Posted by George, Friday, 31 March 2017 8:37:45 AM page 13

"...we were taught (that came later) but first of all atheism, i.e. insistence that there was no God, in spite of what our parents would tell us."
While I do appreciate your experience, your attempt to confound my argument is ineffective. So the communist education system was turning out atheists....? I applaud their commitment to the scientific method and its employment in a search for truth. You give no evidence of being intellectually harmed by it.

AJ Philips has presented an excellent refutation of any attempt to conflate the position of atheism vis a vis christianity in this argument so I won't occupy further space with an unnecessary refutation of my own.

I hope mhaze takes note and realises the futility of twisting history to suit religious purpose. The practice is prevalent and ubiquitous in christian argument. It is dishonest.

Yuyutsu

“As for "convincing", can over a billion people be convinced, yet you don't see that it is convincing?”

No, I can’t. Certainly the fact that many people believe something, is not, of itself, a proof of its rationality.

Just because theorems must be rational, doesn’t mean that axioms cannot be; and I don’t think you’ve given any reason why axioms cannot be rational.

Indeed we would expect self-evident propositions to be make logical sense, for the same reason we expect illogical propositions not to be self-evident.

If we think about common examples of axioms, for example “All men are mortal” or “All swans are white”, I think they are rational, given what is common knowledge about human life (everyone dies eventually), and given what was common knowledge about swans at the time when that statement about swans was considered self-evident, before black swans were discovered LOL.

As for the woman who argued that she cannot argue, I concede that is a valid example against me.

“but if you insist to limit your ethics to rational sources, then where will you obtain "good" and "evil" from?”

I’m going to argue that certain ethical norms are necessarily implied in the fact of argumentation itself.

Rationality is always about one thing *in relation to another*. The ‘ratio’ part especially refers to relation in certain proportions. That’s why mathematics is, par excellence, the domain of rationality: all the real-world and qualitative differences of things are abstracted away, and we are left dealing with the pure ratios and proportions in relation to one another. Rationality in effect means that we can definitely establish that certain propositions are not correct; and gives us the possibility of objective validation and confirmation – even if only as to errors - which is why rationality is so valuable. Results matter. (And they matter for the same reason that ethics and economics and political economy matter – because of the physical scarcity of resources.)

We may arrive at our belief in axioms because of some intuition or non-rational factor. But that doesn’t mean that they *cannot* be rational.

(cont.)

If it were true that axioms cannot be rational, then there would be no necessary truth to them, because there would be no necessary relation of one thing to another, which is what rationality is all about. So even if we derived logically correct theorems from initially irrational and erroneous axioms, that logical validity of the theorem could not save the conclusions from being ultimately unsound as ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’. And there would be no way to know that the axioms are not erroneous, because in the absence of rationality, how do you establish any ‘ratio’, any necessary relation or correct proportion of one thing to another, within the sense of the axiom itself? The whole project would necessarily become a-rational; worse: it’s apparent rationality would be only illusory.

It amounts to saying that rationality could not exist in any practical application.

Therefore I assert that “man acts” is self-evident; axiomatic; and that it is rational because it asserts a definite relation between man and his actions: namely, that human action is purposeful behaviour.

I don’t see how any of your objections negative that

AJ,

>>Your comparison is fallacious.<<

I could have expected your reaction, therefore I did not address this account of my experience to you. Most of what you wrote is irrelevant to my experience, but I have to accept your apparent point that we are all “false” and “fallacious” who see things differently, and have life experiences, different from yours.

Pogi,

>>I applaud their (the Stalinists’) commitment to the scientific method and its employment in a search for truth.<<

I do not think this deserves a dignified response from me. [I do not think you would react to a holocaust surviver’s personal experience by “You give no evidence of having been gassed”. (which certainly does not mean that what I went through under the Stalinist atheists was even slightly comparable with what a Jew had to go through under the Nazi.]

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There are Christians whose Christian world view has degenerated into an ideology. And - as we have seen also on this thread - there are atheists whose atheist world view has degenerated into an ideology. In both cases it is futile to try to argue with them.

Hi George & Pogi,

Every ideological trend, including all the various aspects of the Enlightenment, can go off the rails and be taken to dreadful extremes: the notion that everything could be reduced to sciences 'evolved' into both Bolshevism and Nazism in their slightly different ways, for example.

Yes, our values have broadly been developed from Judeo-Graeco-Christian basic principles, often in opposition to them - that's precisely how Marx would have looked at it, in terms of Aristotle's thesis - antithesis - synthesis, but even that can be taken to impermissible extremes, particularly if someone gets the 'antithesis' bit slightly wrong, and then of course draws the wrong conclusions about 'synthesis'. But the 'rule' is still useful as a broad guide.

If one looks at the Enlightenment as a long road with many turn-offs and dead-ends, something forged out of both continuity with and reaction against its orthodoxies, then you realise that what Isaiah Berlin called the 'pursuit of the ideal' is both never-ending and booby-trapped. Even Marx went well off the rails given that his 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would have required (and did require) the extinction of the rule of law (in favour of pragmatic exigencies), and certainly would not have allowed standard, enlightenment-oriented freedoms, or equality before the law (not of all classes, for example).

Western life is thus based on a set of principles based on severely-tested Enlightenment experiences, which in turn are what have survived, or been derived from, the struggles within and against those Judeo-Graeco-Christian foundations. They're pretty knocked-about, and are constantly under threat from both Right and Left, sometimes both simultaneously, as is happening now.

But 'if you know of a better hole, go to it', as the old cartoon put it.

Joe

George,

A more appropriate word to describe what I did would be “respond”. By referring to my response as a “reaction”, your words imply that my response was emotionally-driven rather than rationally thought through.

<<I could have expected your reaction, …>>

If you could expect it, then why didn’t you account for it in your response to Pogi? We HAVE discussed this before, after all.

<<… therefore I did not address this account of my experience to you.>>

I would have thought that the reason for that was because you were responding to what Pogi said. Are you suggesting that you did consider addressing your post to me as well, but then decided not to because you knew I could point to the flaw in your logic?

<<Most of what you wrote is irrelevant to my experience, …>>

Well, that depends on what point it was that you were using your experience to make. The point you were making was that atheism played a central role in, or was a core tenet of, the communist ideology that you grew up with.

Which is fine.

But then you followed that up by falsely equating atheism with religion. To which I then replied by pointing out that it does not matter who insists what. What matters is that, unlike religion, there is nothing within atheism to support what atheists do beyond not believing in a god.

So what I said was absolutely relevant.

<<… but I have to accept your apparent point that we are all “false” and “fallacious” who see things differently, and have life experiences, different from yours.>>

Whether or not one agrees with me is not the determinant of fallaciousness. One’s line of reasoning is what determines that.

<<There are Christians whose Christian world view has degenerated into an ideology. And … there are atheists whose atheist world view has degenerated into an ideology.>>

The difference being, of course, that there is nothing within atheism to support the ideology that one’s atheism may degenerate into, because atheism has no doctrine.

There’s no need to be rude, by the way.