Dumbo The Ex-Christian -- That's Me !

[Llwellyn]

The Calvinist scientist who believes he must assume Yahweh the Trinity in order to conduct inquiry is like Dumbo the Elephant who believes he must hold a feather in order to fly.  The Calvinist Transcendental Assumption of God (TAG) states that meaningful inquiry presupposes Yahweh the Trinity.  Cornelius Van Til writes:  "This God of the Bible, who speaks authoritatively through his Word, is the presupposition of the intelligibility of human experience."  Science sits on the presupposed foundation of the Christian God as a pre-condition of intelligibility.  The TAG should really be called the NAG.  It is an assumption, not an argument.  The assumption of God does not have to be called "transcendental," it can be called "noumenal" in the Kantian sense of that realm beyond all human percept.  Calvinists have a Noumenal Assumption of God -- a NAG.  

 

But what work does the NAG serve in our inquiry?  I believe that Dumbo can throw away the feather and still fly, and after he does, the feather does not have the same magical quality in Dumbo's understanding.  Science does not have to assume universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, and the inherent rationality of the universe.  We need no magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world.  We can muddle through, we have been muddling through for a long time, and, with luck, we will continue to muddle through.  Or you can call it flying -- it all depends on attitude.  But it is still an absolute truth that a magical feather is a magical feather -- it is just a completely useless truth.  Here is a picture of Dumbo the Ex-Christian, without a feather.  What feathers are you still holding on to?

 

[♦ ficino ♦]

Great analysis, Llewellyn! I'm flyin' right now, no feather!

 

It's been decades since I read Kant. Can you explain further the difference between noumenal and transcendental? I thought noumenal has to do with "the thing in itself," about which we can reason but which we cannot perceive. And i thought that transcendental has to do with the necessary conditions for our thinking. ??

 

And what are the consequences of renaming TAG as NAG?

[Llwellyn]

The consequence of renaming TAG as NAG is to indicate the social function of Christian apologetics, in a tongue-in-cheek way.  We don't need a NAG telling us we have no right to hope...  Naturalism is a guess at the riddle -- not a transcendent assumption, but an inference of abductive reasoning.  It is not a guess which necessarily excludes any other hypothesis.  But Atheists have a right to guess -- to attempt to transform the indeterminacy of a situation into a more harmonious state of affairs.  And we guess that, to us, there are no gods and nature is more-or-less regular.  When I take a naturalistic stance, I do so not because I adopt naturalism as an article of faith (as another feather) but because, on reflection, it seems to be right—the best, the most reasonable, stance to take.  It is not an assumption beyond inquiry.  Naturalism has proved more efficacious than other devices for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.  It is more illuminating than a belief in Platonic Absolute Good or Yahweh the Trinity.

 

I think of Kant's "transcendentals" as being a priori concepts which are required for us to interpret objects of experience.  Transcendentals are justified by their necessity to mental processes.  A noumenon is something that is outside our perception, belonging to the world of the unknowable.  The Christian assumption of God is not transcendental, because it has no function.  It is noumenal because as Yahweh exists, he exists without effects that might conceivably have practical bearings.

[disillusioned]

 

The consequence of renaming TAG as NAG is to indicate the social function of Christian apologetics, in a tongue-in-cheek way.  We don't need a NAG telling us we have no right to hope...  Naturalism is a guess at the riddle -- not a transcendent assumption, but an inference of abductive reasoning.  It is not a guess which necessarily excludes any other hypothesis.  But Atheists have a right to guess -- to attempt to transform the indeterminacy of a situation into a more harmonious state of affairs.  And we guess that, to us, there are no gods and nature is more-or-less regular.  When I take a naturalistic stance, I do so not because I adopt naturalism as an article of faith (as another feather) but because, on reflection, it seems to be right—the best, the most reasonable, stance to take.  It is not an assumption beyond inquiry.  Naturalism has proved more efficacious than other devices for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.  It is more illuminating than a belief in Platonic Absolute Good or Yahweh the Trinity.

 

This is very good. I have often been plagued with Christians who have argued that Atheism/Naturalism is a faith-based position, and given that it is, it must be placed on an equal footing with other faith-based positions such as Christianity.

 

This argument has always seemed somewhat pathetic to me. It is the last resort of a believer who has failed to demonstrate that their belief system does anything of substance. It is nothing more than to claim stalemate. But further, I think it is fundamentally weak for the reasons that you outline above. Not all faith needs to be blind. Some assumptions are useful, in that they help us make sense of the world. This doesn't mean that our assumptions are carved in stone, or that the picture of the world that they allow us to form will be perfect. They just let us continue to muddle through. The same may not be said of the assumptions of Christianity (and I agree, by the way, that TAG is foundationally merely an assumption).

 

Personally, I hesitate to use the word "faith" when speaking of my assumptions, as I find that it has a certain negative connotation. This does not change the fact that my most basic assumptions cannot be justified by reason or science. I prefer to say that I trust my intuition, but only as far as I absolutely must.

[♦ ficino ♦]

I second Disillusioned in saying that what you've said in this thread is very good, Llewellyn.

 

As a TAGer, how could I respond?

 

First, I would go back to van Til and proudly agree that my assumptions about a Transcendent God are assumptions. I would say that all human reasoning must start from some first principle, and God in his triune nature is that.

 

Then I suppose I would claim that the transcendent God assumption is a better one than yours because it "accounts for" rationality itself, basing rationality in the rational mind of God. I would reply that in your last post, you say you adopt naturalism because it seems the most reasonable framework. So your commitment to reasoning is prior to your commitment to naturalism. But your commitment to reasoning is not justified, because you have not "accounted for" the validity of the laws of thought. The Calvinist, on the other hand, accounts for the laws of thought by deriving them from The God Who Is.

 

Therefore, your entire system is irrational. The reasonableness to which you appeal is actually a blind faith commitment. The Calvinist's root assumption, on the other hand, does the crucial work of grounding human reason. Therefore it is a good assumption, and yours is bad.

 

So we adopt God as the starting point for everything else. You have no starting point except perhaps yourself.

 

Then I'd circle back to Romans 1 and say that Paul points out that everyone knows that God is the starting point, but the natural man suppresses this knowledge and, irrationally, makes himself the starting point.

 

Then I'd issue an altar call. (Actually, Calvinists aren't big on altar calls.)

 

Seriously, though, I'm waiting eagerly for your take on the Calvinist attempt to make God's existence a necessary assumption for rationality. So far I think you have asserted the contrary, but, unless I'm missing something, you haven't argued the contrary. Is that because we cannot construct arguments for X or Y as first principles? We can only judge them by the work they do?

[disillusioned]

Then I suppose I would claim that the transcendent God assumption is a better one than yours because it "accounts for" rationality itself, basing rationality in the rational mind of God. I would reply that in your last post, you say you adopt naturalism because it seems the most reasonable framework. So your commitment to reasoning is prior to your commitment to naturalism. But your commitment to reasoning is not justified, because you have not "accounted for" the validity of the laws of thought. The Calvinist, on the other hand, accounts for the laws of thought by deriving them from The God Who Is.

 

I actually think that this is a very important point. I'm just not sure that it leads one to accept the trinity.

 

If someone wishes to define "God" as "the source of reason", and then assert that since reason must have a source, God must therefore exist, I can get behind that. Such an assumption may be helpful. But I fail to see how this "source of reason" must be Yahweh the Trinity. That seems to me to be to assume entirely too much.

 

I'm interested to see what you think Llwellyn.

[Llwellyn]

Hey, thanks for the encouragement on this thread.  I talk to my sweetheart about these things, and she indulges me, but this conversation isn't very relevant to her.  

 

I do not account for the validity of the laws of thought, in fact, I, along with other scientists, specifically deny its validity:  "Our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy."  C.S. Peirce.  Nothing transports us from human reasoning to truth.  There is no realm of extra-human verification and validation, whether that realm be theological, philosophical or empirical.  With or without a feather, Dumbo has no confidence of his flight, except for the confidence he gives to himself.  That's all he has ever had.  The answer to Christian despair is Atheist courage.  The joy that we experience in reasoning is the only account that reasoning needs.  As Pharrell Williams says, we "feel like happiness is the truth."  It's easy to imagine that a Christian, according to Romans 1 would want to call this sentimental, irrational, solipsistic, ignorant, rebellious, evil, and maybe by their definitions, it is.  But I've respectfully listened to the NAG and I find myself unmoved.  Have they respectfully listened to me?

 

We do not have to join them in their hopelessness, when they say things like the following:  "The LORD knows the thoughts of man; he knows that they are futile."  Psalm 94:11.  "Every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time."  Genesis 6:5-13.  "[W]hat is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else?"  C.S. Lewis.  The point of thinking is the vital felicities that come from thinking.  This has always been the case for all of us, Atheist and Christian alike.  When we "think about thinking," when we analyze what we are doing, how, and why, we do so in the middle of our human projects, rather than prior to beginning our projects.  The principles of our reasoning are not the "starting point" in time because we are already half-way through our lives as individuals, communities, and a species.  That is why it is strange to pretend that accounting precedes application, when the reverse is the case.

 

It is correct that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation because any empirical test requires accepting the truth of one or more auxiliary hypotheses.  (Duhem–Quine Thesis.)  As Donald Davidson put it, "Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief."  But each and every hypothesis can be tested in sequence without assuming any transcendental truth.  (Neurath's Boat.)  The result of inquiry can be a more or less coherent web of beliefs, which is more or less justifiable to ourselves and others as we interact with each other and the flux of phenomenon.  Thinking is the adaptive response of human behavior to a "scene of risk," as Dewey calls it.  We consult what we are given as the state of the art in human common sense.  We don't have to pretend to have arrived at "Absolute Truth" and we can say with Socrates "as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do."  

 

[♦ ficino ♦]

This is really great, Llewellyn. If we keep on like this, you'll be ready to debate John Frame - or at least, Matt Slick!

 

Off the top of head reaction: as I sugggested a while ago, pragmatism seems as though it may be immune to TAG/NAG. You're going with pragmatism very successfully, I think, based on what I know so far.

 

Off the top of head question: in your last paragraph, it sounds as though you are subscribing to, or applying, a coherence theory of truth. A logician friend of mine says that's poor, that a correspondence theory of truth is much better. ??

[Llwellyn]

I don't think a correspondence theory is necessary for Dumbo's flight.  It's not necessary to modern science or logic.  I think a correspondence theory unnecessarily assumes the inherent rationality of the universe (i.e. the theory is a gratuitous magical feather in Dumbo's trunk).  The correspondence theory could be better for winning a Cold War against an ideological enemy.  It could be better for starting a civil war.  I don't think it is better as in "more honest" for a human.  The correspondence theory would be part of the thinking of a being who is convinced that he himself is alone God and thus his opinions are the "God's Eye View."

 

I agree with your friend -- my impression is that our beliefs are integrated with our environment.  Increased comprehension of the world is within reach.  "[T]he mind of man is strongly adapted to the comprehension of the world; at least, so far as this goes, that certain conceptions, highly important for such a comprehension, naturally arise in his mind; and, without such a tendency, the mind could never have had any development at all."  Peirce.  But a correspondence theory of truth is not candid.  We can know what the world means to us in the language that we use to describe it, but the ideas that we have cannot be realistically projected beyond human practices as they are adapted to the environment.  The truth of an idea is the "satisfaction which arises when the idea as working hypothesis or tentative method is applied to prior existences in such a way as to fulfill what it intends."  Dewey.  We have a sense of what beliefs have proven themselves to work for us, more or less.  What we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true.  And what's more, we guess that truth is not black and white, but more like a smudge, so the whole project of "true/false" is tangled from the start.

 

I don't think there is any hope of open confident fallibilistic relativism defeating a NAG in a public debate.  Just the nature of the two perspectives means that the one necessarily defeats the other in that contest, like rock beats scissors in Rock-Paper-Scissors.  In a debate I would have to admit that Yahweh may exist.  No-one is going to understand when I say that even so, I don't care because Dumbo's unaided flight is not inconsistent with the existence of magical feathers.  I have a naturalistic stance, but if the universe is as unbounded as I suspect that it is, then Yahweh's existence is probably inevitable.  He exists, along with Allah, Zeus, Mithras, Ahura Mazda, Shiva, Kali -- all together roiling in a creative war.  Human beings spring from the ashes of the Titans, as the Greek myth has it.  Titanomachy is probably no better and only a little bit worse than C.S. Peirce's Tychism for describing the flux which impinges into our human sensation.  But for us, in terms of what is humanly intelligible, "man is the measure of all things; of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not."  Protagoras.