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Notes -
Have you read any of Alasdair MacIntyre?
I'm particularly reminded of his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. I haven't read all of it, but the point you highlighted about different visions of morality and rationality coheres rather nicely with what I understand to be his views.
I can't put my finger on it, but this just seems wrong somehow. It feels to me like moral uprightness and artistic beauty are sacred because they cohere with truth -- not necessarily bare "material factuality" but "reality as it really is," "existence as it really is," "humans as they really are." The strongest claims for moral uprightness are always undergirded by an appeal to things being in line with what they really are. It was decidedly not the enlightenment thinkers who synthesized the concept of natural law, nor was it them who developed a teleological approach to ethics.
I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.
I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:
In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.
In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.
By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).
I would not actually renounce that material factuality is part of truth, nor would I hold that material factuality lacks sanctity. But rather, by describing "bare material factuality," I was describing facts without reference to what we're actually supposed to do with them. You need both, or there is no sanctity.
While material factuality taken too far leads to nihilism (because it separates facts from values), truth-as-non-concealment taken too far leads to relativism (because it separates values from facts). My view would be that material factuality is sacred when tied in with the proper disposition towards factuality and with the larger ontological questions of what reality is. It is sacred to seek the truth, and it is even more sacred to find it. But moreover, the sacredness is applied to the sum total of things and experiences; it's reality that is sacred, sanity that is sacred.
Jesus was indeed describing himself as the full and unconcealed revelation of God, but it is only because that revelation points to something really real, factually real, actually real, that this matters. It would mean precious little for Jesus to be the unconcealed revelation of something that does not correspond to reality. That's not Christianity as the New Testament understands it. It is precisely that his audience believed in the factual existence of God that his claim to be the revelation of God meant anything to them, whether for good or for ill.
Put simply, I think the dichotomy between truth-as-factual-correspondance and truth-as-disposition is a false one, and frankly I see it as a means to smuggle in the epistemological nihilism of Postmodernism. Every discussion I read about the topic sounds like a thousand words saying nothing. There is a reality, and there is a means of humans reaching closer correspondence to it; this is not an enlightenment theory but one that is necessary for human existence in general, anything else also leads to nihilism. It beggars belief to state that when Plato or Aristotle wrote long discourses about the nature of justice or logical deduction, that they did not intend their views to approach material factuality. Whence else cometh the metaphor of the cave?
My disagreements with the Enlightenment have precious little to do with such a dichotomy, and everything to do with their intellectual overconfidence (the "self-evident" phrasing you cited) and limitation of the means of reaching an understanding of material factuality ("according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics"). That doesn't mean the tools of science and mathematics are useless in reaching truth, just that they're limited, and cannot at times approach the value of a good story or a compelling narrative in stating and revealing the truth of things within their purview, like human social relations.
This is what I am talking about when I am referring to the religious "gish gallop" style of operation. This whole screed could have been done in 3 sentences.
Actually, could you do that (Do the comment in three sentences)? I'd be impressed. It doesn't need to get quite everything, but the gist.
I don't think it's really a gish-gallop, as those make too many points to reasonably address. You're saying it's not dense, so that's just making a few points repeatedly or slowly. That's not a gish-gallop.
Anyway, here's a (brief) case for Christianity, that might even seem rational from a secular, moral-free perspective, at least if you're motivated sufficiently highly by reason and argumentation:
Step 10 is what currently seem sketchiest to me; I'm not too familiar with Islam, unfortunately.
I don't expect you to care about arguments enough to do this (but not doing so is a really low expected value move on your part, if I'm right), but I do think this is fairly defensible, and I think you're irrational insofar as you don't act accordingly.
Step 1 seems very shaky to me, as it assumes the reward-structure of real, Earth theologies. These gods are likely to involve something like "Infinite reward for belief; Infinite punishment for disbelief."
If we assume God operates on the opposite payout, then Pascal's Wager clearly implies we need to be Atheist!
Then your problem isn't with assuming that the things that everything should be done are infinites, in what you just said, you seem to concede that. It's with step 5, maybe, as you think we can't know anything.
Alright, so now, what are you going to do?
It seems fairly unlikely to me that those people claiming divine revelation and eternal rewards would do precisely nothing to affect the probabilities involved, and, if you have no competition in mind that gives you a more likely source of infinite gain/loss, then you should go wholeheartedly after that small chance.
That is, God could have the opposite payout, but revelation, in my opinion, makes it slightly more likely that he has the policies conveyed than that he has the opposite, and any slight likeliness will dominate over the rest of your options. But it would be weird if they cancelled out exactly to zero, so if you really think the other way is more compelling, then you should act fanatically that way. If you're really not sure, well, this is literally the most important thing, so you should think extremely hard, like, lifetime of effort hard, in order to discern any minute difference in probability, so that you can figure out what to orient yourself around. Under no circumstances should you be ignoring all this.
I originally engaged because your step 1 name drops Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager assumes the reward structure (God wants to be believed).
It seems the phrasing of your step 1 should be more like "We should avoid infinite punishments and seek out infinite rewards." Then, you introduce the reward structure all the way down in step 5 or 6, where it is awarded the position of Null Hypothesis on account of the scriptures.
This argument seems to me like a rhetorical device, and not reasoning. Nobody decides to think about infinite rewards and punishments, and then stumbles upon sacred texts. People read the sacred texts and then start thinking about the expected utility of infinite rewards and punishments. Someone doing reasoning would notice if the texts are just an incentive structure, and if so, discard the whole infinite reward business.
I guess this makes me not on board with 1, as this is clearly a rigged game with a pre-written Bottom Line.
You're right, I only actually bring up God later. The whole argument here is a more fleshed out version of Pascal's wager that doesn't assume Christianity is the only possible such wager. I didn't mean to include the whole thing in step one.
I guess I don't quite follow why you're rejecting this. You're saying that this isn't usually the way that people approach things. Sure. Does that mean it's wrong?
I don't understand what you're saying in this sentence: "Someone doing reasoning would notice if the texts are just an incentive structure, and if so, discard the whole infinite reward business." Could you elaborate?
I don't think that's a good reason to reject step 1. You seem to be saying that these are specious arguments trying to trick you into being religious, and therefore can be dismissed. But that's not actually any reason to think that 1 (we'll follow your phrasing of it) is wrong.
I find 1 extremely compelling, and it should be true just as a matter of general principles, before we consider any implications: it's worth pursuing better things and avoiding bad things in general, this is just more of that.
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