But for our purposes, those who call themselves gnostics in this context are pretty much irrelevant, because philosophy is not about conviction.

Do you think these people are a good representation of actual philosophy of religion?

Who exactly calls themselves a gnostic, apart from those fourteen-year-old wannabe tryhards?

But certainly nobody actually claims that they have absolute knowledge of God's existence. If they do they're a hack.

In terms of being logical and being very certain beyond doubt that trillion of dollars exist, you must have the requirement of first hand experience in seeing it physically. Therefore, you heavily believe trillions of dollars exist because of conformity, yet aren't 100% certain beyond doubt that it exists. — WiseMoron

Then this applies to basically any judgement at all, and agnosticism becomes an annoying baggage term. I'm an "agnostic" about the real external world. I'm an "agnostic" about my car existing. I'm an "agnostic" about how many toes my dog has. I'm "pretty sure" the real external word exists, that my car exists, and that my dog has twenty toes, but of course I'm not absolutely certain.

But since when did absolute certainty become a requirement for belief? Why is it so important? Why can't we just say, you believe God exists = theism, you believe God does not exist = atheism, you lack a belief in God = agnosticism? Making all these extra terms only muddies the water and makes things even more pretentious than they already are.

What's common between both positions is specifically: lacking belief in god. — VagabondSpectre

But asserting that lack of belief in God makes you an atheist is to beg the question. What if I just don't believe in God, one way or another, but neither do I disbelieve in God?

Not believing in God is a necessary but not sufficient condition for atheism.

Yes but it has to to with knowability, not belief. It's an epistemic position about whether something is knowable, not whether it is believed. — VagabondSpectre

In this case, the etymology of agnosticism is not really accurate at all.

A theist who claims their belief in god is based on faith rather than knowledge is a good example of an agnostic theist. — VagabondSpectre

But they nevertheless believe God exists. They may think they cannot "know" if God exists, but clearly they do think they have some reasons to believe God exists.

If you truly do not believe one way or another, then you are an agnostic, plain and simple. Nobody actually goes around denying knowledge of God and yet believing anyway. That's stupid.

Saying "I don't know God exists" but believing anyway is confusing and dishonest. Why would anyone believe anything they didn't think was actually true? And how can someone actually know that they know something? And why should anyone else care how "strongly" you believe in God or whatever? Why don't we just ask them what their reasons for belief are and go from there?

Nobody knows that they know God exists, but that doesn't matter at all. What matters is their belief.

The bad rap of atheism (people insisting it's a claim to knowledge, rather than a lack of belief or disbelief) is what drove people to try and redefine agnosticism in this way. — VagabondSpectre

Disbelief is a claim of knowledge. Any sort of belief is held because it is seen as true, even if one is a fallibilist or whatever.

Agnosticism applies to things outside of the god debate.

Many people are skeptical of human knowledge pertaining to god but they believe in god none the less. — VagabondSpectre

Which makes them theists, not agnostics.

How am I employing it in a bastardized form?

That diagram is basically cancer precisely because it leaves out, or rather bastardizes, agnosticism, or the mere lack of belief. Agnosticism entails not being either an atheist or a theist - it is to have an indeterminate belief. But for some funny reason both sides, especially the atheistic side, demand that everyone pick a side when in reality there are many people, myself included, who have little interest in the debate currently and have no wish to be associated with those who are.

To equate agnosticism with "weak atheism" is to beg the question and ignore the legitimate concerns actual agnostics have against either theism or atheism.

There is absolutely no need for any of these silly "sorting" diagrams, as if it's a political spectrum but for theological issues. You're either a theist, an atheist, or an agnostic, with the particulars happening within these three positions, just like any simple ontological debate. If I do not believe electrons exist, but I don't "know" electrons don't exist (wtf?!), I'm not an "agnostic a-electronist". I'm just an a-electronist. Nobody gives two shits how "strong" your belief is - because the actual strength of your belief is brought up through testing your reasons.

If you ask me "do you believe in God?" I will respond with "tell me what God is and I'll tell you whether I believe in it." I do not believe in the gods of organized religion, but that does not make me an atheist. It just makes me non-religious. That's it, folks. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along, move along.

Was listening to Portugal. the Man before they were cool...

How do you feel about the species being doomed? — Bitter Crank

I have asked myself this question repeatedly for a very long time.

On one hand, there is a tremendous amount of suffering, naturally and inevitably occurring by life simply being here. And a lot of the suffering humans in particular endure is caused primarily by a moral decay of sorts, where people just don't care about other people (and animals!) and treat them horribly. The history of life is a story of conflict, with the strongest luckiest turning out on top, only to eventually die anyway. It's all very brutish, clunky and disappointing. From this perspective (admittedly nihilistic), I would welcome the end of the human race and life in general.

But from the other hand, there is great beauty in the world, and I have increasingly become more attuned and appreciable of it. I find that denying the beauty in the world is simply an affirmation of it, for I would not need to deny it if it did not exist.

So from an ethical perspective, I think the end of life would be good. From a purely aesthetic perspective, it might be a sad loss.

The best case scenario I can think of is one in which everyone decides to cease reproducing, which would halt worries of overpopulation, resource deprivation, etc, which would largely stop international conflict. With no fear of running out of fuel or food, we could focus all our efforts on artwork and play. The finale of the human race, its apex, would be right before it ends in a furious flurry of free artistic expression. We could leave the Earth painted and with a clear conscience.

No, might does not make right, just as having power does not give one authority.

How about instead of "whatever begins to exist has a cause", "everything that I'm aware of has been brought into being by something else". The only problem with that change of premise (if it's true) is that you can't argue from me being aware of things having a cause of its coming to be, to there being a God. — Purple Pond

I don't see where you're going with this. To exist, at the bare minimum, means to be not-nothing. Demonstrations like the cosmological argument are typically not based in the sort of Humean empiricism you are advocating here, where reality is a disconnected disunity with only contingent repetitions.

If we take your Humean empiricist route, we can ask, why shouldn't what we aren't aware of have a cause? Or, alternatively, we can make our way back in history and find the moments in time which things we were not aware of come into our awareness. And we'll see there were causes for these.

Going all the way back, then, brings us to the hypothesis of God. You can say "this does not prove God exists" but this is basically akin to saying "there is rain, but this doesn't mean clouds exist above me". It's this sort of thing that makes me acknowledge that it's not entirely proven that God exists (just as the "rain" could just be a sprinkler) but I think the evidence favors the existence of some sort of uncaused, prime mover. Without any reason to believe it's a sprinkler, I'm going to believe it's clouds.

I'm kinda addicted to this song.

Stumbled upon a great piece by Susan Haack - "Scientism and its Discontents"

Love, love, love Tame Impala.

So which is more important in ethics; intention or consequences? — Mine

Well, both are necessary for the ascription of responsibility. You can't have one without the other. The intention is the psychological state and the consequences are the content of this psychological state.

So from a consequentialist perspective, the intentions that are directed towards the best possible outcome are those that are preferable.

The question isn't "why ought I to do what I ought to do?". The question is just "why do what I ought to do?" It's a question of motivation. I don't think the existence of some claimed obligation is sufficient. If it could be shown that I was obligated to kill babies, I still wouldn't. — Michael

Are you talking about motivation from an egoistic perspective? As in, what's in it for me? If so,I already said that morality does not require you to want to observe it.

Or are you referring to externalism/internalism schemes of moral motivation?

Anyway, it seems wrong to me to say that last bit about killing babies. Clearly you wouldn't kill babies not just because you don't want to get your hands dirty but because you think it's wrong to kill babies. The methodology of ethics rests largely on appeals to "intuitions" or whatever you want to call them. There isn't going to be some scientific or mathematical proof that killing babies is morally obligatory (nor impermissible). It's going to come from reflection. If you're a realist, then moral facts are exposed through this rational deliberation. If you're an anti-realist, then moral facts are created through this deliberation. At any rate, the discussion (hopefully) leads to a convergence of belief to an equilibrium.

So the fact that you find killing babies wrong is evidence that killing babies is wrong - unless of course you were ignoring good reasons against your view. But I doubt there would ever be a good reason to kill anyone, really.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Given that the "good" or the "moral" life (if that is even possible) is more demanding (sometimes exceedingly so), what rational reason do we have to be moral?

Personally the answer I prefer is self-evident: to ask the question "why be moral?" is to forget that morality is what we ought to do. Just because you don't wanna be moral doesn't mean you don't have to be moral. And I'm not talking about environmental constraints forcing you to act a certain way, I'm talking about the idea that moral facts may actually exist and act as justification for our intentional actions.

So affirmative perspectives get themselves into all sorts of thorny convolutions, including the idea that existence has to be improved. If it has to be improved, then was it ever good to begin with? Better surely is not equivalent to good. We are left with the uncomfortable notion that no matter how much exists, or what exists, there is always something more or something else that could be better. This is because existence is fundamentally an imperfection.

Yes, it's as if affirmative morality exists within a conceptual vacuum and is unable to survive a radical self-analysis! How strange that most people overwhelmingly see harm and manipulation as wrong but turn a blind eye when it comes to matters that threaten the stability and maintenance of the social order!

Any ethical system worth mentioning instantiates what we might call the "fundamental ethical articulation", or the principle that it is wrong to hurt and manipulate others without good reason. Given the procreation is entirely unnecessary, since it is also a given that the focus of ethics is clearly on the well-being of those who are sentient (to which the FEA would apply), it seems as though procreation has some formal issues for morality.

It isn't just a formal, conceptual problem, though. The structural, material aspects of life make this issue serious and irreversible. I have a hard time wondering why anyone would want to give birth to someone, knowing they will suffer and die, let alone think this act as morally innocuous as the second-order social morality advertises it as.

But what do I know? :-|

I think it's more plausible that Dennett has ideological prejudices so powerful that they can overcome any intuitive evidence whatsoever, than that he has experiential defects. But it's interesting to think about how phenomenological differences could lead to theoretical ones, and whether they have in the past. — The Great Whatever

Yes, this was essentially my response to your OP. It's a coherent theoretical idea but I don't really think it is what is actually going on. The idea of phenomenological differences sort of reminds me of the bicameral theory of mind. Literature was analyzed through a historical lens and what was found is that right around the time when Homer would have written his epics we find a distinct change in way language was written. Before then we see lots of command-like writing that is third-person, and not until later do we see actual introspection and the sense of "self".

But it's probably not true, either.

Don't Dennett and co. have no trouble relating to and describing the experience of qualia?

I suppose the metaphysics of the mind is still not developed enough to make any qualified statements. Your hypothesis, to me, is implausible. But it has just enough internal coherence, and exists in a vacuum of knowledge, that it might actually be true. I doubt it but then again I doubt most things.

Do they, though? Aren't they like beetles-in-boxes? Indeed the machinery of the world seem to have little room for them. — The Great Whatever

At the same time, though, there needs to be an explanation as to how the brain produces epiphenomenal qualia, and why it would (presumably) use energy to create something that is entirely useless.

Secular theodicies be like:

But certainly it seems qualia plays a more functional role than just when we are discussing its existence. Which is why I said to accept your argument would require we see qualia as epiphenomenal.

Now, if there are partial p-zombies demonstrably, why is it so odd that there might be actual p-zombies? Maybe the philosophers who claim not to have, or understand qualia, literally don't have them. And the conversational 'trigger' that made them realize this was someone talking about the 'hard problem.' — The Great Whatever

I think there are better explanations as to why some philosophers deny qualitative experience than the hypothesis that they are actually p-zombies. The history of their ideas is grounded in some kind of positivism and/or physicalism, and a repudiation of theism and dualism or any of the other theories on the "opposite" side of the spectrum. For example, the motivation for eliminativist materialism was not that it actually made any sense, but rather it saw that science was so successful in some areas and assumed this would carry on to the mind as well, reducing it away.

But say people like Dennett or the Churchlands are actually p-zombies. This has implications for the nature of qualia in general. It would mean it is epiphenomenal, as the p-zombies like Dennett seem to operate just as well as those who firmly believe we have qualia. However we can ask why it is epiphenomenal; why would qualia even exist, and why would the brain use energy to produce it (assuming it is a result of neural activity)?

So probably the better hypothesis, in my opinion, would be that those who deny qualia have an irrational attachment to a worldview that they prophetically believe to be the most rational which is nevertheless in major contradiction to our own lives, and that epiphenomena that last for an extended period of time are at odds with a universe that is maintained through parameters. In short, epiphenomena are even more strange, especially when only some creatures have them and not every creature and furthermore when they cannot be reduced to the physical.

I still think, however, that there is something profoundly different between religion and science, because the scientific method, though ritualistic, calls for constant revision of observations and prevents an established dogma of facts to become sacrosanct. — ichakas

You would think that, ideally, science would operate like this. But this is not really what happens. Established paradigms are pushed as dogma and alternative theories are not given their fair time. It isn't until an overwhelming amount of evidence, usually, that the scientific community will change its mind. A paradigm shift.

And further, although it is true that the "scientific method" (whatever that actually is...) is basically superior in most respects to straight-up religion, it nevertheless satisfies the need for ritual and the sacred, not just for the practitioners but the general public as well. Seriously, go take a look at some of the trending and bestselling books on science, especially physics and biology. The authors are falling over themselves attempting to show how "physics can set us free" or how "mathematics is the 'poetry' of reality" or the "greatest show on earth" or some incoherent lame-ass shallow bullshit. They have their head so far up their assholes with the belief that because they are scientists makes them qualified to publish their own shitty philosophical ideas as dogma. More often than not it's basically just self-help "look how beautiful the universe is! wow!" rhetoric that nauseates me to no end.

There is a recurring idea that scientists "know everything", or at least know a lot more than we common folk do. It's true, they do know more than the average person does in regards to their field. But my own experience and study of the history of science leads me to believe that scientists actually know more about the history of models than reality tout court.

It's hilarious to watch the mind gymnastics of those who claim to be superior in rationality and logic try to justify why they basically worship science in the way they do. There is no justification for the belief it will solve all our problems, and in fact there is a lot going against that idea. The "awe" and "wonder" one feels when doing science (or more likely, while looking at photoshopped pictures of dust clouds in space) is not "scientific" by any means and is the same thing the religious person feels, that "spiritual connection" with the One, the Absolute, the Singularity or whatever the hell you're into. The new trend, it seems, is to replace God with purple nebulae. m'kay.

Assuming my experience is not so far removed from the average, it looks as though science is an attempt at impartial and rational inquiry that either primarily or as an important byproduct satisfies religious needs: a community of like-minded individuals (ones' associates of fellow scientists), an emotional desire for the transcendent (the future apotheosis of human knowledge), ritualistic behavior meant to guarantee some consequence (the "scientific method"), spiritual leaders of knowledge (public scientists themselves), crusades of sorts (Age of Exploration, Space Race, nuclear power, medicine against diseases especially cancer, environmentalism, etc) that are prophecies for a future free of suffering and death (a "secular theodicy").

The point I'm making is not that science is bad, per se. Regardless of how effective science is, it nevertheless is not the product of our collective "unshackling" of religion - it's just another manifestation of this psychological need for religion. Without this need, science as we know it probably wouldn't even exist.

I believe that, contrary to the recent(-ish) wave of positivism and the optimistic liberal prophets, humans are not as rational as they believe themselves to be, and that there is a significant aspect of the human psyche that requires ritual, symbolism and heroic narratives. Religion will not "win" in the end, but it will be maintained, even if it is transformed into the collective reverence of scientists (priests), the scientific method (ritual), the acquisition of "facts" that cannot be doubted (paradigm dogma), and the seductive idea that one day, some day, science (alongside liberal democracy, or Marxism, or anarchism, or whatever) will solve all of our problems and rescue us from death (the redemption myth). We already see this happening (and has been happening). Similar ritualistic behavior is found in the legal and economic systems.

So basically, to get rid of "religion" is to get rid of an integral part of the human psyche. It is not going to happen unless or until there is metamorphosis of sorts, probably when we all go extinct or something.

Rule number one: Don't ever philosophize while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.

What is life? — Samuel Lacrampe

Suffering.

I don't believe that there is enough evidence for us to place complete trust and faith in this being that we have not seen, heard, or even experienced. — GreyScorpio

Nor do I believe there is enough evidence for us to assume there isn't a supernatural entity of which we would call God.

Methodological naturalism requires conditional atheism, but I have my doubts about metaphysical naturalism. It seems almost as much of an extraordinary claim to say there is no God, whatsoever, as to say that there is a God.

Probably the best position to hold is disinterested agnosticism. See where inquiry takes us and evaluate as we go along. But let's not pretend either theism or atheism are motivated purely by rational deliberation, because almost certainly they are not and indeed, if I am correct, cannot.

It's just too much of a coincidence to say it's just chance. — TheMadFool

What makes you say this?

God did it, duh.