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Notes -
https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.
Interesting article! Thanks for linking.
I've heard these comparisons, and as I've mentioned before I'm extremely bullish on the social contagion hypothesis for the majority of mental illness cases. It's an especially pernicious problem because once an illness becomes too 'saturated' like anorexia has been, the cultural cachet of the diagnoses plummets and the fad moves on. All that's left is hordes of people with broken lives and nothing to show for it.
I'm convinced that the modern world's turn away from religion is the main culprit here. That being said, I've been an agnostic for most of my life, so I don't think anyone is necessarily to blame when it comes to turning our backs on old religions. Unfortunately it's just extremely difficult to reconcile modern scientific knowledge with old religious worldviews. I think what many religious people, especially on this forum, miss is that for many agnostics or athiests it's not that they don't want to believe, rather that they find it practically impossible to believe in a religion which demands they lay down the rules of science and empiricism.
It's the turn to a religion: not only has the basic premodern faith of Christianity - which would have checked this as a matter of course - been destroyed the only thing that even vaguely seems to have filled the niche is a brand of anti-science (ironically) blank-slateist view that is inherently in tension with human nature.
That's sort of the underlying tenet that makes any of this even vaguely acceptable.
I’m a bit confused here. You’re saying the blank slate view makes social contagion acceptable?
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It makes these social contagions more viable.
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Only because of an implicit scientism that is pervasive in our society, which is particularly popular among liberal atheistic/agnostic types. I can't speak for every religion but the Catholic Church believes that there is no conflict between (Catholic Christian) religion and science, a belief I share.
The issue with this scientism is really quite obvious when you ask a straight-forward question: is all knowledge (or all truths) discernable via science or the scientific method? The answer to this question to me is clearly no, and that some truths (e.g. moral truths) cannot be discerned through science, and this enters the realm of philosophy and ultimately religion or faith. Many a philosopher has attempted derive moral truths through scientific/materialist means (including atheist star Sam Harris, if we want to call him a philosopher), but these projects inevitably end up as failures trying to square the circle. The alternative is moral nihilism and a completely materialist outlook, but very few atheists seem to actually want to bite that bullet.
Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.
I do have sympathy for the view that "it's not that they don't want to believe, rather that they find it practically impossible to believe in a religion which demands they lay down the rules of science and empiricism" because after all, it is the "gift of faith". You can reason your way so far, but the grace of belief isn't attainable by mere reason.
So sincere agnostics/atheists who go "I would like to believe but I can't" have my respect. It's the sneering jeering "religion R dumb and U R dumb" types who deserve the kicking (metaphorical, before anybody starts gasping in horror that I am advocating physical violence against unbelievers in my tyrannical Spanish Inquisition heretic burning Catholic rage).
I also have sympathy for that view, and it's refreshing to see the discussion around religion evolve from 'religion is stupid and holding us back from rational utopia' to 'religion does have some real social utility'. However, it's hard for me to take this claim of wanting to believe seriously from some people who make this claim when I see a dismissal of all metaphysics out of hand from those same people, from what I believe is not from a serious consideration of metaphysics but a reflexive dismissal of anything that isn't materialist (scientism).
At the same time, I see a lot of what I'll perhaps uncharitably describe as 'playing' at atheism. That is, a refusal to engage with the actual consequences or logic conclusion of atheism, as outlined by philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre - perhaps because the conclusion is so undesirable. Instead, we see this glossy and superficial atheism professed by the New Atheists, whose critics I think quite rightly point out are attacking Christianity while relying on an underlying implicit Christian morality in practice. They profess a rationalistic/scientific approach to moral issues which I think is a fool's errand - the scientism I was criticising in my original post.
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Here's where the empiricist shrugs and says "I keep observing an ordered and knowable universe. Until that changes I'm accepting it as tentatively correct."
Also the word "faith" is so often tortured to accuse atheists of being faithful.
It's amusing. If one calls it "faith", atheists complain that you're trying to call them faithful. If one calls it axiomatic thinking, atheist's complain that your trying to whitewash irrationality.
Either way, accepting that a thing can't be proven and asserting it as true anyway is an unavoidable part of of the reasoning process. No one actually builds their entire logical understanding from personally-verified first principles.
I'm not saying you or Lackluster are doing it, but the word "faith" is much abused by some people to make a rhetorical attack on atheists. I've seen too much "Oh yeah, well, you atheists are the actually faithful people".
And to address Lackluster's point more directly: pointing out that people have "faith" in external reality existing isn't a very impressive point. Unless this discussion is actually about Descartes' demon, I'm going to roll my eyes about the great "faith" that atheists have about the material world actually existing.
The point of my original post is not to 'attack' atheists, but rather quite the opposite, rather to reconcile belief in science and belief in religion (or belief in God in the general sense). I only 'attack' atheists insofar as I am arguing against scientism which atheists may or may not believe in. Even then, 'attacking' is a pretty uncharitable description of arguing against something.
I think part of the rhetorical divide is that atheists implicitly think that 'faith' is a dirty word. I don't have such a view of the word or meaning behind faith. When I use the word 'faith' here, I'm being quite sincere.
You're also skipping a step with your stand-in empiricist - the empiricist has to first believe it is possible to observe the ordered and knowable universe in first place, and the observations he's make necessary correspond to an objective reality and not, say, it's all in his head to be a bit facetious. This axiomatic foundation is completely foundational religious thought (i.e. a belief in God), and one might argue tends to believe or even necessarily leads to belief in God. This is what Christians mean by God being Logos and God's Logos - that there is an inherent order/structure to the universe and this structure is discernable by Reason (which is one of the possible ways of translating of Logos along with Word). God is identified with this inherent (divine) structure of the universe.
Someone could write a paragraph dropping as many Sanskrit words as you did Greek words in defense of their position and I would be no more moved.
Someone could drop as many Taoist (or is it Daoist?) words and I would be even less moved.
All the Greek words I dropped being Logos, and... all the other ones?
Even if I had "dropped" a bunch of Greek words, how is this a rebuttal? Greek terminology is extremely commonly used in Western philosophy in general and a basic Greek vocabulary is useful for anyone wanting to engage with it.
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All very well and good for the Catholic Church to believe that (what else are they gonna do?). But that is a theological tenet, not fact, that many people find difficult to accept, for many real reasons.
I'll not get into Christianity because...well, there's significant differences. But, as a former Muslim, we're just kinda hemmed-in on certain matters.
Modern Muslims can now call it "scientism", but it's pretty clear historically that scholars believed a lot of these things (the Qur'an itself attacks those who say it only repeats "tales of the ancients"*) that science now "debunks". Apologists love to say that "the Qur'an is not a science book" - but you can't combine it being the divine speech of God, with it explicitly saying that it describes natural phenomenon as signs for the willing and also call scientism when it turns out to be wrong about the moon or mountains being pegs.
The "subtraction theory" that Charles Taylor tries to debunk (aka secular society just kept removing things we assumed to be proof of religion and replacing its value) may be overly simplistic (you are right that a lot of this was actually driven by people who thought we could know God's ordered creation and with a belief in progress rather than cyclical time) but the tension isn't easily dissolved. Like, just as naive observers we should assume premodern religions clash with modernity no?
* Which removes an important avenue of escape liberal Christians have
Become Protestants? Which was the whole point of a little debate back in the day 😁
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I’m an atheist and consider myself a moral relativist, which is to me is quite distinct from being a moral nihilist. Morality, to me, is a subjective human construct but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it exists in that same sphere as concepts, ideas and beliefs. It’s based on axioms which are essentially arbitrary; the only thing you can do is point out logical contradictions ensuing from them. In that manner, it’s quite similar to maths, which also don’t materially exist but certainly can be studied.
I find the very concept that morality could ever be objective to be logically incoherent; whatever moral “truth” you come up with, I can immediately just invent another worldview that contradicts it due to having different axioms. Even if God existed, I don’t see why I couldn’t disagree with his morality. The fact that he created me or the universe doesn’t grant him any philosophical authority any more than my parents, and being omnipotent just makes him a cosmic dictator with the power to punish me if I stray from his own personal beliefs.
I think the idea of objective morality might be coherent. There may not be such a thing in practice, or it may not meaningfully distinguish human moral systems, but if it were revealed somehow that there exist logically watertight rules by which our object-level beliefs can correctly unfold into preferences, having something to do with what a preference means, then there'd be a way to say that some preferences are objectively wrong, in the sense that a person could not have legitimately arrived at them and is just spouting confused nonsense that conflicts with his own ultimate priorities (which would presumably be shared between agents, because there is only one objective reality to have beliefs about). As you say, a given moral system can be logically incoherent; this just takes it to another level.
Source: getting high
Right. Did you change your mind about this?
This isn’t a gotcha, let’s not squabble.
No. There is no contradiction. «Objective morality» might be a logically coherent idea/concept (I actually think it is, but that can plausibly be due to my lacking intelligence). I still believe it's not a thing that factually exists in our Universe; and even if it does, it could not be satisfactorily established.
OK. But then when people talk of objective morality, you should treat it as that attempt at coherence. Because in practice, denial of objective morality is used to dismiss every morality out of hand as equally worthless as any other moral system. Much like the denial of objective reality dismisses every epistemology (‘ways of knowing’) as equally worthless.
«Logically coherent» is still a rather weak ontological status. People may try whatever, I just don't think they can succeed, and they certainly cannot positively convince each other (me included) that they have.
Denial of objective morality is objectively correct and a prerequisite for any non-deluded attempt at negotiating social norms. It is exactly because there is a single shared objective reality (presumably) that we can discuss our distinct interests in common terms, instead of immediately concluding that the only solution to disagreement is brainwashing or genocide.
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I remember when I reached this salient and powerful realization about morality in my own theological musings. It features heavily in my own estimations of morality.
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I don’t see the problem. Yes morality is relative. Yes my moral values are not materially truer than yours, so what? My morals are my morals, and they are correct, for me. I will act accordingly. I see no reason for this to collapse into nihilism.
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
Does Might make Right? Is Justice as simple as "Whatever the strong impose on the weak"?
I don't think that is what I said but I am trying to follow your point. morality is an evolved shared thing. It often stops the strong from imposing on the weak. Again, I don't see why that requires it to be objective. It is a cooperative custom.
Regardless of what justice is the strong will impose on the weak. Different cultures will evolve different customs to limit that. Limiting the strong being cruel to the weak seems good to me and also seems to be selected for in the evolution of morality. I think it is a blessing that that tends to happen.
might is not the only factor, culture and argument can affect things certainly, but maybe in this context you would see that as might too. People who can make convincing arguments or manipulate their peers will impose on those who can't
The first post in this chain said that morality is subjective not objective. Which I agree with. morality is crucial but not a material fact. It is based on inherited axioms that are evolved.
The response to that post that I replied to argued that that position leads inexorably to nihilism. Which I disagree with. I believe I can have a substantial moral position while recognizing that it is relative. The post I replied to said:
I don't see why morality can't do the things he wants it to do while being relative.
If I think that the Nazis are bad, which of course I do, I can fight them. Recognizing that my morals are not materially more true than their's doesn't stop me.
What, then, do you mean by "bad"? Like, if you were to say to another human, let's call her Alice, that you thought the Nazis are bad, what does that entail? Does it mean that you have a reason, which you think should be convincing to Alice, to believe that... oh, I don't know, that their morals are materially less true than yours? Are you just merely expressing some feature of your personal morals, completely isolated from anything else in the universe? Like, what's going on here?
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Justice is what keeps a social group cohesive instead of turning on each other. A “weaker” tribe with a functioning social system can often outlast a stronger one that tears itself apart due to power struggles and revenge over perceived slights.
But different societies absolutely have different conceptions of justice, how do you know yours is the objective truth? Many things you do, people from other nations or time periods would find absolutely abhorrent, and vice versa.
The world is moving closer and closer to a monoculture, of which societal differences are obliterated from the twin forces of capitalism and social media. What justice would such a society have? It would be permanent and immutable, and if you dislike it even in the smallest part it will be imposed upon you.
The relativist stance is descriptive of a reality that is fast disappearing. Current academics feel no shame of imposing their morality on the distant past. It is post-modernist babble that is completely unhelpful to the vital question of what is right and good.
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Isn't math usually seen as objective - i.e. its truth or falseness is mind-independent? After all, we use it to come up with falsifiable theories of how the universe works. In fact, one line of argument for theism is that math is unreasonably useful here.
Um, what? It really is "heads I win, tails you lose" with theism, isn't it? I guarantee no ancient theologian was saying "I sure hope that all of Creation, including our own biology and brains, turns out to be describable by simple mathematical rules; that would REALLY cement my belief in God, unlike all this ineffability nonsense."
It's a hard problem from all possible directions, that people have been grappling with since before recorded history. There's going to be a pretty wide diversity of answers.
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There's two catches with that. The first is that "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." (Albert Einstein)
Witness his special relativity, wherein 2 apples plus 2 apples might still be 4 apples but 2 m/s plus 2 m/s turns out to only be 3.9999 (and another dozen or so 9s, admittedly) m/s.
So we can come up with conceptual universes of axioms and prove all sorts of interesting things about them, but we can never be totally sure how completely any of them are really relevant to the actual universe we're in, rather than just amusing games. The fact that we've invented so many pure amusing games that turned out to be good descriptions of the building blocks of reality makes this a surprisingly tricky question.
The second is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. Any reasonable (able to handle basic arithmetic, not obviously inconsistent) system of foundational axioms for mathematics is inadequate to prove all statements which are true in that system, and is also unable to prove its own consistency. We can sometimes use a more complex system to prove the consistency of a less complex system, but then at that point it's turtles all the way down.
There are a lot of ways to interpret the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. To some extent the discovery of how much complexity can be derived from ridiculously simple rules hints at possible alternatives to theism, though I'm not exactly all on board the Tegmark train myself.
I've always been taken by Godel's theorem's as it really cuts us down to size. But if I'm understanding it properly, it doesn't preclude the idea of a proof itself from a series of other proofs, just we can't prove a system of them all lining up together on the same axiom base. But that's not quite the same as having an ambivalent confusion about everything in mathematics...?
These days I like Iain Mcgilchrist's left-brain, right-brain algorithmic vs gestalt brain thing. A lot of our thinking and limitations are because we mistake the left-brain view of the world for reality. The key scientific insights of the 20th century, Godel, quantum physics, relativity and, yes, postmodernism are all pointing us to somewhere else...
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IIRC from my physics class in college a long time ago, this isn't even a "somehow." It's that complex numbers were formulated and used because they were useful in physics, specifically for modeling behaviors of real-world objects, not some obscure electromagnetism effects happening in a circuit or whatever. I wish I could remember the details and/or how apocryphal the story was, but it's certainly one of the less intuitive things that square-roots of negative numbers are so useful in real-world physics, looking at math from the outside.
This isn't true. They were originally developed to solve equations. The physics applications came much later
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Nah; the whole reason imaginary numbers are called "imaginary" is that they were first used in formal, temporary, intermediate results in algorithms for calculating the "real" cubic/quartic polynomial roots that people care about. That was like 1600. I think Euler's formula a century later was when engineers and physicists first really started treating complex numbers as things of non-temporary interest, and quantum mechanics was when complex numbers started to feel more "real" than real ones.
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I endorse this wholeheartedly, how exactly does one assess the objectivity of a moral maxim? If the heavens opened up and the Abrahamic God handed us a new set of commandments, where does his authority to set objectivity lie?
Personally, I'm a moral relativist, but I have no compunctions about being a moral chauvinist and thinking my set of values are superior and ought to be promulgated. Any disagreeing is welcome to do the same, neither of us can stop each other after all.
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As with all sorts of similar solipsistic arguments, my response is this: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.
I think that was his point, we must believe there is order to the universe otherwise we should just do random shit for no reason, and religion was mankind's first attempt to discern that order, facilitating the advent of science when we discovered religion's limitations.
I agree with this angle. I think the stance of moral relativism is a performative contradiction -as soon as we have an 'other' we have to reckon with a non-relativist morality. I think morality gets mixed in with the locus of care where we apply it. Humans are very good at shifting this boundary and there are different solutions to scaling morality across different groups. Some cultures favour family, tribe over all else, but this is different from moral relativity.
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Motte: science doesn't explain everything so there could be something like a God
Bailey: science doesn't explain everything so Bible is fact
Yeah this is my view to a T. It’s sad because I would love the comfort of unshakeable faith in a Christian or other type of God, but I can’t seem to take the leap away from facts required.
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As someone who prides themselves on their internal consistency, you'll find me being deeply uncool with both.
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I think you can reconcile any religion with modern science, but I also think you are going to have some serious work to do.
For example, for christianity, the pain points would be:
Other religions would have different pain points.
Ironically I think the unmoved mover argument is very hard to reconcile with modern science, however it's more of a christian thing and even there it doesn't really matter.
Okay, I'm presuming you mean Pseudo-Dionysius here, lemme go check:
Yup, you do. It's not a forgery, it's a misattribution. We're getting into the weeds here, as the content of the work is distinct from the authorship. If someone pretended to be Isaac Newton, but the book they wrote was investigated and found to be correct in the mathematics, is that a discrediting forgery for the work? You are saying that "the guy lied about who he was, so what he wrote must be taken as wrong" but it's not that clear.
It was a convention to use recognised authorities to back up your claims, and to write "in the style of" or even outright claiming to be that authority. There was even in early times controversy over who the true author was, and whether you accepted it or not came down to did it cohere with your theology.
Now, if there is nothing in the work which contradicts established theology, then we're in the "fake Isaac Newton" realm: does the genuine work stand on its own, or do we reject it even if it is correct, because the author lied about who he is?
If it's contradictory, then regardless of who wrote it, we can reject it.
St Thomas Aquinas and others wrote on the nature of angels, and he certainly wasn't a forgery, so then it comes down to: what is our view of angels?
(If they were instead described as sufficiently advanced aliens or the Simulators as in the simulation argument, I think people would be more inclined to believe in them, even as a thought experiment, than as an explicitly religious existence).
You even get this recognised in Dante, as he describes the orders of angels where he goes with Pseudo-Dionysius rather than Pope Gregory, because it fits in better with his theological schema for the Divine Comedy:
Okay, what you can do is throw out all the theories of the angels if you decide "it's all forgery", but you cannot from that reject the existence of angels, since they are mentioned in the Scriptures. We can admit we're wrong in our ideas about them, but we cannot then go on to say "therefore angels don't exist".
I think the comparison with Newton, assuming you are referring to Newton's works in physics and optics, is unwarranted because him and Pseudo-dyonisius stand on opposite sides of an epistemological divide. Pre modern intellectual work was primarily about interpreting and finding truth within a canon of works of authors in the antiquity. We don't care who wrote Newton's Principia because they stand on the strength of their argument and of empirical evidence. You can't say the same thing about De Coelesti Hierarchia because it doesn't make any argument it just states some facts that have been revealed to the author through divine revelation.
When all of your arguments are appeals to authority, who the author is becomes extermely important. Are you really going to believe some anonymous guy that tells you they received divine revelation when they are also pretending to be a mythical character that lived 500 years earlier?
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Some? If we go even by apologists like Habermas there are only a handful of "minimal facts" about Jesus's life at all in post-enlightenment Biblical scholarship.
Think about it from the perspective of someone who is already religious: you are already prepared to believe on faith that the gospels are a historical account. Many miracles would have only a few witnesses, so it is not surprising that they would not be recorded by historians (there probably were many false accounts of miracolous healers at the time and it would get lost among the fakes). But some of them are so huge and public that they couldn't escape notice.
As far as I am concerned I only believe (1) and partially (6) of that list with any certainty. There's too much conjecture in this part of history, if this standard of proof was applied uniformly we would believe in the existence of the philosopher stone too.
Well, we're talking about reconciling with modernity so we should consider just what problems modernity is throwing up. If the claim is just that someone who refuses to believe in them through sheer force of will, fair enough I guess. I thought the point was to unify modernity and religion not just ignore the former.
And one of the problems modernity poses is precisely to the unity or reliability of Scripture. It actually strikes me as one of the bigger ones: plenty of books were entered into the canon because of their alleged authors. If we now prove the authors almost certainly didn't write it and we can glean minimal information, a Christian can say "well, God inspired us to canonize that book" anyway, but it seems way more novel and thus, a sign of special pleading.
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Given the claims in various books of the New Testament, there really should be independent historical verification of some of these events, if they happened at all.
Matthew 27:51-53 comes to mind. Astounding mass miracles seen by many according to the Bible. Strangely lacking any mention outside of that text which was written decades later by an anonymous author.
Yeah, all these so-called 'historians' claiming this guy named Julius Caesar existed and went around conquering other countries. The Chinese and South American civilisations never mention a word about him, just these "Europeans"! Fishy, that!
If Romans at the time also lacked any mention of his great acts outside of a single anonymous non-contemporaneous source then we'd be damned skeptical. Lack of ancient South American mention is obviously not relevant.
Astounding mass miracles viewed by many in the region, such as described in Matthew 27:51-53 as an off the top of my head example, should have locals mentioning it. Not the ancient Chinese of course, but the people in that region supposedly experiencing mass miracles.
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