Saturday, November 13, 2021

On Medium: Are Atheists Overconfident in Reason?

Here's an article about how reason historically undermined itself and turned new atheism into a futile sales job.

21 comments:

  1. Perhaps the flaw was not in God or reason, but in ourselves. Martin Luther characterized Reason as a whore because it is so easily used to justify anything we might want to do or believe in. Of course, Faith is no different. Isn't it interesting that God just happens to hate all the things his worshipers hate?

    Socrates knew very well how easily reason could be abused. This was his peeve with the Sophists. He knew that the language games the Sophists played no more represented true reason than the Christian Fundamentalist's bigotry reflects genuine spirituality. Reason, in the Socratic sense, was more than simply a set of rules that could be formalized the way George Boole did. Our faculty of reason allowed us to glimpse into the world of forms, among which there was the Good.

    I believe that it was this broader sense of reason which informed the ethics the pre-modern philosophers &, to some degree, the enlightened era ones as well even if they rejected Plato's metaphysics. How else could Voltaire have justified a line like "Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

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    1. Yet what I wanted to get across is the idea that reason is a tool for dismantling things to benefit us, and that reason eventually dismantled itself (in cognitive science and postmodern philosophy). So now idolizing reason in the scientistic or carefree optimistic manner of the secular humanist is about as gauche as religious fundamentalism. We should be humble in using reason (logic, analysis, and science) to assess the rationality of beliefs, which leaves the door open for existentialism and for aesthetic or other nonrational assessments.

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    2. Sybok, I think, in a way, what Boole and other philosophers/mathematicians like him (Tarski, Frege, etc.) did is more down to earth and humble than the socratic (platonic) presumption. I agree with Ben in that we should be humble in respect of what we can achieve with reason and that positivist thinking tends to idolize reason and 'progress', which is obviously unjustified. Nevertheless, a more 'naturalized' view of reason, as that of the aforementioned philosophers, is closer to the truth, I think.

      As a faculty, all that reason permits us is to formalize our thinking and discover logical or mathematical truths. However, as a tool to discover nature, as an empirical faculty, it is an imperfect instrument.

      With this in mind, I think we can, indeed, use reason to justify pretty much anything, as long as we don't contradict ourselves and don't express erroneous empirical judgements. In other words, my view is that reason in itself and ethics are independent. All ethics are rational, but reason itself is neither good nor bad.

      The ground to say that something is bad, I believe, ultimately doesn't rest on a rational faculty, but in a more instinctual, 'primitive', condition. We know it in our gut, so to speak, as it has been conditioned by a myriad of factors, none of them rational.

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    3. Kevin, I usually find myself agreeing that logic is great for making sense of the facts but lousy at discovering them; though I also occasionally have my doubts. Even as a child I seemed to have some queer conceptions of right & wrong that could not be accounted for by my upbringing, religion, or social milieu. Where did I get them from?

      Logic is not purely descriptive. The laws of logic are also normative whenever we use them to analyze an argument. And if logic can be both prescriptive & descriptive, then why not ethics too? Perhaps the Good does exist after all & is no more counterfactual than a perfect circle. If we can't find a perfect circle in nature do we then dismiss geometry as nothing but airy faery speculation? Or do we use that knowledge to build the best circles we can, even if they never come out perfect? Sometimes I wonder if we have simply lost the full use of our reason. If we could rise above our linguistic games would we see the Good & know it just as well as we know the Pythagorean theorem?

      P.S. I think it should be noted that Boole (according to his wife) had a mystical experience when he was 17 that apparently inspired his later work on formal logic. He was also a convinced Deist (or theist, or pantheist -- it isn't clear) who didn't blush at attempting to examine God analytically. So humble he wasn't.

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    4. Ben, I agree that reason has its limits. Game theory was useful at modeling animal behavior, but failed disastrously when economists used it to predict human human behavior. There are countless examples of reasoning falling short of even the most practical aims.

      However, I'm not so certain that reason undermines itself. Are you referring to things like Russell's paradox or Gödel's incompleteness proof? In that case I'd say that Russell's paradox only applies to a certain subset of reason, but doesn't undermine it as a whole. Gödel's incompleteness proof says more about the limits of our mathematical knowledge than mathematics itself. The problem I see with using reason to undermine reason is that the strategy presupposes the very validity of what it attacks. It would be like exorcizing demons in the name of Beelzebub: it might work, but if it does that's only because you've invoked the name of their lord.

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    5. ''existentialism and for aesthetic or other nonrational assessments.''

      Why do you believe existentialism is not rational

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    6. Sybok, I might have been using some hyperbole in laying out this thesis about the implosion of reason. It's a question of skepticism applied to skepticism. This is what I've called hyperskepticism, which is the postmodern condition.

      I'm not saying logic and science no longer work. I'm saying they've lost some of their mystique. Postmodern relativists take this hyper-doubt too far, though. They say there's no such thing as pure reason or objectivity, but just more and more politics and prejudice, ploys for power disguised with fake disinterest. I don't go all the way into that cynicism. Instead, I end up with a pragmatic approach to reason, which lies somewhere between the utopian modern myths and unremitting postmodern jadedness.

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    7. Sybok,
      "...Where did I get them from?"

      Maybe it's in our very nature as beings who have bodies to have some natural inclinations which we then rationalize or express in abstract form through reason. I think we come up with the concept or idea of 'good' by abstracting what multiple individuals mean by it. So I don't think we're justified in thinking of it as a form in the platonic sense.

      "Logic is not purely descriptive. The laws of logic are also normative whenever we use them to analyze an argument. And if logic can be both prescriptive & descriptive, then why not ethics too?"

      Logic can show us when an argument is wrong, sure, but we're not using 'wrong' here in a prescriptive-ethical manner. It's not 'immoral' to make a mistake in logic or to do a miscalculation in math.

      "If we can't find a perfect circle in nature do we then dismiss geometry as nothing but airy faery speculation? Or do we use that knowledge to build the best circles we can, even if they never come out perfect?"

      I think geometry in itself is 'aery speculation' (that doesn't mean it doesn't have any value, it has the inherent value of any mental activity. I think literature and other akin activities can have the same value), however it can become incredibly useful when describing certain natural phenomena, the same with language and math. We just need to be careful of the signifier/signified distinction.

      "Or do we use that knowledge to build the best circles we can, even if they never come out perfect?"

      This is where we enter in the 'ethical realm', I think. Geometry doesn't prescribe us how or when or even if we should or shouldn't use it. The 'moral incentive' to make perfect circles must come from another dimension of the human being. I don't think it comes from his reason. I also don't believe the Pythagorean theorem, or any theorem, has anything to do with good or bad in an ethical sense. We could describe them using aesthetic criteria (such as when we talk about mathematical beauty or elegance) but even that would be beside the point, because it's truth value doesn't have anything to do with wether the observer finds it beautiful or not.

      "...So humble he wasn't"

      I didn't know that about Boole. Thanks for the anecdote. It reminded me of Cantor who, if I recall, believed that god told him about transfinite numbers, which, I don't know why, I find hilarious. It shows us how mathematicians can benefit from philosophy to wake from their 'dogmatic slumber'.

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    8. Maybe it's in our very nature as beings who have bodies to have some natural inclinations which we then rationalize or express in abstract form through reason.

      Well we can rationalize anything, but in many cases there didn't seem to be any incentive for me to rationalize. To take an example: I grew up in a strict Christian household during the late 20th century & yet I've never believed there was anything wrong with homosexuality even though I myself am not homosexual & for a good long while didn't even know any homosexuals. That at 10 years old I was saying there's nothing wrong with being gay even though literally everyone I knew -- my family, my friends, everyone -- strongly disagreed with me just seems inexplicable. Moreover, the rationalizations came later. I didn't arrive at my conviction through a process of deduction; I simply 'knew', from age 10 & on, that there was nothing wrong with any consensual sexual activity regardless of what my parents, my peers, the law, and even God had to say about it. Maybe I was gay in a past life.

      Logic can show us when an argument is wrong, sure, but we're not using 'wrong' here in a prescriptive-ethical manner. It's not 'immoral' to make a mistake in logic or to do a miscalculation in math.

      Ethical norms, legal strictures, & mathematical axioms are all prescriptive, though in different ways. It's not immoral to miscalculate, nor is it necessarily illegal to lie. Still, what these different prescriptions have in common is that they dictate what should be, rather than what may in fact be the case. People shouldn't murder each other, though they often do. Less ominously, people forget to carry the 1 every day -- though they should have done so. Nevertheless, if I can say to a student: "You should have carried the 1, but you didn't." Can't I tell the shoplifter: "You should have payed for that candy bar."?

      I didn't know that about Boole. Thanks for the anecdote. It reminded me of Cantor who, if I recall, believed that god told him about transfinite numbers, which, I don't know why, I find hilarious. It shows us how mathematicians can benefit from philosophy to wake from their 'dogmatic slumber'.

      It's strange that the most rational people (mathematicians, logicians, engineers) can believe in the most extravagant fantasies. Cantor, if I recall correctly, eventually went mad. Godel succumbed to paranoia & starved him. John Nash was certifiably schizophrenic. Emanuel Swedenborg spoke with angels. Lewis Carrol was an interesting case in that he never went crazy, but he wrote some of the most surreal fiction ever penned. Perhaps Alice in Wonderland was a sort catharsis for him -- something that allowed him to indulge his irrational side.

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    9. Ben, I think the source of the confusion might be that reason gets confounded with Rationalism in the same way science gets confused with Scientism. Rationalism & Scientism are philosophies, wheres reason & science are merely methods for arriving at different kinds of knowledge. Hyperskepticism blurs the distinction between metaphysics & epistemology.

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    10. Sybok,
      "... maybe I was gay in a past life."

      Well, Ockham's razor would dictate a more 'mundane' solution to the problem. I'd suggest something along the lines of 'innate tendencies', maybe similar to what Empedocles called the "love-strife" dichotomy. It would explain why, seemingly inexplicably, a sociopath emerges from a normal household and other such cases.

      "...what these different prescriptions have in common is that they dictate what should be, rather than what may in fact be the case."

      But there's a difference between what logically or mathematically should follow and what morally, ethically or, indeed, legally, should follow. In your example, the shoplifter could have replied with: "I don't believe in the value of property or money", "The shop owner had it coming", etc. By which I mean that the inferences in these cases are ambiguous. In contrast, in logic are crystal clear because the sentences are formal or 'empty' expressions. We shouldn't confuse logic with ethics nor with the external world. Logic, in itself, is useless yet apodictic.

      "...something that allowed him to indulge his irrational side."

      Very interesting. This made me think that, perhaps, we all cultivate our irrational side in one way or another. Maybe our ethical principles stem from an irrational part. If many people come to share them, then they cease to be perceived as such. If only an individual professes them, then he could be considered insane.

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    11. Kevin, I made the past life remark in jest; though I believe that our innate tendencies are something to be explained rather than an explanation in themselves. Reincarnation is one explanation, but it seems impossible to prove (or disprove).

      Regarding the crystal clarity of logical statements versus the ambiguity of ethical ones... While some logical statements are tautologies (like 1+1=2) & thus unambiguously true, not all of them are. While 1+1=2 is true by definition, the same cannot be said for a statement like: "All S are P, All S are M, hence, some M are P." It's a true statement, but it isn't obvious why it's true. I find it inexplicable that, out of the 256 possible permutations ('moods') of the traditional syllogism, only 24 are 'true' & can be employed in logical arguments. As far as I can see, those 24 valid moods are totally arbitrary; their structures contain no underlying pattern that distinguishes them from the remaining 232 false moods. It's almost like God plucked them out of his hat at random (joking). It seems obvious to me that rape is immoral & consensual sex isn't & I can rationalize the point if I like, but whatever axioms I start from to prove the probity of my argument seem just as arbitrary as those 24 valid moods.

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    12. Sybok, I don't think we're going to get very far trying to explain innate tendencies because, well, they're innate, which means they're not subject to ulterior justification. We can use them to explain a certain behaviour, but not the tendencies themselves. Now, I have no idea which tendencies of our behaviour are innate, I just pointed at them as a way to frame the discussion in a more 'empirical' framework.

      "...but it isn't obvious why it's true"

      I could be mistaken, but I think your example is a third figure syllogism. For it to be true, the major premiss must be particular while the minor, universal. Why is this so? I'd say because of innate tendencies of, in this case, our reason (it's different from the previous case). We can establish the truth/falsity of the permutations analytically (in this case, through quantification we know the necessary link between 'all' and 'some').
      The moods are arbitrary, but the consequences, necessary. Again, why is this so? There's no ulterior answer but the structure of reason itself.

      "It seems obvious to me that rape is immoral & consensual sex isn't..."

      We could reduce all of ethics to logic, I guess. But I don't think ethicists would be happy to do so. We'd like to think there are universal ethical truths which are immediately recognized as good or evil. However, from a logical point of view, this would be a petitio principii, because the truth of the syllogism rests on the conclusion following from the premises, not on the premises themselves. Now, the premises are completely arbitrary. So I could say:

      "All murderers are good persons (I)
      Jack the ripper is a murderer, (II)
      ergo, Jack the ripper is a good person (III)".

      The majority of ethicists, and, indeed, of people (I hope!) would disagree with the major premiss (I), but that would be logically unsound. As it stands, my example would be a classical first figure syllogism.
      That's why I don't think, ultimately, we're being rational when we're making moral judgements.

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    13. Kevin, you sure know your medieval logic. Yes, in fact all but the 4th figure syllogisms follow 2 rules:

      1) At least one of the two premises must be universal (A or E categorical).
      2) If one of the premises is particular ( I or O categorical), then the conclusion must be particular.


      The 4th figure syllogisms break these rules & yet they still seem to work.

      I once believed that our innate sense of logic was genetically hardwired into our brains through a process of natural selection since knowing how reality really is would increase an animal's odds of reproducing; but cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman has recently cast doubt on this hypothesis. Still, it's difficult for me to accept that anything just is a certain way when their is no evident reason why it couldn't be another way. The principle of sufficient reason dictates that if certain syllogisms are useful in arriving at valid deductions while others are not, then there must be a reason or cause that explains why. Plato might say that those 24 syllogisms reflect the eternal form of Reason while the others do not, just as correct ethical principles reflect the true form of the Good. What I'm getting at here is that if we are forced rely on seemingly unjustifiable axioms like:"torture is wrong." & "a particular conclusion follows from a particular premise." then we are left with two possibilities:

      1) Our starting premises are arbitrary, which throws everything that follows from them into doubt. Or
      2) Our starting premises are non-arbitrary in the sense that they conform to a transcendent, unchanging reality.

      My contention isn't so much that ethical statements must be rational, but that, like reason, they serve a normative function & thus must be rooted in something other than our personal feelings if they are to have any validity. If not, then ethics is neither prescriptive nor even descriptive except in the sense that it would describe the behavior of people who consider themselves ethical.

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    14. Sybok, I think the point is more that reason undermines us, and thus indirectly itself. We used to think reason was the mirror of nature, as Richard Rorty said. As we lost our early modern swagger, and entered the age of postmodern self-doubt, we interpreted everything more cynically. We lost our trust in the modern metanarratives. And we understood how reason evolved. So reason became a tool and truth was to some extent relativized.

      I talk about this more in my article on presuppositionalism. I still think objectivity and thus realism are possible, but only in something like a cosmicist or mysterian context.

      https://medium.com/@benjamincain8/god-idols-and-the-incoherence-of-secularism-1ee3a29079be?source=friends_link&sk=4a3be0c11ce3a16ce3bdc2b62ab3bcbf

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    15. Sybok,

      "...The 4th figure syllogisms break these rules & yet they still seem to work."

      I could be misremembering, but in the fourth figure, when the major is affirmative, the minor is universal. And if the minor is affirmative, the conclusion must be particular.

      "The principle of sufficient reason dictates that if certain syllogisms are useful in arriving at valid deductions while others are not, then there must be a reason or cause that explains why."

      Well, I think there's definitively a relation between the principle of sufficient reason and logic. Based on what Schopenhauer explains in the "Fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason", we could characterize such relation as one of homogeneity and specification. By which I mean that logic would be a particular (specific) instantiation of the principle of sufficient reason (this would be homogenous and general, as it includes all types of necessity: material, logical, mathematical and psychological). We need to be careful not to confuse reasons (logic) with causes (material world), because they refer to different types of necessity. However, they're encompassed in the principle of sufficient reason.

      So, asking for a cause for the structure of our reason would be misguided, because it confuses material (cause and effect) with logical (reason and consequence) necessity.

      The problem in trying to explain reason in the platonic sense is that it already presupposes the principle of sufficient reason to guarantee a valid conclusion. So, the principle and its instantiations themselves remain unexplained and unexplainable, we can use them to explain other things, different from themselves.

      Schopenhauer explains this better than I.

      "...if we are forced rely on seemingly unjustifiable axioms like:'torture is wrong.' & 'a particular conclusion follows from a particular premise...'"

      The former is synthetic, so it's not (sadly) immediately true or justifiable, while the latter is either analytical or synthetic a priori, so it must be true.

      "...then we are left with two possibilities:..."

      I'd choose 1).

      I think, however, that in logic, arbitrary premisses still yield apodictic conclusions, at least in principle, independently of the truth values of each sentence (in a purely formal way). But in other domains, such as ethics or empirical enquiry, yes, we can be sceptical.

      For ethics to be normative in the same sense that logic is, we would need a faculty analogous to reason for ethics. A formal faculty which can serve as a standard for discriminating between good and evil as we have one for discriminating between valid and invalid inferences. I don't think we have such faculty. For a long time, philosophers thought that reason alone fulfilled both, but modern philosophy, in the end, shows us that that is simply not the case, by subjecting morals and reason to unbiased, non dogmatic, analysis (at least in comparison to the previous age).

      That doesn't mean that we should stop caring about ethics. I think it means, rather, that we should treat it as we treat, for example, aesthetics. We can appreciate and defend a work of art without resorting to a platonic form of beauty that justifies it, and being aware that our judgement may not be shared by all, or appreciated in the future. That shouldn't need to refrain us from promoting and admiring such work of art, defending it against its critics, and encouraging the production of other works like it.

      I think this applies to ethics as well.

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  2. ''Nevertheless, these progressive critics have a point. You need merely look at the abundant landscape of modern barbarities perpetrated by so-called rationally enlightened Europeans, Americans, Russians, Chinese, and their client states — from slavery and genocide to the world wars and secular dictatorships — to see that the modern celebration of Reason was largely hype.''

    But how they define reason or if they say they are rational does not mean they are or were.

    The world is full of people who think they are morally superior and aren't.
    And it's also full of people who cynically say they are morally superior.

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  3. ''Likewise, if reason is our salvation, why did modernity repeat the savagery of the so-called pre-enlightened ages,''

    Capitalism.

    '' and why did new atheism itself splinter into a rabid mob of inept progressives and into the dark web’s old atheistic irrationalists? And why did reason ironically undermine itself in late-modern philosophy and science?''

    Maybe it's not the reason but the lack of it.

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    1. We might be able to define things differently, but I think philosophy and science eventually undermined themselves to some extent, as represented by so-called postmodernity. We switched from scrutinizing the external environment to examining our inner world, our mind, history, and culture. The result was the loss of faith even in modern metanarratives. New atheism and secular humanism cling to some of those myths, such as the myth that reason is a panacea.

      I have another article coming out soon on another of these secular myths, the myth of social progress.

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    2. I agree that to emphasize only subjectivity and history is quite misleading.

      I think there is a kind of stupidity cycle going on from right to left in the political and ideological spectrum.

      It happens like this:

      The right appropriates a real, relevant concept, for example, the truth, and distorts it to suit its poor conception of reality.

      The left defines the concept of truth based on how the right defines it and not by itself and denies its objective validity, believing that truth is only subjective or relative.

      So, the left contradicts itself in defending something and at the same time says that there is no right and wrong or objectivity.

      The right, on the other hand, enters into the contradiction of believing that its conception of the concept is universal but is actually a reflection of its own pre-modern mentality.

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    3. The dynamic between the two political sides, especially in the US, might also be compared to an abusive relationship. The man keeps battering the woman, but the woman stays because she's a little masochistic or she thinks she has no choice. Guess which political side is comparable to the abusive husband.

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