are you an atheist?

So it's not moving goal posts to fit your own personal definition of god/spirits/mystical components around the naturalist aspects you choose to accept?

xps

i'm confused about how you're using the idiom "moving goal posts"

pushing the definition of the supernatural into the unknowns as you see fit

I guess god/supernatural-of-the-gaps makes more sense right now.

xp

The goalpost metaphor implies that the object or idea associated with the 'goalpost' should never be moved because all parties in the game have already accepted their present position as being vital to the rules of the game. It is most often used when, in the middle of a debate, one party changes a position previously defined to one which is more advantageous, to prevent the opponent who was attacking that position from 'scoring' a debating point.

I don't see where that metaphor has any application to o. nate's link or any person's personal redefinition of their faith in ways not entirely endorsed by some external religious authority. Neither the orthodoxy nor the heterodoxy were undertaken with the idea that some atheist was about to score a point off them. The atheist's opposition to their enterprise most likely never crossed their minds.

yeah, most of this kind of theology was developed in medieval era long before apologetics of modernity were required

In reference to that original article I was describing the inner conflict of subscribing to naturalism and concluding there is no supernatural beings and rather than dismissing your faith you totally redefine the god as you see fit.

Sorry it probably wasn't the right description.

i'm suggesting that this definition isn't new, but very old - and that it happens to also be compatible for contemporary thinkers who subscribe to naturalism

i'm an atheist mostly but that's probably you're best proof of god, like that would be so fucking me, i die all smug like "death is the end welcome dark void"....them i wake up to st. peter and he's all like "howya doin' chief?" and i'm like #FM(after)L and like "listen man i was more agnostic than atheist i swear!" and he's like "let's go to instant replay"

The position is that "god is supernatural" first, then the idea that the supernatural does not exist is presented and the god concept is redefined to be safe from that problem if naturalism is accepted. So that internal debate has some goal post moving?

So Pascal convinced you to go agnostic?

http://books.google.com/books?id=M0lfQWZL7EUC&pg=PT27&lpg=PT27&dq=%22nothing+unreal+exists%22+kiri-kin&source=bl&ots=kXQPP6XmrH&sig=DtM3Mw35dbCp0n2p5WrbiEfKYeQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kfs6U_GFIYa6yQH5noHgDA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=%22nothing%20unreal%20exists%22%20kiri-kin&f=false

also A+++ for naming your book, "Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant"

evan, do u think that pantheism is also moving goalposts?

It's all context I guess depending on the starting point.

The starting point in any discussion of an idea is whenever both parties to the discussion agree on what they are talking about.

I interpreted Mordy's question to me as "is pantheism similarly the result of internal goal post moving in your opinion?"

there's an interesting moment in Descartes' Meditations (i think it's that one) where he's talking about the difference between actuality and possibility. he claims that possibility is "nothing" (again, going off memory here) and that actuality is the only thing that is, or at least the only meaningful thing.

i think this is a rather important claim in terms of understanding modernity: it's to make a distinction and then claim that only one side of that distinction (actual/possible) has real meaning. but of course even a glance at the history of philosophy or science shows that the category of possibility doesn't vanish because the system that modernity is trying to construct (a "closed" or reversible system) is never finished: it's open, irreversible, developing in ways not always predictable.

even under modernity's own terms, this seems to suggest that "actuality" as a concept only has coherence or meaning when it's part of a two-sided distinction, but that always leaves the possibility of choosing the "other" side. i'd argue that this is what happens in an act of "faith"--choosing the unseen, the pure possible, as opposed to the actual. but this choice doesn't reveal the possible itself because choosing it then leads to its "actualization." the possible always remains on the "other" side, paradoxically revealing the contingency, the intrinsic otherness, of "this" side. that's what a "religious experience" means to me. it's a premonition of form free of content.

i should add that while im sympathetic to defenses of religious belief that lean on some kind of subjective phenomenology or "inner experience" i'm also trying to say something different. this is partly because i think those defenses use a similar concept of the subject which already failed to ground a scientific modernity ("man as immediate and unproblematized evidence," to use foucault's description, or the illusion of the "objective observer") but also because i'd argue that what constitutes religious experience is precisely that which, paradoxically, isn't seen, felt, experienced--what remains hidden in those sensations produced by a functioning (or malfunctioning) nervous system.

and for all that, i think the question of god's existence, or even my own sometimes atheism, always remains an open question.

I'm not sure I follow the goal post thing. Evan are you saying that spiritual beliefs/practices that fall outside of a narrow range (defined by who, exactly?) of orthodox norms are invalid and suspect because of their idiosyncrasies? Because that is essentially the basis for religious fundam3nt@lism, and it denies decades of alternative traditions, many of which are folk traditions and cultures created and maintained by people that were oppressed (including systematically hunted down) for that very reason.

Who sets these goal posts? If you say the Vatican or otherwise members at the top of the social-religious hierarchy, then what gives them the authority? As an atheist, the authority of such divinely-organized hierarchies should be especially under suspicion.

It just seems pretty clear to me that people work backwards with their personal god definition. Howard Wettstein for instance seems to be going to great lengths to reshape the idea of god (for himself) that doesn't contradict with his naturalist conclusions.

Scientific consensus especially and the current set of morals shaped by culture are the closest thing to an agreed basis we have. Everyone's personal idea of theology and god seems to be unique and varies from person to person.

Wettstein reshapes the idea of god

From what? What is this primary idea of God that he is reshaping? Who is the authority on this idea of God?

I'm 100% down with spirituality being everyone's individual personal experience, but to say that someone is reshaping it implies that there is an official definition, and if you are an atheist I don't see how you could accept that.

The primary idea is the majority interpretation in his particular faith- and it wouldn't be splitting hairs to say that "god is a supernatural being" as a decided feature that he has reshaped to fit.

an official feature

just an addendum to my earlier posts: we have logical trouble describing thermodynamically open or "irreversible" systems--but it's also not surprising (imo) that logical systems that seem up to at least addressing this task (gotthard gunther, perhaps c.s. peirce) have certain non-superficial similarities to some strains of medieval theology (eriugena, cusa).

imo thinking as hard as youse all do about this stuff puts youse far more beyond most ppl's comprehension that exists a divide in assumptions between ppl who simply do/don't believe in a god without thinking about it

To each his own. Some of us feel compelled to sort this stuff out in more detail.

I've searched a number of translations of the Pentateuch and have come up with 0 results for "supernatural".

tbf, the Pentateuch does describe god making the sun stand still in the sky, among other acts of god, and by most commonly accepted standards of what is natural, this does not qualify. The word itself need not appear for the concept to be manifest.

Yes, if you take it 100% literally. Of course, there are many different ways to interpret it.

For example, the rabbi that they interviewed in that revive link has read the books and doesn't seem to think so.

It's either a natural entity, a supernatural entity, or product of imagination. Which one is widely accepted definition of god? The popular definition is that god is an entity that somehow exists outside of space and time- that's supernatural.

blah blah ryan post blah blah blah ryan post blah blah

:(

ignore the unchill vibes imo

don't ignore them, take my offhand superiority and smugness to heart

imma be reductive and annoying coz i'm tired and have had some wine but i was talking to a wiccan who believed in a lot of the tenants of that religion (focussing on the superiority of the 'natural organic' state etc) and joined that religion because of it (which mystifies me because it seems self-evidentially an act of external validation when you already had your answers) and when she suggested that there's nothing supernatural about her religion and that nature is 'magic' i got flustered because 'magic' is definitionally supernatural.

so when Evan talks about "moving goalposts" that's what I think of.

I am currently reading Schneider and Sagan's Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, which is a really fascinating and decidedly anti-creationist account of life (they even take issue with the "4th law" self-organizing principle suggested by Stuart Kauffman) among many other things. But the following passage is especially interesting since it brushes up against some knotty aporias in accounts about the origin of life--the radically incommensurable domains of religion and science which nevertheless seem caught in a permanent relation of tension (perhaps it's a version of that "actual/possible" aporia i mentioned upthread).

I've left out a few citations. sorry for any inevitable typos in what follows.

Before complexity and self-organization became catchwords, the Nobel laureate Jacques Monod contrasted chance with necessity, and wrote of the near impossibility of life's origins, which he likened to "chance caught on the wing." However unlikely, life only had to arise once. Moreover, if it had not, and it had not developed to the point where we could marvel at its complexity, the mystery of us marveling at it would not exist. As historian and philosopher of science Iris Fry points out, notions of self-organization have eased the theoretical difficulties somewhat. The belief in a naturalistic origin for life does not depend on discovering the specific biochemical route leading from nonlife to life. Even Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, an origins-of-life researcher with harsh words for those he perceives to be of a mystical bent, makes the mistake of thinking that discovering a biochemical path from nonlife to life will lay to rest creationist claims: "until such time," he has recently said, "as biologists can demonstrate an entirely material origin of life, the divine will remain a contender." But a belief in an unseen God controlling phenomena, based on faith, slips epistemologically about and is in no way beholden to evidence. If we wish to believe him, for example, God could have arranged the preliving components in such a way that they might tend naturally, under the influences of energy flow, to arrange into recursive polypeptide-nucleotide machines. Indeed, although in his letters Darwin privately revels in the possibility of life arising from some little warm pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, in public he is more circumspect, coming off more as a modern creationist in his estimation that there is "grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed [by the Creator] into a few forms or into one." At bottom the belief in a naturalistic origin of life may also be faith--but it is faith deeply tied to empiricism, to a search for answer in a climate of the willingness to be wrong, in short to the "organized skepticism" of the scientific method. No single scientific fact or discovery can prove or disprove God, and the facts surrounding the mystery of life's origin are no exception.

that epistemological slipperiness they talk about is, i think, in line with the "moving goalposts" thing.

Well yeah, my issues with religion as an atheist come down to the probability factor that "your" god is the right god.

that "magic" vs supernatural thing is funny since it would seem she maintains private definitions for both. Hard to really talk about something with someone when they've freed themselves from any commitment to even minimal coherence and consistency. That's in keeping with darraghmac's good point above that most people are not especially interested in being intellectually rigorous about this. But that's an unfortunate tendency when religious belief is quarantined in private or subjective experience.

Moving goalposts happens on the science side as well. Seems all too easy to ignore that science pretty much evolved out of soothsayers, magicians, alchemists, astrologists, mystics, etc., and that for a time magic was considered science. Many of the big names in science were intensely religious, and many of them seriously researched supernatural phenomenon in addition to discovering the foundations of modern science.

If it is within the realm of the atheist to ignore all of this and posit that modern science is an ahistorical phenomenon then why can't the religious do the same with their subject?

strawmanning there

well both would be wrong to do that, of course. it was perhaps inevitable that religion would be backed into the corner of private experience but I think that bargain is no longer a good one.

Anyway that's why I argue for a more epistemologically humble religious stance, one derived in essence from the tradition of negative theology (ie, one that doesn't so much forgo transcendental pronouncements but radically circumscribes them).

To be more precise in addressing Adam's point, I don't think it's a given that atheists ignore the huge significance of religious thought in how ideas evolved. We have hit a point in certain culture where they butt up against each other, and one wins out and one doesn't, but that's not the whole story. It's not about denying the importance of religion, but appreciating that there was a point where the religious aspect just isn't as necessary as it was at one point.

I consider myself a spiritual person - but I can't define that spirituality in any religion.

And that skepticism isn't so much about spirituality as it is about specific religions, and the questioning that any specific religion somehow got it right.