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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Philosophical classical theism along the lines articulated initially by the high metaphysical philosophers of ancient Greece would be the main alternative. Christianity is a synthesis of the scriptural tradition and this philosophy, but the philosophy itself is not inherently connected with any particular religion. In fact it was developed initially in opposition to the prevailing pagan religious mentality as a more pure and theoretically coherent conception of what we might call an absolute, unconditioned reality than the gods portrayed in the Homeric myths. This tradition developed arguments for the existence of said absolute, unconditioned reality that are much stronger (taken on their own terms) than many people are aware of or give credit for. In particular, refined versions of the cosmological argument - as opposed to popular apologetics versions - are very strong.

I say "taken on their own terms" because they require a fairly robust conception of the metaphysical enterprise to get off the ground - that is, the idea that metaphysical concepts describe real features of the real world. This ability of metaphysics to grasp real features of the world is what enables the inference from effect to cause even in the case of inferring a supersensible and transcendent cause for a sensible and physical effect. In contrast, if one believes that metaphysical concepts have to do with the way we think but not the way things are - so that causation is a question of how we organize and conceptualize phenomena rather than a real mind-independent relation between beings as such - then we cannot use causation to infer the real existence of something beyond what we could possibly experience.

I am still a novice in these matters but I suspect that this kind of meta-philosophical controversy is why theism remains controversial today in philosophy. In other words it's not coincidental, or due to anything like social pressure or force, that the whole philosophical world was theistic until relatively recently. Within a "realist" metaphysical framework of the kind that the ancient Greek philosophers are the chief examples, theism more or less tends to be the natural conclusion, and that framework is what is called into question today.

That's not to say that there aren't still controversies over the validity of theistic arguments even within that framework. The technical issues in the arguments are complicated and difficult. However this shift may explain, from a historical perspective related to the general philosophical atmosphere, the differences in the baseline perception of plausibility of theism and atheism.

Could you link a primer to this sort of theory? Very curious. I’ve read about Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” and the platonic idea of the good but haven’t seen the full theories laid out from the beginning.

I can try, sure. I'm not too familiar with online resources because I've mostly learned about it through my attempt to engage deeply with the history of philosophy, which I strongly recommend to everyone here; if I had a "thesis" of which I hoped to persuade readers, it would be this. There is much more than a lifetime's worth of rich content in the great authors, and much of it is little known today.

I know of one person on reddit who was particularly interested in classical theism and wrote a series of posts on one of Aquinas's cosmological arguments here.

My entry to this way of thinking was by reading some books by Edward Feser, who has a blog here that is generally interesting. While he writes from a particular (i.e. Thomistic and Catholic) perspective, a lot of his concern is to defend general principles of classical Western metaphysics against modern or contemporary philosophical paradigms, so reading him gives a decent overview of the Hellenic philosophical mentality from which all of this springs. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide and Five Proofs for the Existence of God are great; the first will provide a systematic overview of the building-block concepts like act/potency, form/matter, essence/existence, etc. and culminates in an argument for theism; the latter is, as the title indicates, all about natural theology.

For those whose interest goes beyond the beginner level, I would recommend just digging into the history of philosophical thought on metaphysics and theology. Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy is a great resource, as is Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy. Both are quite long, but that's what it takes to do the subject matter justice.

Thanks!

Why not try to make things more concrete?

Bostrom's Simulation Argument is persuasive because it operates off principles we can easily understand.

  1. There's plenty of resources in this universe to conduct computer simulations of whole planets and civilizations, let alone universes with more generous physics

  2. It seems very reasonable that highly advanced civilizations would conduct many simulations of their ancestors for fun or research purposes

  3. Therefore, most existences of pre-singularitarian civilization should be simulated unless

3a. Nearly all pre-singularitarian civilizations get exterminated for some reason

3b. Nearly all post-singularitarian civilizations refrain from simulations

Now this is basically theism with a cherry on top. It really doesn't matter if we're dealing with the server owner or a divine being, they're one and the same from our perspective.

I really dislike the First Mover argument since it just pushes back the problem of what comes first. If the universe needs a cause, why doesn't God? Far better an eternal universe, perhaps operating on a cyclic pattern. Eternity needs no justification or cause. We might be many layers down in a series of simulations inside an eternal universe.

I really dislike the First Mover argument since it just pushes back the problem of what comes first. If the universe needs a cause, why doesn't God?

But the arguments explain why the universe needs a cause and God doesn't, so this doesn't seem like a fruitful objection. In particular the basic structure of many cosmological arguments is an inference from contingency to necessity, and the existence of something contingent and actual implies an external reason why it is actual as opposed to not (i.e. a cause), whereas the existence of something necessary does not.

What it sounds like you're saying with more words than necessary is to quote Nietzsche, Christianity is Platonism for the people. In other words Christianity merged Jewish monotheism/apocalypticism with platonic idealism and there's good reason to think it's not too much more complicated than that.

So you can try to get a bunch of atheists to take idealism more seriously, but if that's your goal I would put it more straightforwardly because then they can actually do their own research on idealism with the various sources that are out there. I don't think too many will find it convincing but you may get some converts.

The comment you are replying to was just a sketch of the thread that has served as the key polar opposite to atheism in philosophy. One can believe this without believing in any particular religion, so the question of theism or atheism should not turn on whether any particular religion is true.

Whether particular religions that attempt to build upon this foundation have added enough to make them philosophically interesting in their own right is another matter that I didn't mean to comment on.

I am not writing this to dismiss what you've just written or try to denigrate you, but my eyes have glazed over by the middle of the first paragraph. Can you explain what metaphysics are to someone who has studied only physics? If you asked me to give an example of metaphysics I would've replied with the principle of least action, but that's not what you meant, did you?

It is the study of being as such, as distinct from the special sciences which study being under some aspect, as we might say roughly and imprecisely that modern physical science studies being as corporeal and quantitative (philosophical physics like Aristotle's studies being as corporeal but not quantitative, heh).

So metaphysics is about rising above particular kinds and concepts of being to the most general analysis of being. And there we get to questions like: we know there's at least one sort of being (the corporeal kind), is that it, or is there a kind of being that is incorporeal or supersensible? That question is the main theme of Plato's corpus.

And it studies categories applicable to being in general (not just one kind of being), like causation, or contingency and necessity. So there you will get questions like whether the existence of contingent beings ipso facto implies the existence of a necessary being, and what attributes a necessary being must have in virtue of its necessity. Or whether a chain of causes implies a first element in it and what we can say about such an element based on the properties it must have in order to be the first element in such a chain.

This may (or may not, like I said I'm still learning) help to explain why the validity of metaphysics as a discipline that grasps being as it is is so critical for classical theistic arguments. If all of these concepts - causation, contingency, necessity etc. - are just a matter of how we think about the stuff that appears to us, we can't use it to draw conclusions that go beyond what appears to us, because it's basically just a schema for organizing all of that (this is why Kantianism threw such a major wrench in philosophy). But if it's grasping being as it is, then we can.

I'd guess the lack of interest in metaphysics, then, is due to the wholehearted embrace of empiricism by rationalists. Most of us are mainly concerned with empirical claims, and this is pretty much a settled matter in this universe of discourse. There are no guardrails, of course, but maybe a lack of interest.

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