Okay! So you may have heard of The Problem Of Susan, a literary critical view of what happened to Susan in “The Last Battle”, the final Narnia book. This has been quoted on Tumblr, I responded to that, and this is a development of my view of the reading.
A lot of people have done psycho-sexual readings of the line about “lipstick and nylons” and gone on about this being indicative of Susan maturing into a sexual being. Naturally, since C.S. Lewis is a famous Christian, this means that as a Christian he heartily disapproved of:
• Sex
• Women
• Women Being Sexual
• Children Growing Up
• Children Losing Innocence About The World
• Children Growing Up To Be Women Who Are Sexual
and probably a ton of other stuff too which I can’t be bothered to go search online for them to tell me he hated. Some people do not like Lewis, Narnia, or Christianity, and have a very dour view of The Problem Of Susan and like to tell us all how, why, and where Lewis is a horrid old Puritan sex-hater. Before we get into this, I want to say: if you don’t like Lewis, Narnia, Christianity or any combination of these, you’re free to do so and nobody can make you like them.
The problem I have with The Problem Of Susan is that it’s a very shallow reading.
First, there seems to be little to no reading of that part of the text as a whole:
"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"
"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia."
"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."
It gets quoted as “lipstick and nylons” and the part about “invitations” gets left out. And there’s latching on to “too keen on being grown-up”.
So what is Lewis saying here, or trying to say? “Growing up is icky, especially if you start liking boys”? To take the reading that he is saying ‘loss of innocence (especially sexual innocence) is bad, adulthood is bad, children should stay children as long as possible’?
I don’t think so. Polly is a grown-up herself, and yet a friend of Narnia. If Susan is now ‘grown-up’, then Peter - as her elder brother - is also a grown-up. But he’s here in Narnia. So if adulthood per se is not the problem, what is?
And here we get the view as expressed by someone in a response to my response:
Uuhh I’m PRETTY sure Susan got kicked out of the gang bc winklydinnkkkllllllllldl :/
Sex is the problem. But is this a plausible reading?
Well, sure. Sexual maturation, developing sexual interest and sexuality is all part of growing up. People have used “nylons and lipstick” as signifiers that Lewis means sex because, well, nylons: lingerie, fetish or at the very mildest sex fantasy fuel. And lipstick means reddening the lips, making them look like the labia, ready for sex.
(Look, if I’ve had to read these intepretations, so do you).
But is there a better reading? I think there is.
So here is the second part of what I think is going on.
Now, if the problem is that Susan is now sexually aware, what about Peter? (And Edmund, and Lucy?) On this reading, if they are still ‘friends of Narnia’ then they must have avoided Susan’s sexual awakening. Peter must be developmentally stunted and have remained a good, innocent, little boy mentally at least.
So for the proponents of The Problem Of Susan, the only mature adult is Susan, who is cast out of Narnia for that knowledge and that choice (Pullman wrote an entire trilogy of books in response about how sexual awakening is the means of becoming adults and independent).
However, I disagree. Let’s segue off for a moment about homosexuality (this was a joke comment in the original post to which I was replying). Lewis was writing in the 50s and was a Christian to boot, he must have had the same repressive social ideas as you imagine a 50s Christian would have, right?
Here’s where I recommend you read his memoir Surprised By Joy, particularly the parts about his early schooling.
Here's a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he's written a whole chapter describing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.
("This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely written about..." Well, yes, it does, and more's the pity; but it's nothing to our purpose at the moment.)
Okay, looks like this is going to be a long ‘un, so breaking off here for Part One before getting into Part Two
I’ve criticised the take that the Problem of Susan is reducible to the simple (and simplicistic) answer of “Sex”, and here’s why I think that.
Let’s look at the full version of the much-quoted line about “lipstick and nylons”:
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
“and invitations”. To drag in another writer, “What’s invitations, precious? What’s invitations, eh?”
Well, they’re exactly what they sound like. “Oh, you mean boys asking her out on dates, maybe?” No. Being asked out, yes, but I mean “invitations to parties and social occasions and grown-up events”.
I’m hobbled by the fact that Lewis doesn’t give us any exact ages for his characters, particularly the Pevensie children (Tolkien would have told us the day and month, not alone year, they were born so we could have worked it out) but we can roughly take it that for “The Last Battle”, Susan is old enough to have left school but isn’t going on to college (that we know of, at least not yet).
So she’s about eighteen or so at a minimum, and looking around online there’s an estimation that she’s twenty-one.
Let’s go with twenty-one: legal age of adulthood, but still young and inexperienced. Polly is a little hard on Susan:
She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.
Which of us has not wanted to be treated as a grown-up and chafed under “you can’t do that, you’re too young” when we’re in our teenage years, caught between no longer a child but not quite adult yet? And mostly we’ve had a simple view of what being grown-up means: nobody imagines “I’ll have to do my taxes and get a mortgage” when they’re contemplating what it will be like to be free and independent and nobody can tell us what to do or eat or wear.
So Susan was eager to be old enough to wear adult clothes and makeup and go to parties and have fun. That’s not a bad thing! The bad thing is if that’s all she wants to do, ever; if her reasons are based on vanity and selfishness. We all like to be admired, so if Susan wants the boys/young men to find her attractive and be interested in her, that’s only natural. But if she spends her time only going to parties, looking for flattery of attention, and trying to be ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ as she gets older, then she’s wasting her potential. I don’t think anybody imagines that Susan as an airhead is a good future for her.
Let me jump back into the memoir to show that Lewis knew about, because he had experienced, adolescent desire. He attended a preparatory school between the ages of thirteen and fifteen:
It is quite true that at this time I underwent a violent, and wholly successful, assault of sexual temptation. But this is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense my deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. ...The mere facts of generation I had learned long ago, from another boy, when I was too young to feel much more than a scientific interest in them.
...Pogo's communications, however much they helped to vulgarise my mind, had no such electric effect on my senses as the dancing mistress, nor as Bekker's Charicles, which was given me for a prize. I never thought that dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G., but she was the first woman I ever "looked upon to lust after her"; assuredly through no fault of her own. A gesture, a tone of the voice, may in these matters have unpredictable results. When the schoolroom on the last night of the winter term was decorated for a dance, she paused, lifted a flag, and, remarking, "I love the smell of bunting," pressed it to her face -- and I was undone.
You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of my life, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly different region. What I felt for the dancing mistress was sheer appetite; the prose and not the poetry of the Flesh. I did not feel at all like a knight devoting himself to a lady; I was much more like a Turk looking at a Circassian whom he could not afford to buy. I knew quite well what I wanted. It is common, by the way, to assume that such an experience produces a feeling of guilt, but it did not do so in me. And I may as well say here that the feeling of guilt, save where a moral offence happened also to break the code of honour or had consequences which excited my pity, was a thing which at that time I hardly knew. It took me as long to acquire inhibitions as others (they say) have taken to get rid of them. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.
So Lewis is going to be the last person in the world to condemn Susan for natural part of growing up. What he does want to condemn her for - is going to be developed in Part Three.
Part Three, and if you’ve stuck with me this far, congratulations! “Jeez, will you ever get to the point?” I will, I promise!
So here’s where we have to get into theology (sorry, but it is relevant, I promise) and here is a handy definition:
In Christian theology, the world, the flesh, and the devil have been singled out "by sources from St Thomas Aquinas" to the Council of Trent, as "implacable enemies of the soul".
The three sources of temptation have been described as:
world -- "indifference and opposition to God’s design", "empty, passing values"
flesh -- "gluttony and sexual immorality, ... our corrupt inclinations, disordered passions"
the Devil -- "a real, personal enemy, a fallen angel, Father of Lies, who ... labours in relentless malice to twist us away from salvation".
What proponents of The Problem Of Susan think Lewis is preaching against is the second, the Flesh (lipstick and nylons = sexual maturity and awakening).
I maintain that what he is warning against, in the person of Susan as she has abandoned her family and Narnia, is The World.
“But what’s wrong with liking fun and parties and having a good time and meeting people and making new friends?”
Nothing! And everything, if it turns you into a liar, a traitor, a snob, a sell-out.
And that is what Susan is doing, in her quest to be a ‘proper’ grown-up:
(W)henever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
She’s lying to herself as much as to the others. She knows Narnia and everything they say is real, but because it doesn’t fit in with the type of person she wants to be now, she’s doing her best to deny it and forget it. She’s convinced herself that it was all just a game and childish imagination, and she’s not a child now. Popular, cool people don’t believe in fairy stories, and she so desperately wants to be popular and cool and to fit in with the right sort of people, the people who throw those parties everyone wants to go to, the invitations she is so eager to receive.
And Lewis knew about that from the inside, too:
He was succeeded by a young gentleman just down from the University whom we may call Pogo. Pogo was a very minor edition of a Saki, perhaps even a Wodehouse, hero. Pogo was a wit, Pogo was a dressy man, Pogo was a man about town, Pogo was even a lad. After a week or so of hesitation (for his temper was uncertain) we fell at his feet and adored. Here was sophistication, glossy all over, and (dared one believe it?) ready to impart sophistication to us.
We became -- at least I became -- dressy. It was the age of the "knut": of "spread" ties with pins in them, of very low cut coats and trousers worn very high to show startling socks, and brogue shoes with immensely wide laces. Something of all this had already trickled to me from the College through my brother, who was now becoming sufficiently senior to aspire to knuttery. Pogo completed the process. A more pitiful ambition for a lout of an overgrown fourteen-year-old with a shilling a week pocket money could hardly be imagined; the more so since I am one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop. I cannot even now remember without embarrassment the concern that I then felt about pressing my trousers and (filthy habit) plastering my hair with oil. A new element had entered my life: Vulgarity. Up till now I had committed nearly every other sin and folly within my power, but I had not yet been flashy.
These hobble-de-hoy fineries were, however, only a small part of our new sophistication. Pogo was a great theatrical authority. We soon knew all the latest songs. We soon knew all about the famous actresses of that age -- Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Zena Dare. Pogo was a fund of information about their private lives. We learned from him all the latest jokes; where we did not understand he was ready to give us help. He explained many things. After a term of Pogo's society one had the feeling of being not twelve weeks but twelve years older.
…What attacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know. He gave little help, if any, in destroying my chastity, but he made sad work of certain humble and childlike and self-forgetful qualities which (I think) had remained with me till that moment. I began to labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.
I would be sorry if the reader passed too harsh a judgement on Pogo. As I now see it, he was not too old to have charge of boys but too young. He was only an adolescent himself, still immature enough to be delightedly "grown up" and naif enough to enjoy our greater naïveté. And there was a real friendliness in him. He was moved partly by that to tell us all he knew or thought he knew.
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back. Unless she lets herself harden into a caricature of a silly, vain attention-seeker who follows and drops every social fad as it comes into and goes out of fashion, who is always taking the cue as to what to say and think from others instead of her own views and opinions, and who continues to deny reality.
Nobody locked her out or kicked her out. She walked out herself, or rather ran out, rushing to go to that party or function or event or gathering of the real adults.
Well, that’s my take on it, anyway. Take it or leave it as you like.
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Notes -
In our discussions, have I seemed immune to evidence or incapable of reason to you? Is there an update that you think has been sufficiently demonstrated that I've nonetheless simply declined out of stubbornness? If so, by all means point it out. Alternatively, entertain the notion that what I'm pointing out above is the very pedestrian idea that evidence that persuades one person observably does not persuade others, for any given value of evidence and any given question.
Is it your assertion that there exists an objectively correct set of Values, and that these are derivable from reason a priori, in a way that compels the reasonable to concede to them? If so, probably you should do us all a favor and elaborate them. Several hundred years of philosophers have tried previously, but maybe you're the dude we've all been waiting for.
Postmodernism is the inevitable despair the Enlightenment arrives at, having exhausted itself in pursuit of an impossible objective: they believed reason would solve all problems, when it cannot in fact do that. Postmodernism is them admitting the failure while being unable to abandon the fruitless pursuit.
In any case, I can believe that there is a correct answer to a given question, and even believe that this correct answer is supported by considerable evidence, without believing that the evidence will be dispositive to those who are committed against it, or thinking that I myself am forced to believe it because of the evidence. The difference between me and the modernists is that I don't believe reason solves all problems. The difference between me and the postmodernists is that I believe there are in fact correct answers. The cards in your hand and in mine and face down on the table are in fact what they are, and what they will be when the betting is done and we turn them all over. What we are doing now is placing our bets, and then we'll see who takes the pot and who goes home busted.
No. It’s only when you really care that you serve this slop. The most committed postmodernist does not doubt objective reality and science when he estimates the likelihood his plane might go down, and he doesn’t will it into airworthiness. He too believes certain things are correct, there is nothing separating you from him. The sunday postmodernist is the only extant kind, living all week what he denies on sunday.
Postmodernists employ discussion of these matters (and attacks on reason and objectivity) as special protections of their worldview (here, theism). If you got the upper hand in a discussion, and I then launched into a tirade about will over reason, the general weakness of evidence, relativism, the uncertainty principle , incompleteness theorems and so on, I have no doubt you would recognize it as such.
Those arguments are independent of the matter. They function equally well for any other position. If you can will God into existence, protect him from evidence , so can your enemies with unfalsifiable racism or whatever. Your versions are equally worthless. The fundamental paradox of postmodernists is that they proclaim everything to be a lie, and then expect to be believed later. I have not been convinced of the validity of the former, but I can reject the latter every day of the week.
As with previous discussions, you round what I've said off to a reductive caricature, and then rail against it, leaving me the choice either to try to find common ground with someone apparently uninterested in seeking it, or else simply allowing you to have your say. The latter is much more attractive.
I don't think I'm claiming that everything is a lie, and I am explicitly making arguments that apply to my own reason as well, on Sunday and on every day of the week. I, too, choose my beliefs, my axioms. I, too, am not ultimately forced to conclusions by evidence, but interpret that evidence according to my axioms. I am trying to describe the process of reason as I have observed it in myself and others, the better to note its limitations.
Do you actually disagree that axioms in reasoning are unavoidable?
How often in debate about philosophy or theology or atheism or even banal politics or politically-charged science have you actually seen evidence be recognized as dispositive by all parties concerned?
Do you disagree that available evidence pertaining to a given issue in some way is effectively infinite, and that reasoning about that issue involves pruning the evidence down to a much smaller, finite set that is judged to be most relevant and dispositive? do you further disagree that the logic involved in this process is founded on one's axioms?
I do not believe I can will God into existence. I can choose to believe that He exists, and act on that belief, but it's entirely possible I'm mistaken. I do not find the evidence for his existence dispositive, nor do I find the evidence for his non-existence dispositive. It seems to me that I and everyone else is free to believe as they please, and take the consequences that result, whatever they may be. I regard assertions that conclusions on the question are "forced by evidence" to be absurd; it appears obvious to me that evidence can't force a conclusion on what the just outcome of the Israeli/Palestinian issue would be, or on the nature and existence of global warming.
In any case, it's certainly true that my enemies can adopt hostile axioms which are then largely immune to being dislodged by reasoned argument. This hardly seems like a shocking insight. How many wars have been ended by a keen logical proposition, as opposed to mass slaughter? And no, this isn't an argument that "might makes right", it's an observation that people choose, and that those choices have consequences.
I do search for common ground with you, desperately. And I know you can be reached most of the week, if it’s some scientific study, Jan 6 insurrection or supreme court detail . Evidence matters to you then. But here, despite daily proof against, you deny the common ground between us exists at a fundamental level. So from my perspective you have more in common with a marxist postmodernist than a christian honestly trying to convince me of the truth of god.
Or gravity?
No. I disagree that we have different axioms.
Constantly. Of all the things believed by you, me, and the average person, we are all 99% in agreement (call it common sense and science). Our common axioms allow us to stand on a mountain of agreement, only at the top does meaningful disagreement arise.
Yes, I disagree on both counts. The amount and quality of available evidence favours the truth on any given issue.
...Could you elaborate on why you believe this to be so? How does it work? If you live in, say, the Soviet Union in 1925, what force makes evidence of the truth available to offset the false evidence your entire society is engineered to generate constantly?
Or to put it in more practical terms, I would like to arrive at a correct understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It seems very unlikely that the moral claims of the two sides are exactly morally balanced, objectively speaking, so one side is probably morally superior to the other. Both sides claim to be the good guys, and demand policy accommodate their desires. You claim that the amount and quality of available evidence should favor the truth on any given issue, and this is clearly an issue. What is the proper way to go about consuming the evidence available, so as to determine which side the amount and quality of evidence favors?
Evidence matters to me now too, because it is useful for learning and communicating and making decisions. Sometimes it can help change minds by leveraging one axiom against another, sometimes it can embarrass people who deserve it by exposing their mistakes, sometimes when the axioms line up it can settle an issue. What it can't do is force someone to change their mind against their will. Usually it can't even incentivize changing their mind all that strongly. I know you've seen this, because you've been here long enough to watch many of the regulars slowly give up hope on the idea of actually convincing those on the other side of an issue, and slide into a sort of quasi-companionable enmity.
Maybe some related examples would help?
You know the problem with Utilitarianism, right? Utilitarianism attempts to reduce moral value to deterministic math, with the goal being an objective, scientific measure of right and wrong. Just one problem: the numbers are made up, because there is no actual way to scientifically calculate Utility. You can calculate things that you claim are proxies, but proxies are not Utility itself, and choice of proxy and method of calculation are themselves subjective, and therefore fraught. What they are trying to do can't be done at the scale they want to do it at, because moral value is not fully reducible to integer math. What ends up happening is that the people doing the calculating determine that, surprise surprise, the things they like just happen to be positive utility, and the things they don't like are negative utility.
LessWrong popularized Baye's Theorem, and talk about "priors". It's a handy piece of math, but the problem quickly emerges that in many cases there is no rigorous way to calculate what their prior should actually be. It turns out that one can figure out the answer one wants, and then set a prior value that delivers that answer regardless of the other terms, at which point the theorem is just a prop.
I am not trying to convince you of the truth of God because that's not something I think it is possible to do. I'm trying to point out a real, observable phenomenon in cognition that you can experience for yourself with a little introspection, which puts the lie to a popular bit of pseudo-knowledge.
Maybe I'm phrasing this all wrong and should find a way to reformulate it, because gravity pretty clearly is evidence, pretty clearly does force people to recognize it or die. Bullets work much the same way. So does fire, to a lesser extent. So does poison, to a yet-lesser extent, and there we have actual examples of large groups of people convincing themselves to drink poison in the belief that it will have some effect other than death. Past that, can you recognize that this self-enforcement of belief very rapidly tails off to nothing? That all beliefs we talk about here, ideological, political, religious, philosophical, are fundamentally not like our belief in Gravity?
Take free will, for example. I think I'm directly observing my use of it at this very moment, as I type these words. And yet some commenters in this forum argue persuasively that it does not exist, and that my perception of free will is an epiphenomenon. We've agreed that gravity enforces belief. Does free will similarly enforce belief?
I believe in God, and you don't. I believe in Heaven and Hell, sin and salvation, and you don't. Are these not examples of different axioms?
All beliefs are not equivalent. a hundred thousand inconsequential agreements can be outweighed by one disagreement of true and penetrating significance. It's true, though, that we share enough in common to make argument possible.
The quality of the evidence for the truth is greater than socially engineered lies. What can a ‘socialist realist’ film showing rural abundance achieve against your own eyes and stomach assuring you that your village is starving? Lysenko can have the loudest megaphone and censor or even kill all who oppose him, but his plants still won’t thrive. Evidence is literally growing out of the ground to denounce him.
Random sampling, sort by controversial, evaluate the best arguments from both sides, etc. If you’ve expended all the time you wish to invest on the issue, and both sides still look like they have a case, then that’s okay, it’s just low confidence 50/50.
You’ve got a strange binary view. Like somehow if something isn’t as certain as gravity or poison, that means evidence is meaningless, and you can just pick a side and start fighting. Evidence is never unlimited or zero. The enforcement of belief does not tail off to nothing, it tails off to little (a nudge).
No, I don’t recognize that. Ideologies and religions make predictions, they can be, and have been, falsified and discarded. The signal gets weaker, but it’s still there.
No, because axioms are at the bottom of the mountain. You can’t just pick a point of disagreement and call it an axiom. We believe in gravity for the same reasons, and they have nothing to do with God. And if we argued the existence of God, you would refer to those axioms, like aquinas did. This is all knowable, debatable, subject to evidence. But I am far more interested in convincing you to abandon postmodernism than theism.
Let’s say you’re right, and our beliefs are a matter of choice. Why on earth would you choose postmodernism? An ugly and dark path that only leads to confusion and conflict. Has it ever produced anything of value? Tomes and tomes of obscurantism, tearing down beautiful things to defend all kinds of falsehoods. Its nature as an anti-truth epistemic defense mechanism is so well-known that it was the original inspiration for the motte and bailey.
It makes you bitter and fatalistic, quick to declare that no understanding is possible. You say you’ve chosen to believe in God to improve your outlook on life. How has your belief in postmodernism improved it?
Upthread, I asked you:
You replied:
In this thread, when asked how you handle the huge amounts of data, you say:
All three of these are methods for pruning the available evidence down to a smaller, finite set, and two of them involve that process being shaped by axioms.
in another thread, you write:
...Which is exactly what I meant by "evidence is effectively infinite". Complicated questions have too many datapoints and too many arguments to actually crunch them all, so pruning is necessary. So apparently you do think base datasets are intractable, at least for, in your word, "practical" purposes. And again:
This is a perfect description of reasoning from axioms to prune the dataset to managable proportions.
I asked:
And you said:
But you agree that the signal does get weaker. You agree that reasoning on these topics relies on pruned datasets, with axioms determining what gets pruned, in exactly the way that reasoning about gravity does not. You do not have to rely on pruned datasets to reason about gravity; it is immediately and constantly evident every waking second of your life, so these questions are fundamentally not like gravity. Gravity is certain to the point of absurdity, these other questions are not. That is the fundamental difference!
...In other words, some questions are not certain like gravity, and even after crunching all the data you can manage, you are still left with a coin-toss.
You appeal to gravity to demonstrate that we reason from overwhelming certainty. I point out that most things we reason about are not as overwhelmingly certain as gravity. You reject my argument, but then independently assert your belief in all the premises it was based on.
Progress?
No. If something is not as certain as gravity, then it's less certain than gravity, and reasoning becomes proportionally looser depending on how much less certain it is. Poison is observably less certain than gravity, and so some outlier people can rarely adopt axioms that reason them into drinking it.
Elsewhere, you spoke of Axioms:
Yes, exactly.
"Since A, B, C, therefore God Exists" is an example of reasoning from evidence to draw a conclusion.
"Assuming God Exists, then A, B, C imply D, E, F" is an example of reasoning from an axiom to interpret evidence. If this axiom is a stable, long-term foundation for one's reasoning and choices, it is accurately described as a belief.
Axioms are chosen because they allow one to make a cohesive whole out of large bodies of evidence. There are usually a number of different axioms to select from, and they are generally chosen for non-objective reasons. They are beliefs that you choose.
The axioms you've chosen then shape which evidence you observe, and how that evidence is interpreted. So do more mundane choices of what to pay attention to, where to expend your intellectual effort. Between them, the overwhelming majority of the data you reason from has been chosen by you, with interpretations chosen by you, viewed in terms of axioms chosen by you. In this way, you choose your beliefs.
Some evidence, like Gravity, is so overwhelming that Axioms have to be overwhelmingly strong to shift it, and they usually aren't. But most evidence is not certain and obvious like gravity, but is uncertain and incomplete, and highly open to interpretation, and for these questions our choices are dispositive.
For me, God's existence was, roughly speaking, a 50/50 question, so choosing to adopt the axiom that he did not exist was relatively easy, and with that axiomatic perspective, His non-existence was obvious. But when further experiences drove me to re-examine my axioms, taking his existence as axiomatic likewise was relatively easy, and again, from that axiomatic perspective, his existence is likewise obvious. In this way, I chose to believe in God, not by brute-forcing evidence, but precisely because no brute-forcing of evidence was required. The decision didn't hinge on questions of objective evidence at all, and I still do not consider God's existence to be an evident fact of the sort gravity is. If you choose to adopted axioms that hold that his existence must be forced on you the way gravity is, it seems to me that you will be happily immune to such belief indefinitely. All I ask that you recognize is the unambiguous fact that this immunity is itself chosen, not forced.
Here’s what I understood, and understand, you to be saying:
I think: if the pruning is arbitrary, the evidence resulting from it is meaningless. For example, reading animal entrails to divine the truth of a proposition , is a form of pruning based on religious axioms – but this pruning, despite looking legit and producing what looks like ‘evidence’, fails to grab any real evidence and is more like setting fire to the tree rather than pruning it. What is the difference between the axioms that justify your beliefs and reading entrails?
My model is that for any question, there is a limited amount of evidence in the pool, and that evidence is heavily slanted towards the truth (that is, there is far more evidence that something true is in fact true, than ‘evidence’ that it is false ) .
You can get at the evidence through a number of non-arbitrary, well-recognized tests, like falsifiability. Due to time constraints, people do not run the full battery of tests on every question, they rely on heuristics and only one or two tests, even for something as certain as gravity. Since the pool composition is slanted towards the truth, most legit tests will return the same answer anyway.
Some questions, of course, don’t return a clear answer, but even then I find your use of 'axioms' or axiomatic reasoning, alien.
I want to know the truth . If I pick an axiom instrumentally, so that I will then believe the most comfortable answer, It’d be like cheating myself. And later, others. Because when I ask you for the truth, I do not want to hear what you find comfortable.
Why can’t you just pick your belief straight-up, instead of pretending you picked an axiom, and then ‘reasoned’ your belief from the axiom?
And you seem to be saying that most questions don’t have a clear answer, stuff like the effectiveness or poison or vaccines would already be fair game for axiomatic picking and choosing, 'open to interpretation' etc.
This level of discourse negation would be catastrophic for human understanding (yes, I know you’re a conflict theorist and pessimist), but this is unrealistic: at least this discussion and democracy would be pointless . The world simply would make far less sense than now if people weren’t forced by this kind of evidence all the time. And again, I don't see you playing the axiomatic uncertainty card if we're discussing some corona, gender trans, or college debt study, and you think evidence is actually on your side.
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