The issue, for the purposes of this discussion, is whether or not these two presuppositions are absolute presuppositions of a materialist point of view. — Clarky

Of course the absolute presupposition of materialism is that matter - nowadays, matter/energy - are the only real substances.

When I said "substance" I meant matter and energy. — Clarky

It's not a mistake, so much as a very pervasive confusion in philosophy, in particular.

The everyday meaning of substance is 'a material with uniform properties'. Examples might be gases, plastics, metals, radioactive substances, etc. The difficulty is, 'substance' in philosophy has a different meaning, namely, 'the bearer of attributes'. That is why you read the, to us, confusing notion of Socrates being 'a substance' or 'a substantial being'. Where it originates is in the Aristotelian term 'ouisia' which is a form of the Greek verb 'to be'. So it is actually nearer in meaning, you could argue, to 'being' than to what we think of 'substance'. But that distinction dropped out of regular discourse over the centuries.

Imagine if Descartes' two categories were said to be 'thinking beings' and 'extended beings'. It's not quite accurate, but it hints at a distinction lost.

One can only recognize their position as just one more worldview once they have transcended it. — Joshs

Fair enough, for which the awareness of there being something to be transcended would be a pre-requisite.

Russell and Hawking may have ridiculed what they understood to be metaphysics, but this hardly means their own view of the world was lacking a metaphysical basis. — Joshs

Of course. The point is, their kind of naturalism is a worldview that doesn't realise that it's a worldview - it takes itself to be the way things truly are, once the world has been stripped of what they see as superstitious accretions.

[1] We live in an ordered universe that can be understood by humans.
[2] The universe consists entirely of physical substances - matter and energy. — Clarky

(1) is of greater antiquity than (2). The idea of an ordered universe was one of the motivating beliefs of the Greek philosophers and indeed of science wherever it was found. But (2) was until recently one view among others, proposed by the ancient atomists and other materialist philosophies. However, post-Descartes, which effectively depicted spirit as a ghost in a machine, scientists and engineers tended to reject the ghost and keep the machine. It was one of the characteristics of Enlightenment materialism. But the provenance of many of the other points goes back to medieval and even ancient times. But one final point I think ought to be brought out:

[7] Substances are indestructible, although they can change to something else. — Clarky

What do you think is the meaning of 'substance' in this context? I ask this, because I think there is considerable confusion about the philosophical, as distinct from everyday, sense of the word 'substance'. It is related to Cartesian dualism as mentioned above.

This whole subject is a massive can of worms, but I'll say a few words.

Regarding Aristotle and the subject of objectivity - I think the whole concept, or rather orientation, of objectivity, is part and parcel of the modern period. The word itself only came into regular usage in the early modern period. And I think the deep reason for that is that pre-moderns, even very sophisticated pre-moderns such as the Greeks, experienced the world differently - not as an ensemble of objects, but as an intentional creation, and so had different kind of relationship with it - an 'I-Thou' relationship, not subject and object. But that's a whole thesis topic, right there. (I think it's articulated by Owen Barfield in his books.)

As regards scholasticism - my very scanty knowledge of that started with a book called God, Zen and the Intuition of Being (from the Adyar Bookshop, naturally) which was cross-cultural meditation on spiritual awareness in Zen Buddhism and Thomas Aquinas (mediated by Jacques Maritain). It's not at all dry scholasticism, but about an acuity of insight into the nature of being. Why it appealed to me, is that it depicts Aquinas in terms of his spiritual realisation. (It can be found here.)

There was another book, The Theological Origins of Modernity, by Michael Allen Gillespie. Read that in 2010 when first posting on forums. It's an essay in the history of ideas, showing how the roots of today's scientific materialism lie in medieval nominalism. It documents a series of interchanges between some of the key figures - Descartes and Hobbes, and Erasmus and Luther, for example. The point about nominalism was that it dissolved the intricate Aristotelian rationalism that underlay the scholastic worldview and moved Christianity nearer to something like Islam, where God is an unknowable and completely capricious sovereign. It ends up belittling reason (for which, see Max Horkheimer The Eclipse of Reason. Review of Gillespie here. You see it especially in the fideism of Protestant Fundamentalism.)

The basic drift of all this is that the advent of modernity, whilst conferring immense power and comfort, is also deeply irrational. Man pictures himself, as Bertrand Russell put it, as the outcome of the accidental collocation of atoms, 'chemical scum', in Stephen Hawkings words, on a minute speck of dust in an infinite universe. That's the setting in which metaphysics is ridiculed, mainly because the culture has forgotten what it means. And that goes back to the medieval period, the conflict between nominalism and (scholastic) realism, as Gillespie says. History, as they say, is written by the victors, and now we can't even remember what the conflict was about.

A genuine (scholastic) realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom — Joshua Hochschild, What's Wrong with Ockham?Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West

His moves are always and solely directed towards his own image and his own status. — unenlightened

I believe you. There's an editorial in today's Sydney Morning Herald saying he ought to resign. And he should.

David Stove's Discovery of the Worst Argument in the World addressed this problem, raising the inevitable conclusion that there is no way to get out. — RussellA

I studied David Hume under David Stove as an undergrad. I liked Stove and respected him, but I'm afraid that his 'Gem' is rather a caricature. I mean, yes, there are those who abuse the kinds of arguments that Stove has in his sights, but there is a genuine philosophical insight that I think Stove is somehow missing. See this critique of 'Stove's Gem' (and I knew that writer, too - he's known for his writings on Aristotelian philosophy of maths).

As you wrote about Kant's theory of "Transcendental Idealism": "you can be both a transcendental AND an empirical realist", this indicates the phrase "Transcendental Idealism" should be treated as a figure of speech rather than something to be taken literally. — RussellA

That's really not the case, but I grant, it is a very hard idea to fathom. See this primer.

I wonder if we could find the middle ground, you know, pare down metaphysics into something more manageable? — Agent Smith

You have to begin with some kind of handle on what it means. As I've said, I feel as though I have gotten a sense of it, through an intuitive understanding of some elements of Platonism but what I think seems intuitively clear seems completely baffling to a lot of people, for reasons I can't really understand.



Thanks for your comments. Here's a tip - when you want to quote what another poster has said, select the text in question, and you'll see a floating quote button appear. Click (or tap) on that, and the selected text will appear with the correct attribution. If you want to reply to a post without quoting it, click (or tap) at the bottom of that post, a curved arrow will appear, click (or tap) on that.

Otherwise I would find it difficult to fill the kettle with water, switch on the kettle and put a tea bag into my cup if I didn't think these things were real and not a figment of my imagination. — RussellA

All due respect, you're misunderstanding what idealism means. Idealists do not think that the world is a figment of the imagination, although if you believe that is what they think, then I'm probably unable to set you straight on that.

I looked up the terms metalogic and metalogos, — universeness

Try 'metanoia'. That is a word with an interesting heritage, and it ain't a modern innovation.

Well I for one was trying to unburden it of what I thought were questionable associations with Chinese philosophy, to return it to its Platonist-Aristotelian roots.

You might expound on why, then, 'in Peirce’s opinion, “nominalism” does not take the category of thirdness to be real'. It sounds a thoroughly metaphysical argument. I think the thrust is, Pierce dismisses 'a priori' metaphysics, not metaphysics altogether. But then, that's probably a metaphysical distinction. :wink:

But it's defensible to hold that the Tao Te Ching has ontological, and therefore metaphysical, content. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I agree - I said earlier that in the vernacular sense, Taoism is part of metaphysics. But the more you drill down into those different cultural forms, the greater the differences between different metaphysical schemas appears. If you disregard that you end up with a kind of 'one-size-fits-all' syncretism, which is what most people mean by 'metaphysics'.

(My entry point into metaphysics was the conviction (or realisation) of the reality of numbers and other such intelligible objects.)

Johnson has won that particular battle, but according to many accounts, will lose the war. Commentator just now recalled that Thatcher and May both lost the premiership shortly after winning confidence votes.

It's a shame, because at least some of Johnson's recent moves have been commendable, such as his forthright action on climate change and his full-throated support for Ukraine. But he really does seem to be a pathological liar and - how to put it - not a man of sound character.

You stand corrected, — 180 Proof

I will generally acknowledge any errors I make, but here I don't see one. I said, metaphysics developed out of Platonism, which I then qualified by saying that this not necessarily confined to 'the dialogues of Plato' but encompasses the themes found in the broader Platonic corpus, going back before the historical Plato and developed after his death by other schools of Platonism.

So philosophical taoism (daojia) is just "poetry" — 180 Proof

I didn't say that, either. The SEP entry on 'chinese metaphysics' starts with the heading '1. Is there “Metaphysics” in Chinese Philosophy?' and continues:
This entire entry could be taken up with the question begged by its title: Is there metaphysics in Chinese Philosophy?' It seems a splendid essay in comparative philosophy and religion, but I still say that it's mistaken to present the Tao Te Ching as an exemplar of metaphysics, and there's a lot of qualifications in that entry about whether it should be so considered.

Noted, but also note the first sentence: 'While there was no word corresponding precisely to the term “metaphysics"...' And also notice in the introduction, that specific attention is drawn to the differences with European metaphysics. I agree that there are common areas, parallels, comparisons that can be drawn, but I still think it's mistaken to refer to the Tao Te Ching as a kind of exemplary metaphysic (especially if we're not Chinese speakers, but that's another can of worms.)

No metaphysics (archai) before Plato? — 180 Proof

As SEP notes, the word was coined long after Aristotle's death. And Plato never used the term 'metaphysics'. But the core concerns go back to Parmenides and the pre-Socratics. Gerson's books on the subject - one of his books is called Aristotle and Other Platonists - develops the idea of there being an 'Ur-Platonism' which is the original source of what became the subjects of metaphysics. Indeed Gerson claims that Platonism *is* philosophy proper, and that unless that is recognised, it has no proper subject matter (the subject of his most recent book, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy.)

I'm sure that someone has made the case for a thoroughly naturalist reading of the Tao Te Ching.

They're physicists, not philosophers. — Clarky

Ad hominem. D'Espagnat, in particular, has authored a number of books on philosophy and physics.

There's a reason I bring that up. Metaphysics has a way of resurrecting itself - as some philosopher noted, 'philosophy buries its undertakers' (referring to all the many positivist types, like Stephen Hawkings, who declared philosophy dead.)

Richard Conn Henry, The Mental Universe
— Wayfarer

Insufferably smug baloney. Mr. Henry doesn't understand the difference between metaphysics and physics either.
and Bernard D'Espagnat.
— Wayfarer

Mr. D'Espagnat is also confused about metaphysics. — Clarky

Richard Conn Henry (born 7 March 1940[1]) is an Academy Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, author of one book and over 200 publications on the topics of astrophysics and various forms of astronomy including optical, radio, ultraviolet, and X-ray. He reports being part of a team that discovered "vastly more baryons than had ever before been found in the universe".[2] He is also cited in the effort to recategorize Pluto as a dwarf planet.[3][4]

Bernard d'Espagnat (22 August 1921 – 1 August 2015) was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality.[1][2] Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality is partially named after him.

D'Espagnat obtained his Ph.D. from the Sorbonne at the Institut Henri Poincaré under the guidance of Louis de Broglie. He was a researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique CNRS, 1947-57. During this period he also worked with Enrico Fermi in Chicago, 1951–52, and on a research project led by Niels Bohr at the Institute in Copenhagen, 1953-54. He then pursued his scientific career as the first theoretical physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, 1954-59.[5][6]

I'll take them at their word.

What could the Tao Te Ching be if it's not metaphysics? — Clarky

It's a classic in Chinese philosophy and religion.

The Tao-te Ching presented a way of life intended to restore harmony and tranquillity to a kingdom racked by widespread disorders. It was critical of the unbridled wantonness of self-seeking rulers and was disdainful of social activism based on the type of abstract moralism and mechanical propriety characteristic of Confucian ethics. The Dao of the Tao-te Ching has received a wide variety of interpretations because of its elusiveness and mystical overtones, and it has been a basic concept in both philosophy and religion. In essence, it consists of “nonaction” (wuwei), understood as no unnatural action rather than complete passivity. It implies spontaneity, noninterference, letting things take their natural course: “Do nothing and everything is done.” Chaos ceases, quarrels end, and self-righteous feuding disappears because the Dao is allowed to flow unchallenged and unchallenging. Everything that is comes from the inexhaustible, effortless, invisible, and inaudible Way, which existed before heaven and earth. By instilling in the populace the principle of Dao, the ruler precludes all cause for complaint and presides over a kingdom of great tranquillity. — Encyclopedia Brittanica

Here is the beginning of the SEP entry on metaphysics:

The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. ...The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle's death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) titled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”—“the after the physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”—the “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now call Aristotle's Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotle's philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered “the physical ones”, the books about nature or the natural world—that is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world. — SEP

There are some very general conceptions that can be found in both sources - after all, they're both part of the world's perennial wisdom traditions. But I think it's mistaken to take the Tao Te Ching as an exemplar of the subject of metaphysics - there's a world of difference between 'the nameless' of Lao Tzu and the First Mover of Aristotle.

It's a notoriously difficult word to define. I grant there's a vernacular definition of metaphysics which denotes a wide range of ideas from many different traditions and cultures, but I try to keep in mind the definition specific to European culture (e.g. here.)

Are you saying the Ancient Chinese didn't have metaphysics? — Clarky

There are comparisons between them, but the Tao Te Ching is not metaphysics per se. You tend to refer to the Tao Te Ching to give you a kind of handle on anything that 'sounds metaphysical'. But 'metaphysics' is not generic term for 'anything spiritual' (or, more pejoratively, 'woo') which is how most people here seem to treat it. Metaphysics proper developed in the Western, specifically Platonist-Aristotelian, philosophical world.

It's closer to poetry than to metaphysics. Metaphysics developed out Platonism and the core subjects such as the Ideas, Forms, Universals, the nature of number, the nature of substance, and so on. That was the intellectual heritage that enabled the scientific revolution and the discovery of quantum physics. It never happened in China (or India) nor showed any sign of happening in those cultures.

The term "Transcendental Idealism" is more metaphorical than literal — RussellA

According to the source document:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. — CPR A369

However, Kant then grants that you can be both a transcendental AND an empirical realist:

The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance – which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing – matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. — CPR A370

So, Kant is not denying the apparent reality of the empirical domain, but that it has intrinsic or inherent reality.

Can anyone make a valid argument that a mind-independent world did not exist in the 13 billion years before the arrival of human observers ? — RussellA

The problem is philosophical, not scientific. You're taking the scientific realist view as an absolute description. In other words, you're not seeing the role that the mind plays in constructing the picture of the world - even of the world prior to the advent of human consciousness. In that sense, even the most apparently-obvious scientific hypotheses are mental constructions. They may be accurate mental constructions, which can be tested against all manner of observations, but the mind has an inextricable role in their construction. Have a look again at this quote.

John Wheeler has a gut feeling that we inhabit a cosmos made real by our own observation. — RussellA

It's more than a 'gut feeling'. Wheeler was one of the giants of theoretical physics. In terms of popular science, he is known for this theory of the 'participatory universe'. It's about a lot more than simply what happens in an experiment.

IE, from the standpoint of Epistemological Idealism within Indirect Realism, I agree with the above, and I am sure that not only Kant but also Schopenhauer would as well. — RussellA

That's because you have in your mind the firm belief in an external reality. I understand that questioning that belief is difficult.

When Lao Tzu asked that kind of question, it was metaphysics — Clarky

There was nothing of the kind in the Tao Te Ching. Einstein's question was the consequence of a particular moment in history, and a highly consequential one at that.

The word metaphysics should be eliminated from discussions of science. — jgill

Just as the word ‘teleology’ was eliminated from biology, only having to later require the neologism ‘teleonomy’ to serve in the role.

Newton's determinism was based on God as the supreme lawgiver. — Jackson

Until God became a ghost in his own machine…..

This is the only thread where Boris Johnson is discussed so it seems an appropriate thread to post news of the no-confidence vote against him. As I write this, the vote is still some hours away but the commentary seems to indicate that he's in serious peril. And, from everything I've gleaned, bloody well ought to be. :brow:

But the point is, quantum mechanics concerned what was supposed to be the foundational level of the Universe. And yet, when Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was discovered, it became 'oh yeah, well that's a special case, it's "quantum", you know.' The secular mainstream still firmly believes in physicalist determinism and causal closure despite all that.

My interim answer is that quantum mechanics is physics, not metaphysics. — Clarky

I wonder why, then, the great Albert Einstein was compelled to ask, rhetorically, 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when we're not looking at it?'

I think that is a metaphysical question, and that it grew directly out of the discoveries of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli.

I think that quantum mechanics suggests that at some point, 'size really matters,' in that the 'rules' differ in many ways from the macro world compared to the subatomic. — universeness

There are not two worlds, the large and the sub-atomic. It's all the same world. What sensible scientific realists would have hoped to have found, circa 1900 or so, is that there was a reasonable and coherent causal account of the nature of matter reaching right down to the purported 'fundamental constituents'. That is not, however, what happened, and the philosophical implications of that are still far from settled.

There's a specialist who writes on the metaphysics of physics - Tim Maudlin, from memory. Jim Baggott and Philip Ball are two others who say sensible things about it from within a fairly mainstream POV. But my favoured intepretations all tend towards the 'idealistic physicists', of whom there are a few (for instance, Richard Conn Henry, The Mental Universe - note the publication - and Bernard D'Espagnat.)

Sometimes 3 or 4 key ideas highlighted with some recommended readings are helpful to others. — Tom Storm

Good idea. I had started something but side-tracked myself. Now that I have that book, I might use it as a base.

As a mathematician who never gave much thought to Platonic ideals, my rather superficial view is that these ideals do not exist in any sort of physical forms, but exist in an abstract space that is accessible to human minds, in much the same way that spaces of functions exist in the normal mathematical realm. — jgill

Gödel was a mathematical realist, a Platonist. He believed that what makes mathematics true is that it's descriptive—not of empirical reality, of course, but of an abstract reality. Mathematical intuition is something analogous to a kind of sense perception. In his essay "What Is Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis?", Gödel wrote that we're not seeing things that just happen to be true, we're seeing things that must be true. The world of abstract entities is a necessary world—that's why we can deduce our descriptions of it through pure reason. — Rebecca Goldstein

You will notice that the most frequent objection to idealism is the assumed reality of objects, the objective domain, the sensory realm. Everything is premissed on that assumption, and must be ultimately derived from that, even though, on analysis, the actual nature of the objective realm, which is assumed to be self-evidently real, is one of the major points at issue!

The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective , whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or after it has taken form, is empirically given—that is to say, is substance, the chemical element with its primary relations. Some such thing it takes, as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away. Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and ever active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the Idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. — Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation

As you notice, I go into bat for idealism in almost every thread I participate in. But it's such a big subject - I tried to sit down and draft an OP for it, and it quickly became obvious that it was going to be several thousand words. (And I've just shelled out on the rather expensive e-book edition of the link above, mainly to help me bring into focus exactly what form of idealism to comment on.)

It would take a book.

Kant was an Indirect Realist. — RussellA

Not so. His philosophy is described as transcendental idealism although I daresay your simplistic definitions would render the distinction unintelligible.

I personally reject the Platonism of abstracts because I find the idea of objects existing in the external world outside of time and space incomprehensible. — RussellA

That's because you're trying to imagine an external world outside space and time, as 'a place', where 'things' never change. But the subject of the analysis are purely intelligible in nature, i.e. they can only be grasped by a mind, so they don't exist in the way that sensory objects exist. They are inherent in the scheme of things, rather than existing as manifest phenomena. But because our culture is so deeply indoctrinated to think only in phenomenalist terms, it's an impossible distinction to grasp.

The age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years, and human intelligence has been on the Earth for about 7 million years. — RussellA

I can see you're not educated about the philosophical implications of physics. And I can also see why you believe it doesn't make sense, but then, that is why some of the greatest minds of the last century have been perplexed, and still are perplexed, by these very same issues. (See Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?, Discover Magazine.)

Idealism is the view that things exist only as ideas, with no reality of material objects outside of the mind. — RussellA

It's a rather simplistic description. Philosophical idealism can accept that material objects and forces have a degree of reality, and that they're not mere phantasms or delusions. In that sense, they're not 'in the mind' in the way that expression would usually be understood. An idealist philosopher will understand that she will be scalded by hot water or cut by a razor. So she may not hold that things only exist 'in the mind' in a simplistic or obvious sense, but that the constructive activities of the mind are foundational to our knowledge of the world, and that we can't go beyond that to see things 'as they are in themselves'. That was nearer to Kant's view.

It would follow from your position that if numbers are real and not dependent on your or my mind, then there must be a mind-independent world." — RussellA

But numbers and logical principles can only be understood by a mind capable of counting and reasoning. So they're real, but they're not material objects like rocks or trees.

The view that abstract objects are real is generally associated with Platonism or scholastic realism. But you've already indicated that you reject this with reference to F H Bradley's argument.

My claim that numbers and logical principles are real independently of our minds, but can only be grasped by a mind, is closer to traditional realism than to scientific realism.

But:

My belief that elementary particles and elementary forces do ontologically exist in a mind-independent world — RussellA

This is just what has been called into question by 20th Century physics, specifically the Bohr-Einstein debates. Now obviously that is a deep issue - in fact this whole issue is deep - but the thrust of the 'quantum revolution' was succinctly expressed by Werner Heisenberg, when he said:

We can no longer speak of the behaviour of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them. Nor is it any longer possible to ask whether or not these particles exist in space and time objectively … When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature. …Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analysing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of investigation... — The Physicists Conception of Nature

So, this questioning of the 'mind-independent' nature of the supposed fundamental constituents of existence - namely, atomic particles - really has undermined many forms of realism. It was this which was at the heart of Einstein's discomfort - as a staunch scientific realist he could never accept the so-called 'observer dependent' nature of quantum physics. But I believe, as has been discussed in various other threads, that experimental evidence has confirmed Heisenberg's approach - 'the Copenhagen interpretation' - over the realist view.

For this reason, there is actually a kind of idealist streak in a lot of modern scientists. Not all, by any means, and a long way from unanimously, but it's there to be found.

"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." ― Bernard d'Espagnat

"We have to give up the idea of realism to a far greater extent than most physicists believe today." ― Anton Zeilinger

“The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts. ― Werner Heisenberg

and so on.

Until we know for certain the limits of the natural universe, we cannot know if something is beyond its limits. — Art48

‘Miracles are not against nature, but against what we know of nature’ ~ St Augustine

Yeah, no. Not buying.

Aren’t you the one supposed to be defending realism? :smile:

In some ways both the earlier and later Wittgenstein are allies of theism, but in a way that is in line with what I pointed to in a previous post about "possibilities of phenomena". What he is doing clearing the ground to open up a way of looking at things. Tractarian silence is just such an opening up. — Fooloso4

:up: But I get tired of hearing of 'that of which we cannot speak' as shorthand for 'shuddup already!' in response to bringing up anything deemed vaguely spiritual.

I notice this footnote in Thomas Nagel's essay, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament:

The religious temperament is not common among analytic philosophers, but it is not absent. A number of prominent analytic philosophers are Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, and others, such as Wittgenstein and Rawls, clearly had a religious attitude to life without adhering to a particular religion. But I believe nothing of the kind is present in the makeup of Russell, Moore, Ryle, Austin, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Strawson, or most of the current professoriate.

Yes, exactly. But the first place I encountered articulation of the idea was in Terry Eagleton's review of Dawkin's The God Delusion:

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. — Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

(It was that review which led to my discovery of Internet Forums, around 2008 or so.)

:clap:

Another issue with the OP is that the God of monotheism is not *a* God, one God amongst many. Believing in the Gods, as polytheistic religions do, is quite a different thing to faith in God, at least according to monotheism. They would insist that the Biblical God is not simply an instance of a type.

It should also be mentioned that 'existence' is the wrong word for God. 'What exists', as far as we can know, are phenomena, 'that which appears'. In classical philosophy and theology, the first principle/umoved mover/first cause is not 'something that exists' - to say that 'it exists' is to relegate it to the domain of appearances, a being among other beings or thing among things. That gets into the domain of apophatic theology which is probably too specialised for this forum, but ought to be noted.

My answer is that this reasonableness is mostly a trick of language. We say the plane will stay up in the air and the train will arrive regardless of the shifting grounds of the sciences that makes these devices possible. — Joshs

I'm sympathetic to this line of analysis. But planes overwhelmingly do stay up in the air, and the many other devices and technologies that technological culture relies on are generally extremely reliable and stable, validating the faith we have in them. And as philosophers have often observed, scientific activity requires faith that the principles discovered by science are repeatable, dependable, that they will continue to operate in just the same way regardless of contingent factors, whence the very idea of there being scientific laws (or principles). Knowledge of these has expanded considerably since the advent of modernity, knowledge which we previously didn't have, and again is validated on a daily basis by the effectiveness of the technology, medicine, and so on, that it has enabled.

Faith, on the other hand, is an excuse for believing something when there is no good reason. — Tom Storm

That's a kind of fundamentalist view of the nature of religious faith. Many here will agree here that religious faith is belief without evidence, but that doesn't take into consideration the fact that, for a community of faith, the Universe itself is evidence of divine creation (in the theistic traditions at least, i.e. not including Buddhism.) I'm not wanting to open that particular can of worms other than to observe that those who say that faith is belief without evidence, will do so generally on the basis of having already consigned the entire tradition and history of the religion, with its sacred texts and communities of the faithful, to the dustbin of history. (This amounts to a kind of 'negative faith', a conviction in the unreliability of religious faith.) Whereas for those living within such a tradition, evidence abounds - just not in the form of peer-reviewed studies and popular culture. But bear in mind, the kinds of truth which religions deal in are on a very different level to those explored through the empirical sciences. And I also agree at least some of these communities will be characterised by delusion or denial, such as young-earth creationism or many abhorrent religious cults and movements, but by no means all of them are, there are still very many able scientists who profess Christianity, and who don't see any fundamental conflict or division between science and faith.

:clap:

"Personally I would never use the word faith to describe reasonable actions taken in the world." — universeness

Have a read of Metaphysical Mistake, Karen Armstrong.