even if nothing were to follow from it (for the spectacle itself is worth more than much wealth), and as we view the Dionysia not in order to gain anything from the actors (indeed we spend money on them), and as there are many other spectacles we should prefer to much wealth, so too the contemplation of the universe is to be honoured above all the things that are thought useful. For surely it cannot be right that we should take great pains to go to see men imitating women and slaves, or fighting and running, just for the sake of the spectacle, and not think it right to view without payment the nature and reality of things.
Probably Five Proofs for the Existence of God. I thought that one was fantastic and pretty easily digestible. It also doesn't aim too high, it's not trying to make you a Catholic, just a theist.
Since you have more experience with the classics than I realized, let me say - I have been reading through a series called A History of Ancient Philosophy by Giovanni Reale. It's translated from Italian in a way that leaves it a little difficult to get through at times, but if you can manage, it's a major hidden gem that connects and unifies the strands of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the Neoplatonists into a profoundly satisfying narrative centered around Plato's discovery of supersensible being as the fulcrum of classical thought. Very long but very strongly recommended if you have an appetite for that sort of thing, some of the best philosophical work I've ever seen.
The theists making arguments in this thread seem to consider "What observations of reality indicate that your beliefs are true?" some sort of crazy question that shouldn't bear any weight as to whether their beliefs are true.
Well, we might reasonably think that the relevant question should be "What evidence indicates that your beliefs are true?" - the prickliness you're experiencing is a suspicion that saying "observations of reality" rather than a more generic term like "evidence" might amount to smuggling in an assumption about the validity or non-validity of certain forms of evidence with the effect of arbitrarily ruling out valid arguments.
There are plenty of theistic arguments from the history of philosophy that are interesting and worth thinking about. They cannot really said to be narrowly observational in nature; that's not to say they don't depend on certain observations, but the observation they rely on will be something like "There exists at least one contingent being," and the essential content of the argument is deriving what logically follows from the existence of such a contingent being based on an analysis of contingency, necessity, and causation, embodied in metaphysical principles like the principle of sufficient reason, ultimately aiming to establish that contingent being implies necessary being.
So in a strictly precise sense, the theist would respond to your question with: any observation at all indicates that my beliefs are true, because any observation is an observation of a contingent thing, and (the theist argues) the existence of any contingent thing ultimately entails the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality that explains the being of the observed contingent thing, and the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality is what theists are trying to establish.
The exact chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion is not something I've set out here, both because I'm just trying to explain how the argument works to clarify the basic sort of claim that is being made, and because my philosophy is a bit rusty so I probably couldn't explain it here remotely as well as an academic work on the subject. I recognize that tends to kill discussion because who wants to be told to go get a book on something, but oh well.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I can try, sure. I'm not too familiar with online resources because I've mostly learned about it through my attempt to engage deeply with the history of philosophy, which I strongly recommend to everyone here; if I had a "thesis" of which I hoped to persuade readers, it would be this. There is much more than a lifetime's worth of rich content in the great authors, and much of it is little known today.
I know of one person on reddit who was particularly interested in classical theism and wrote a series of posts on one of Aquinas's cosmological arguments here.
My entry to this way of thinking was by reading some books by Edward Feser, who has a blog here that is generally interesting. While he writes from a particular (i.e. Thomistic and Catholic) perspective, a lot of his concern is to defend general principles of classical Western metaphysics against modern or contemporary philosophical paradigms, so reading him gives a decent overview of the Hellenic philosophical mentality from which all of this springs. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide and Five Proofs for the Existence of God are great; the first will provide a systematic overview of the building-block concepts like act/potency, form/matter, essence/existence, etc. and culminates in an argument for theism; the latter is, as the title indicates, all about natural theology.
For those whose interest goes beyond the beginner level, I would recommend just digging into the history of philosophical thought on metaphysics and theology. Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy is a great resource, as is Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy. Both are quite long, but that's what it takes to do the subject matter justice.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It's a meaningless argument against the concept of knowledge itself
No, it's an argument against your proposed criterion of knowledge on the basis of it being self-contradictory.
does absolutely nothing to actually advance the notion of god existing
That's because it's an argument whose goal is to figure out what knowledge is, not whether God exists. If you want arguments that advance the notion of God existing, you should look at those, rather than looking at an argument about knowledge and observing that it doesn't prove that God exists.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?
I'd say that if you diligently investigate the merit of classical philosophical theism then you should arrive at a place where you consider it philosophically formidable and worthy of respect if not actually true. The best introduction to this tradition that doesn't require you spending an inordinate amount of time reading Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas is probably Edward Feser, who has a couple books that distill a lot of the classical argumentation into a more approachable format.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I really dislike the First Mover argument since it just pushes back the problem of what comes first. If the universe needs a cause, why doesn't God?
But the arguments explain why the universe needs a cause and God doesn't, so this doesn't seem like a fruitful objection. In particular the basic structure of many cosmological arguments is an inference from contingency to necessity, and the existence of something contingent and actual implies an external reason why it is actual as opposed to not (i.e. a cause), whereas the existence of something necessary does not.
Actually I'm not sure if I've been interpreting this argument correctly up to this point. My objection is to a kind of methodological materialism or ruling out a priori the possibility of knowledge from philosophical methods. I'm not sure that's coherent because of the obvious issue with stating that one knows this. Perhaps one could deny that one knows it but say it is possibly true, but I don't think that makes any sense, because advancing that proposition (p = "I don't know if the scientific method is the only way to knowledge, but it could be true") is effectively asserting knowledge of p, and one does not know p scientifically.
If what @SSCReader or you mean is just that metaphysical materialism may be true - that it may turn out to be the case that materialism is right and we can make philosophical arguments for and against that and evaluate them according to philosophical methods to arrive at knowledge - then I have no objection.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
The comment you are replying to was just a sketch of the thread that has served as the key polar opposite to atheism in philosophy. One can believe this without believing in any particular religion, so the question of theism or atheism should not turn on whether any particular religion is true.
Whether particular religions that attempt to build upon this foundation have added enough to make them philosophically interesting in their own right is another matter that I didn't mean to comment on.
It is the study of being as such, as distinct from the special sciences which study being under some aspect, as we might say roughly and imprecisely that modern physical science studies being as corporeal and quantitative (philosophical physics like Aristotle's studies being as corporeal but not quantitative, heh).
So metaphysics is about rising above particular kinds and concepts of being to the most general analysis of being. And there we get to questions like: we know there's at least one sort of being (the corporeal kind), is that it, or is there a kind of being that is incorporeal or supersensible? That question is the main theme of Plato's corpus.
And it studies categories applicable to being in general (not just one kind of being), like causation, or contingency and necessity. So there you will get questions like whether the existence of contingent beings ipso facto implies the existence of a necessary being, and what attributes a necessary being must have in virtue of its necessity. Or whether a chain of causes implies a first element in it and what we can say about such an element based on the properties it must have in order to be the first element in such a chain.
This may (or may not, like I said I'm still learning) help to explain why the validity of metaphysics as a discipline that grasps being as it is is so critical for classical theistic arguments. If all of these concepts - causation, contingency, necessity etc. - are just a matter of how we think about the stuff that appears to us, we can't use it to draw conclusions that go beyond what appears to us, because it's basically just a schema for organizing all of that (this is why Kantianism threw such a major wrench in philosophy). But if it's grasping being as it is, then we can.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It means that if we have any knowledge of anything, then we can be sure those are not the actual constraints of reality. Either our item of knowledge K is not scientifically verifiable, in which case the point is proved, or it is scientifically verifiable, in which case in order to count as knowledge, the scientific method must be known to be reliable, which cannot happen by scientific verification.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality?
Yes? If only what is scientifically demonstrable is knowable, then we have no way of knowing that science is a valid source of knowledge, because a scientific demonstration of the validity of scientific knowledge would be circular.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It boils down to the fact that it is incoherent to assert that only what is empirically verifiable can count as knowledge. To demonstrate this, simply attempt to apply the proposition's criterion to itself.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted
I don't think this is true unless you mean on the level of popular discourse. As a theoretical matter, I don't think New Atheist argumentation was ever particularly respected in, say, the world of academic philosophy, which is dominated by atheists, so it's not a question of bias. And the need to respond to New Atheism prompted a re-engagement with classical philosophy among religious thinkers - see people like Edward Feser - that made their position much more theoretically defensible and less vulnerable to New Atheist arguments.
If you mean as a popular matter, then sure, I could see people thinking (incorrectly) that that whole episode sort of settled all these questions, because the sophisticated religious response to their claims turned out to be rather less of a popular phenomenon than the original claims were.
Philosophical classical theism along the lines articulated initially by the high metaphysical philosophers of ancient Greece would be the main alternative. Christianity is a synthesis of the scriptural tradition and this philosophy, but the philosophy itself is not inherently connected with any particular religion. In fact it was developed initially in opposition to the prevailing pagan religious mentality as a more pure and theoretically coherent conception of what we might call an absolute, unconditioned reality than the gods portrayed in the Homeric myths. This tradition developed arguments for the existence of said absolute, unconditioned reality that are much stronger (taken on their own terms) than many people are aware of or give credit for. In particular, refined versions of the cosmological argument - as opposed to popular apologetics versions - are very strong.
I say "taken on their own terms" because they require a fairly robust conception of the metaphysical enterprise to get off the ground - that is, the idea that metaphysical concepts describe real features of the real world. This ability of metaphysics to grasp real features of the world is what enables the inference from effect to cause even in the case of inferring a supersensible and transcendent cause for a sensible and physical effect. In contrast, if one believes that metaphysical concepts have to do with the way we think but not the way things are - so that causation is a question of how we organize and conceptualize phenomena rather than a real mind-independent relation between beings as such - then we cannot use causation to infer the real existence of something beyond what we could possibly experience.
I am still a novice in these matters but I suspect that this kind of meta-philosophical controversy is why theism remains controversial today in philosophy. In other words it's not coincidental, or due to anything like social pressure or force, that the whole philosophical world was theistic until relatively recently. Within a "realist" metaphysical framework of the kind that the ancient Greek philosophers are the chief examples, theism more or less tends to be the natural conclusion, and that framework is what is called into question today.
That's not to say that there aren't still controversies over the validity of theistic arguments even within that framework. The technical issues in the arguments are complicated and difficult. However this shift may explain, from a historical perspective related to the general philosophical atmosphere, the differences in the baseline perception of plausibility of theism and atheism.
There are lots of better ways to succeed if by succeed you just mean grow. But if by succeed you mean really satisfy man’s need to understand the world, his place in it, and his purpose and destiny, putting a primacy on the search for the truth is the only way to do it. If that means getting fewer converts than you could by being a less substantive philosophy, so be it.
(I mean, that’s the enterprise we are trying to be in. You (the reader) may or may not think we do that particularly well, but that’s the point of all of this, not just converting people to…something or other.)
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Wait, who recommended the book? How'd I miss this?
Hi, it's me!
Entelecheia
1yr ago
he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think.
Well, I don't think it was a kind of...business strategic decision optimizing for growth. I'm sure he hoped he would influence people to come back to the pews, but I think he thought and wrote this way because he believed that man is meant to search for the truth and must attempt to articulate to himself real, satisfying answers to his deepest questions. This is probably part of why he struggled with the job, because he was always more inclined toward theology than administration.
I'd also say that the crafting of an intellectual edifice is a lifetime of work that can only be judged from a generational, rather than immediate, perspective. When Socrates died it probably looked like he was a failure (from an external perspective - of course he succeeded in living how he thought was right), but his way of thinking about man and the soul (via its modulation in Plato and Aristotle and combination with Christian ideas) ended up ruling the Western world for a long time.
As a Catholic I hope that the slow decline of the west we are witnessing will lead to curiosity and interest in the questions that Ratzinger considered central to man's life and destiny but that modern society tends to obscure or deny. I hope it will also lead to fruitful engagement with the lifetime of work that he produced in attempting to answer those questions for himself. But even if it doesn't have any outsized downstream impact, it was worth doing anyway.
Yeah, I'm getting to the point where I just can't stand the crushing boredom and isolation anymore even though my tech salary would take a big hit to emigrate. The stuff you listed is table stakes for living in any number of European capitals so it makes my current approach (tough it out in US HCOL to make more money but spend a lot of it on rent and cars and be miserable) feel like I'm getting scammed. Maybe I'll try it for a year and see how it goes.
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