OK. I agree with you in general.


Amen to that, brother.

No, at least as I understand him. He is saying the trend is in that direction. But as an absolute, it is certainly not true. I personally knew a PhD candidate in Chem. Eng. who went on to teach at a top 10 school who was a Biblical literalist. He was certainly a couple of SD's above the mean in intelligence.

Lolz... I didn't even write that post initially. It is trivial. Any "notable" person you name, the claim is that there will likely be societal, upbringing etc reasons that can explain that persons strong belief in something that almost all smart people think is unlikely to be true.

This is of course orthogonal to David's claim which is that amongst people who believe their is a personal god, smart people are much more likely to have views like RLK/Bunny than you. Whether that is true or not nobody has directly refuted it who understands what it means. It is hard to take your claims about reasoning ability seriously (well obv nobody reading this thread does LOL) when you can't even understand what David has been saying. Every single other person in this thread has and was able to after they read just the OP. I'm honestly not sure if you do even yet.

I think there are very good arguments for accepting something mathematical axioms and very little for "god loves you" type stuff.

Yep, vocabulary is mine.

I don't see how david is saying that skill with argument makes it more likely to discern religious (or other) truth. Being smart does make it easier to see correct things clearly in nonreligious contexts and nobody really has a good idea why it would fail for religious, right?

How would you persuade someone to accept that any three points define a plane? Or that there are things called sets which have elements?

A+.

I may well be reading too much into his comment that dogmatic Christians should be concerned. DS arguments irritate me for a variety of reasons, so I don't give him much chance to explain before declaring him wrong.

Nonetheless , I don't think he's ever established it and my personal, idiosyncratic view is that interpreting religion is closer to reading poetry than it is to evaluating scientific claims and/or arguments. I view religion as an attempt to understand fundamentally unknowable concepts.

You can show that these assumption can be used as a framework for constructing models that predict the observed behavior of the world around us.

Yeah, you can show it's useful. How do you persuade them it's true?

What makes you think there's a difference?

Well I favor a realist semantics for reasons which are also not provable. (Same as my acceptance of the rules of logic, etcetera)

Irrespective - if utility is all that matters the Christian has the same out. The bible is useful for them interpreting their spiritual experiences. As far as this thread is concerned, there's no reason for literalists to worry that smart Christians find some different scheme useful. They will argue (and do) that if you 'invite god into your life', study the bible, pray, attend church, and so forth... you too will come to see the utility of the Christian framework.

Why should they have to prove their axioms when you're happy to give the maths guys the benefit of the doubt? You accept the axioms of set theory and see what happens before judging the success or failure of their scheme - why not adopt the same approach to literalist Christianity?

It's not "utility, according to whatever subjective standard someone wants to apply." There are different flavors but to my knowledge they're all a bit narrower than that.

I would claim that if assuming model x allows us to perfectly predict the observed behaviors of the system X being modeled, then x can be said to be "true."

If x is consistent with the observed behavior of X, and makes numerous accurate predictions, then I'd call it "true" but only informally.

If x mostly predicts the observed behavior of X, and there is no other model that appears to do so, I'll mostly call it "true" but sometimes I will actually include those quotation marks.

If x mostly predicts the observed behavior of X, but other models do so in a more effective fashion, I will call x useless drek and will probably be almost vindictive in my dislike for it.

If x makes few validated predictions but is at least consistent with X, then x is "speculation."

Etc.

I believe Christianity fits one of those categories, can you guess which?

To focus on the bolded (subjective standard you want to apply) - you'll recall that I conceded there were arguments which established the truth of mathematical axioms or other premises we accept without justification, but that they involved assuming the conclusion.

Here, you are defining true to mean empirically validated, then concluding that there are good arguments for mathematical premises but not for spiritual ones. The literalist will no doubt define true as 'in accord with the bible' and then come rightbackatcha, so to speak. Remember, I am speaking to DS's claim that they should be concerned at the intelligent prevaricators and there's no reason for that at all. The backgammon players may well be good at determining what's 'true' by your criteria - the claim DS is making is that they are therefore good at determining what's 'true' by the literalist's criteria. I don't see any reason for the literalist to grant that and any justification seems to me to essentially beg the question.

My own definition of true is different from both of yours, but isn't particularly important. I'm addressing things from the literalist's perspective (as that seemed the relevant point to me). I've kind of shifted focus - above I was speaking about my own rejection of DS's claim - based on my belief that nobody has any clue about the truth of religious claims (and in fact can't know the answers in principle). Thus my position is that nobody is better at it - we all score a zero.

The first one can be derived from a self consistent set of axioms... For axioms, I think it is very easy to make their case over their negations. Don't you agree?

No - that's my point. You have to start somewhere (two points define a line is perhaps better - "sets have elements" being another).

You can always set up a bunch of axioms and end with a conclusion you like (the literalists can do that too. It will no doubt begin with "1. The bible is the inerrant, word of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent creator...") but any conclusions are implicit in the axioms you are accepting without argument (and in whichever rules of logic you are also presumably accepting without agument).

Evaluating who is more likely to be 'correct' depends on what you mean by truth (as madnak illustrated by essentially defining truth in terms of empirically verified) or in cases where empiricism fails, by what you accept without argument. Skill at dinosaur extinction theories doesn't imply skill at knowing what the bible means.

I have essentially two strands of argument - one addressing DS's explicit point (namely that literalists should be concerned). From their perspective, having adopted different axioms, they have no need to worry - the backgammon players are wrong because they've very adroitly manipulated incorrect axioms.

The other addresses what I take to be his implicit point (we should all listen to smart people when they expound on topics none of us have a clue about). I reject this and have never seen an argument establishing it - he asserts it often enough and you seem to think it is self-evident. Nonetheless, I think you're thinking of scientific facts or logically derivable statements - I don't consider religion to be a set of either. I think it's poetry and you can't analyse whether Shakespeare was correct or not in labelling his young boyfriend 'more temperate' than a summer's day. Whatever he meant, he didn't mean what a literal interpretation of that would be. I maintain that "God loves you" is a similar type of statement.

Essentially, I concede a lot of ground in my interpretation of religion, though I'm happy to do so. I don't think religion answers any scientific questions and any interpretation purporting to do so is an error by the interpreter, in my view. Nonetheless, if I'm correct - there is no reason to think that skill with science will translate to skill with religion (at least none that I've seen articulated).

Ironically (and this may confuse things even further) I therefore agree with DS that the literalists are likely to be wrong in their arguments with RLK et al. That's not because science people are good at religion though, it's because religious people are trying to do science and are doing it badly by referring to some holy book.

But not all axiom systems are equivalent and they CAN (and are) be argued about. Euclid's parallel postulate was argued about for 2000 years. Mathematicians have spent a ton of time trying to disprove all systems of axioms. They are NOT accepted on faith. They are accepted (tentatively) because nobody can show they are inconsistent and nobody has come up with a possibly consistent competitor. Another option is that math, no matter what, will always be inconsistent and people have argued about that as well.

I don't completely understand what you're getting at here. I'm going to respond to different bits and pieces in random order:
I reject that and don't know any mainstream philosophy of maths which advocates inconsistency. (I know there's various systems of logic where contradictions don't yield trivially complete sets of theorems - at a metalevel though, I don't see this as defending the view 'maths is inconsistent'). Were you referring to these logical structures or to a broad claim about maths?
That's true, of course - I didn't present an axiom system though, I presented a few isolated claims and asked if you had any argument to persuade someone that they were true:

Any two points define a line.
There are things called sets which contain other things called elements.

You can follow madnak's line and construct an argument using a definition of truth based on empirical utility. As I said though, the only way to establish these as conclusions of arguments is by postulating other premises which are accepted as true without argument. Any conclusion is implicit in the premises and rules of logic used to derive it - there is always a starting point.

With regard to axiom systems, remember that I wasn't arguing that 'God is Love' was analogous to 'any two points define a line'. I was claiming it shared a property (not being provable, rather being deemed true by fiat or according to some other, arbitrarily chosen, scheme).

I was not suggesting that Literalist Christianity is a series of statements derived from a bunch of axioms. In fact, my view is that the sentences of Christianity are not even statements - they are poetic attempts to express ideas which we are fundamentally incapable of even understanding, let alone talking about sensibly.
Yeah - this was going to be my next example. If (as you claimed above) "For axioms, I think it is very easy to make their case over their negations." then let's see the case for accepting the axiom "Any two lines define a point" (an axiom of projective geometry) - it's easier to make that case over it's negation?
So they are accepted as true according to some view of 'truth' similar to the one madnak outlined above. As I said to him - this poses no problem to the Literalist Christian, he just thinks you're using the incorrect definition of true (which actually means "as written in the Bible").

I think you, madnak and the literalist are all wrong - I don't think truth relies on utility, rationalist considerations, nor on coherence with Biblical statements. I think it relies on a correspondence between the state of affairs being postulated and how things are in the real world. If I'm right, backgammon players are no more likely to form accurate religious views than astrologers - we're all incapable of understanding those truths anyway.

I missed this the first time around..
I accept them as true. The science is compelling and these are scientific questions.
Because I think you are incorrect to open the bible and read:


"6 Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.

7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.

8 Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”

They did so, 9 and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside 10 and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

11 What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. "


if you think this means that there was this guy who turned water into wine. Water doesn't turn into wine and the bible is not a catalog of facts, nor an account of historical events.

I don't want to go into what I think it means (as you know I'm not big on preaching my own peculiar religion) but I don't think it is a factual claim.

Shakespeare said

"Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

And I think you are missing the point to say he was a bad poet due to the factual errors in this sonnet. "Thou art more lovely and more temperate" reads like a statement of fact, but it isn't. I think "God is love" is the same sort of thing - evaluating it based on correspondence with physical reality is an error of interpretation. Insisting that it must be interpreted that way is hard to justify, in my mind (though not to an atheist).

No problem. Thanks for responding, you've made some nice points here.

You are correct, no mainstream philosophy advocates inconsistency because there would be no papers to write other than the proof of inconsistency itself Once a system is shown inconsistent, you can prove any statement expressible in the system and it's negation. So nobody writes papers assuming inconsistency because they are all trivial.

But we are fine with those being false. I would LOVE to be the person who proved the axioms of math are inconsistent. Even if somebody else did it, I think it would be great.


It's not by fiat. If you (or anyone) can do non trivial math with it's negation we are all hugely intersested. If you can only do trivial math you are only telling us what we already know, math might be inconsistent.

I agree

Of course the parallel line axiom (I think is equivalent to what you said) was by far the easiest one to negate, even though it took 2000 years for someone to do it properly. But keep in mind if somebody negates any axiom that doesn't result in triviality every mathematician in the world would listen.

I don't think I (or we?) are anything like literalists. I am deeply interested in universes where my axioms are false... would any literalist say that?


At the end of the day... I am sort of fine with not knowing exactly what "truth" is...(tarksi has a theorem about it, but I never actually fully got it and don't think it's relevant here) just because I am not even sure it is possible for me to obtain or how I would know I obtained it if I had it. But I like doing math in the same way I like music. I personally don't think my axioms are comparable to literalists axioms.

You may be on to something. Dr. Jones classifies the love from God as irrational. He explains the lamp stand in the tabernacle represents God's love and also explains how it represents the mathematical fraction 22/7 that represent pi (3.14)

"Pi is the main feature of a circle, because the circumference of a circle is the diameter multiplied by pi. A circle represents eternity, because of its never-ending cycle. Pi itself is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and sixteen is the biblical number of love. Thus, the "word" in the lamp stand is symbolized by the word: love.

Moreover pi is also never-ending, because the fraction of 22/7 never ends. It is 3.14159...and has no ending or repeat, even to a hundred trillion calculations, as modern computers have shown. Thus, it is called an irrational number, because the love of God itself is irrational to the human mind."

Quote from Dr. Stephen E. Jones' chapter 1 to "The Laws of Spiritual Warfare"
http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.o...ter.cfm?CID=78

What about the resurrection? Do you accept that everything about science says that a dead organism cannot come back to life in its original state before death?

I get that. The majority of intelligent Christians accept these accounts as allegorical.

I don't take this sonnet as making factual claims at all. In fact, the very first line states that what follows is merely a comparison.

I'd agree that "God is love" is the same sort of thing. But Jesus raising Lazarus is not. Again, if you don't subscribe to such miracles, then I'm still left wondering: Why Christianity? Is it because you have a preference for Christian allegories?

I'm sorry. I sometimes feel like I'm more demanding in asking for your justifications than others. But that's only because I'm more intrigued by your position. You are capable of making a better case for skepticism to other Christians than most atheists, yet are still yourself, a Christian. I would love to understand it. It makes me wonder if I would still be capable of having faith if I only knew the logic you're employing in this one specific area.

Not quite true.

As to the general topic, I am surprised that no one has been more assiduous in challenging the factual premise in Sklansky's argument. He seems to understand liberal theism as primarily being a position of epistemic humility with regard to the claims of theistic religion. First, it should be pointed out that this is not what is standardly meant by "liberal theist."

Liberal versions of theistic religions typically involve accepting different theological claims, not the strength with which you hold those claims. In fact, it is entirely possible (I would say common) for a liberal theist to be more certain in her religious beliefs than someone who is a more traditional theist. I suspect there is a correlation between this kind of liberal theism and IQ.

But as Sklansky seems to be using these terms, I'm just not certain he is correct that there exists a correlation between IQ and liberal theism. I have a couple basic reasons for this. First, in some similar cases, such as politics, we actually see a correlation between certainty (or partisanship, ideological consistency) and high levels of political knowledge. And second, many stupid people have very shallow religious beliefs--when you discuss them, you quickly realize that these beliefs are barely understood and are not held with much certainty at all.

The literalist's definition of truth is essentially isolated from the rest of reality. In order to apply it, the literalist has to beg the question himself.

In terms of actually refuting the literalist from the literalist's own perspective, I don't think it can be done without either begging the question or establishing a contradiction in the literalist's views. And I don't think the former is a great strategy. I also think the latter tends to fail even when there are demonstrable contradictions (which isn't always the case).

So in terms of David's project, I think it's doomed to failure. If someone really does take Biblical inerrancy as a foundational axiom, there's nothing to be done.