Topic: re: argument from authority and what it is to be rational. (Read 1237 times)

Cogito · « **on:** July 07, 2006, 01:03:17 AM »

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Towering intellects like:

Augustine
Aquinas
Descartes
Newton
Pascal
Kierkegaard
et. al.

all believed in God, therefore so should we lesser intellects.

Besides their belief in the Christian God, what else do all these men have in common?

They've all been dead for at least 150 years and most of them for more than two centuries.

Do you think that it is only coincidental that most of the great minds that live today are agnostic or atheist?

Augustine is one of the most important thinkers in Western history. So are Aquinas, Descartes, Newton, Pascal, and Kierkegaard. But they all lived during a time when Christianity was a subject not to be reasoned about. They lived during a time when Christianity was assumed.

The quoted argument is like an argument that goes, "Because Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, Augustine, Aquinas, and virtually all other major thinkers of the first millenium and earlier believed that the sun orbits the earth, and not vice versa, we have good reason to believe that the sun actually orbits the earth."

But we don't have 'good' reason today to believe that the sun orbits the earth and we have every reason to believe that it doesn't. Today we know that those brilliant men were just plain mistaken.

Prior to the sixteenth century this kind of argument from authority was by far the most common form of argument used in disputation. Back then, the words of Aristotle and other ancient authorities were taken to be gospel. Arguments began with these authorities' pronouncements as unshakable premises. It wasn't until Bacon, Descartes, and others lived and wrote that the words of ancient authorities could even be legitimately questioned; and it wasn't until their words were legitimately questioned that knowledge about the world exploded.

A belief in a proposition that was perfectly reasonable five centuries ago, may not be reasonable today. That a well-educated person living 500 years ago might believe that the sun orbits the earth is entirely understandable. That a person with a decent education from any Western university today might believe the same is not.

Knowledge is not fixed. It is accumulative. We simply know more about the world today than we knew about it yesterday. We'll know still more about it tomorrow. I know more about how gravity works than Aristotle knew. So do you. Now granted, all of our brains combined wouldn't equal a decent sized neuron in Aristotle's head but that's beside the point. Fortunately for us, we don't have to depend on our own original mental discoveries about the world to know about the world. We get to stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and look and know.

All that's required of us is that we open our eyes and look without bias.

Bdean · « **Reply #1 on:** July 07, 2006, 08:29:48 PM »

Quote

Do you think that it is only coincidental that most of the great minds that live today are agnostic or atheist?

Now this is a great statement for disussion. Is this true?

Cogito · « **Reply #2 on:** July 07, 2006, 09:56:18 PM »

Yes, I think so. This has been the intellectual trend for the last century and a half and, post-modernism notwithstanding, should continue to be the trend as science continues to close the gaps in the natural world into which a god, like the Christian God, might fit.

There are few true conservative Christians (although of course there are some) who would count among the great minds of the past century.

Compare this to the fact that virtually every great thinker in the West prior to 1500 was Christian.

This is because our knowledge of the world has changed by orders of magnitude in the last five centuries. But it's not just that. Too, it's that the process by which we determine what counts as knowledge has changed. Even the very concept of knowledge has changed.

It's almost impossible today for an intelligent, educated person to have a pre-16th-century belief in God. That kind of certainty in belief just isn't an option in the 21st century for anyone but the unthinking.

Bdean · « **Reply #3 on:** July 07, 2006, 11:53:09 PM »

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It's almost impossible today for an intelligent, educated person to have a pre-16th-century belief in God. That kind of certainty in belief just isn't an option in the 21st century for anyone but the unthinking.

Cog. I appreciate your contributions throughout this board, and I consider it important to make that very clear prior to this next statement.

While I do indeed appreciate several of your thoughts and contributions, a statement like the quote about "anyone but the unthinking"makes it very difficult for me to take your comments on this subject seriously. It is so dogmatic that it truly feels like trying to respond to the claims of the well meaning Jehovah's Witnesses that frequent many of our neighborhoods. Do you really take the postion that belief in God is only possible for the unthinking? I mean, there are obviously a great deal of brilliant minds in the 21st centuries who were/area theists and/or believers in the reality of a spiritual realm inhabited by personal beings. We see these great minds in virtually every academic discipline and vocational path. While the thread started as a focus on scientists, this last quote seems to go beyond simply contemporary scientific knowledge, suggesting that anyone (not just scientists) who believes in God is unthinking. Indeed, believers in God and/or personal spiritual beings have contributed and are currently contributing enormously to society on a global level. We could look at people in human and civil rights, philosophy, literature, medicine, history, psychology, computer science, etc. It isn't too difficult to find national leaders, deans of prestigious schools, and innovative thinkers who have theistic convictions. Look at some of the scholarship coming from places like Calvin College. Incorrect at times? Perhaps, but unthinking? We could also examine some of the signficant contributions from Jewish and Christian scholars at instutions like Harvard, Yale, UW Madison, Stanford, Columbia U, Johns Hopkins, and UM Ann Arbor (all among the top research institutions in the country). I am pretty confident that you realize things things, though; that some in these positions do indeed have a pre-16th century view of a personal deity or personal deities. Perhaps some of these individuals are wrong to believe, but unthinking? Are you sure that you are not overstaing things a bit here? Or...perhaps...do you believe that non-theist scientists are the only individuals who are actually thinking individuals? That last question was not intended to be attacking or goading. I am genuinely uncertain about what your answer might be to that question. I am genuinely wondering if your critique is not just upon theists, but everyone other than atheist or agnostic scientists. Would you please help me better understand your position?

Cogito · « **Reply #4 on:** July 08, 2006, 12:45:14 AM »

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Do you really take the postion that belief in God is only possible for the unthinking?

It's odd that you would bring this up since it has little to do with anything that I've written but since you do bring it up, I'll answer it: No, it's not a position that I take.

I believe that what I wrote is true, though. I believe that it is virtually impossible for an educated, thinking person today to have the same kind of CERTAINTY in belief about the existence of God that many, in fact, probably most believers who lived before the 16th century had, including among them the thinking and the educated.

It's not stressed enough how much the world has changed not only in terms of what we know today about the universe that we didn't know in the past but also in terms of changes in what counts as 'knowledge' now, of how we moderns discern persuasive arguments from unpersuasive arguments, of the entire epistemic project from Descartes' time to our own.

All of that and much more has changed from the 1500s to today. What I want to point out is not the obvious fact that fewer people percentage-wise in the West today call themselves Christian than was the case in 1500, but that the belief in God that people who do call themselves Christian have is not the same kind of belief in God that Christians in 1500 had -- nor hardly is that latter kind of belief even possible today.

Bdean · « **Reply #5 on:** July 08, 2006, 07:51:16 AM »

Ok. Thanks for the clarification.

Cogito · « **Reply #6 on:** July 09, 2006, 12:03:45 AM »

No problem, B.

This is something to think about though, isn't it? If a god wants people to believe in him by faith then why should he make having that faith so easy to come by for people who lived in 1500 and so relatively difficult to come by for people living today?

For all intents and purposes there was no cold, indifferent universe to deal with for people living five centuries ago. God did everything back then. He brought on plagues and famines. He made the sun and planets orbit the earth. He created humans and animals, oceans and stars in the form we see them in today. God was responsible for everything and there was little serious discussion about it.

Almost without question people like me and virtually every other agnostic and atheist on this board would have worshipped such a god 500 years ago -- and been entirely sincere in the worship. There really was no other option back then.

Which brings up this point: Why should I and other like-minded non-believers be punished for no more than the sin of being born in the 20th century instead of in the 15th?

Why would a god who shares our definition of 'justice' punish people for no more than the crime of being born in the wrong time or place?

OTOH, if this god doesn't share our definition of 'justice' then it becomes farcical to believe that there will be justice in any meaningful sense of that word in the afterlife -- or for that matter 'love' or 'eternal happiness' or anything else, really; for if this god doesn't share our definition of 'justice,' then what good reason do we have to believe that he shares our definition of any word or concept?

If this god doesn't share our definitions of words and concepts then why should it be worshipped? What precisely is being worshipped in such a case anyway?

If a god doesn't share our definitions of words and concepts then this renders worship of that god blind and irrational.

Copernicus · « **Reply #7 on:** July 09, 2006, 02:01:37 AM »

I suppose that my only quibble would be with the definition of 'great minds'. I would rather narrow it down to 'great scientists', 'great philosphers', or 'great academics'. The fact is that there are lots of great thinkers who are religious, although I can't think of a single relgious conservative whom I would put in that camp. If we just narrow it down to 'great scientists', we see that many of the great early Western scientists held very deep religious views. Many, like Copernicus, were even priests. Newton comes to mind as someone who was extremely brilliant, but religious to the point of nuttiness. Nowadays, I would be hard-pressed to find a major scientist who is openly religious in the traditional sense, but it is easy to find religious skeptics among leading scientists.

Author Topic: re: argument from authority and what it is to be rational. (Read 1237 times)