Absolute Faith

His defense and the rebuttal is still about just humans though. There is nothing there about other animals. Seems to me it is fairly well established humans are good at the MSR test, even if not in every respect right away. Eventually we are when we see any image of ourselves.
 
Ahanu said:
Since God is the source of ethical truth, then ultimately it comes from the supernatural realm. Ethical truth can be revealed through nature or special individuals because the material realm, which is obviously God's creation, reflects his values.
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Ahanu, on to more of your thoughts. As a person who does not believe Gods exist, I wonder if you could see that from my perspective the quoted comment is very circular reasoning. My first question is which God or Gods are we talking about here. Are we taking about the Abrahamic God? There are plenty of world religions beyond the Abrahamics and they seem to get ethical truths okay.

Also what about the Gods that were pre-Abrahamic? Where did they get their ethical truths from. Jehovah wasn't around yet.

Part the Second: Can Ethical Truths be created within the mortal realm? There has been a lot of study of a more secular need for morals and ethics in the past few decades. One of the arguing points, which I find of particular interest, is the question "Is there really any difference between choosing a religious foundation for morals and a secular reason for doing the same"? An argument can be made that both are subjective decisions.*

There is also the sticky wicket that ethical truths are subjective whether it is from a religious foundation or a secular one. Many of the big topics of society today. Let's take capitol punishment and gun control as two examples. You will find as many pro and contrary positions amongst the religious as you will amongst secularists. This rather proves a subjective nature to at least some of our ethics, no?

*I took many of these examples from a piece by John Lombard, link below. He goes farther than I would in that he argues that secular morals are far superior to religious ones. I do not agree with that. I think both are equally reasonable. Otherwise I find a lot of his points on the subject relevant.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rationaldoubt/2014/10/atheist-morality-no-need-for-god/
 
Devils' Advocate said:
His defense and the rebuttal is still about just humans though. There is nothing there about other animals.
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In the link I posted, you'll see 2 paragraphs from pages 18 and 19. This is what I was mainly referring to. If you read a little closer the first paragraph that mentions evidence for correlations between self-awareness and MSR, you'd see my source mentions animals. It says: "Similarly, Chantek-a language trained orangutan-used more frequent pronoun signs after developing mirror self-recognition". This is after mentioning young children used more pronouns after passing the MSR test. They identify a correlation between a high frequency of pronoun use and passing the MSR test. I only mentioned the MSR test because I know you dig science, so I thought it would be interesting to discuss measuring self-awareness with you. Since you consider it flawed, do you have a better idea for measuring it? Like gravity, self-awareness is invisible . . . which makes developing a method difficult. If I were a psychologist like Gordon Gallup, I would find as many different methods as possible to measure self-awareness. Considering the mirror is so important in Muslim and Baha'i thought in regards to creation, it's interesting that a mirror is so popular in scientific literature when it comes to measuring self-awareness. Mirror use with animals has a long history in science. Even Darwin used a mirror with animals.

Seems to me it is fairly well established humans are good at the MSR test, even if not in every respect right away.
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It seems there's evidence young children in different cultures react differently to the MSR test.
 
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Here is an article about a guy who ran a test using scent to see if his dog was self aware. It makes for interesting reading in relation to what I was saying about bias, and also at least partially, answers your question about one way we could better test animals for self awareness.

https://animalwise.org/2011/08/16/the-yellow-snow-test-for-self-recognition/

This seems to me a much fairer way to test various animals. Test to their strengths, rather than testing them to our strengths.

It is a topic of great interest to me. If we start from a position in a religion that mankind is special and God places us above all other life, we will automatically draw one kind of conclusions.

But what if we were to come from a point of view that man is just another animal. Not saying that a God could not have been involved; rather that said God didn't mean for us to be any better than any other life form on the planet.

For me, now this gets very interesting! We humans are definitely a breed apart from any other species on the planet. If only for our ability to alter it specific to our own needs and desires. But if it is a random mutation, does it mean our species is a good one for the planet? It is hard to look at what we have done to our only home and suggest that we have been good for the biosphere; good for our fellow creatures. It could turn out that the mutation that made us humans might be the worst thing to happen to this planet. We have the capability to destroy it for almost all life for a very long period of time.

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The other part of this equation for me is the randomness of evolution. For a long time it was thought that life progressed forward towards an ever, more capable set of species. With humans being at the apex. But we now know that evolution is a truly random role of the biological dice. It has brought along better species that have failed, and lesser suited species that have succeeded. The mutation for humanity could have happened much earlier in the life of the planet.

The 'common knowledge' that the rise of the mammals was due to the extinction of the dinosaurs has been proven to be false. In fact mammals were around for as long as there were dinosaurs. A version of early mammals were around even before there were dinosaurs!

The Mammal-like Reptiles, or Therapsids first appeared about 285 million years ago near the begiining of the Permian which is well before the dinosaurs. They evolved quickly and many different groups arose. They were very successful until about the end of the Permian, about 245 million years ago, when something catastrophic affected the earth and nearly all of the species then living died out. New species evolved rapidly to fill this empty habitat, among them the first dinosaurs and a few million years later the first mammals.

http://www.earthlife.net/mammals/evolution.html
 
Where did DA go? I miss reading his posts.

:cool:
 
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@juantoo3 leaves a gap too. Imo. Wish he'd turn up again. He thought he'd been banned, for what reason who knows, but it was just some technical glitch and when Steve tried to email him to sort it out, it seems the emails went to spam.
 
Ahanu said:
We need an atheist poster. Maybe we can hire a good one on craigslist.
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I'll do what I can, but even though I'm atheist, I probably don't measure up well against a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic materialist. :cool:
 
Ahanu said:

"Let's illustrate what I think is an example of what you've said here (but let me know if I haven't captured your point). The Quakers believed that slavery was wrong. But most of their contemporaries accepted slavery. Abolitionist arguments couldn't convince their opponents slavery was wrong, so they couldn't prove it. Is it a sign of the Quaker's hubris to continue having absolute faith that slavery is wrong?"​
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Believing slavery is wrong is not the same as having absolute faith that slavery is wrong. I think it could be considered hubris since they are assuming their belief superior without concrete facts. I don't think we can have absolute faith in anything but our own existence.

Sorry I realise this is an old discussion :)
 
Cino said:
I'll do what I can, but even though I'm atheist, I probably don't measure up well against a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic materialist. :cool:
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Great! Hard to find DA quality. I mean, I can disagree with him, he can disagree with me, and we never (or rarely) feel insulted at all. Rare to meet an individual like that in this so-called post-truth era, or perhaps we are what Yuval Noah Harari calls a post-truth species.
 
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OrtaYol said:
Believing slavery is wrong is not the same as having absolute faith that slavery is wrong.
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Appears to be a mere matter of difference in degree. Consider the abolitionist John Brown. If anybody could earn the title today or yesterday of having absolute faith that slavery is wrong, surely it would be him? I couldn't picture anybody convincing him slavery is right. One can conclude from his actions he had an unswerving and absolute faith that slavery was wrong. In other words, his conviction that slavery was wrong is as strong as your conviction that you exist. Note some scepticists would disagree with your absolute faith in your own existence and the existence of others. To them it would appear as hubris par excellence? One's cup of tea may not be another's cup of tea. And vice versa.

biv2.jpg
 
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Ahanu said:
Appears to be a mere matter of difference in degree. Consider the abolitionist John Brown. If anybody could earn the title today or yesterday of having absolute faith that slavery is wrong, surely it would be him? I couldn't picture anybody convincing him slavery is right. One can conclude from his actions he had an unswerving and absolute faith that slavery was wrong. In other words, his conviction that slavery was wrong is as strong as your conviction that you exist. Note some scepticists would disagree with your absolute faith in your own existence and the existence of others. To them it would appear as hubris par excellence? One's cup of tea may not be another's cup of tea. And vice versa.
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Sure it is a difference in degree but an important one.

I don't think it fair to say that John Brown had absolute faith in anything. He could of felt as strongly as he did and still not believed in the human ability to achieve absolute certainty. If he did have absolute certainty what was this certainty based on and why is it not hubris? Is it just because he was right?

Also while I have absolute faith in my own existence(I doubt therefor I am), I'm not so sure about anyone else. :)
 
OrtaYol said:
Also while I have absolute faith in my own existence(I doubt therefor I am), I'm not so sure about anyone else. :)
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Well, since you are not so sure about anyone else's existence, how can you be so sure "I" exists? Descartes' argument is circular reasoning; it assumes "I" exists. As skeptics have noted, instead of saying "I doubt therefore I am," Descartes should have said that "thinking is occurring." If everything is simply blunt physical matter swirling around, then "I" is an illusion. This is naturally where atheism should lead us. Sam Harris sums up the non-existence of the self well here:

S.H.: Because what does not survive scrutiny cannot be real. Perhaps you can see the same effect in this perceptual illusion:



It certainly looks like there is a white square in the center of this figure, but when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled. Can we know that the black shapes are more real than the white one? Yes, because the square doesn’t survive our efforts to locate it — its edges literally disappear. A little investigation and we see that its form has been merely implied.

What could we say to a skeptic who insisted that the white square is just as real as the three-quarter circles and that its disappearance is nothing more than, as you say, “a relatively rare — and deliberately cultivated — experience”? All we could do is urge him to look more closely.

The same is true about the conventional sense of self — the feeling of being a subject inside your head, a locus of consciousness behind your eyes, a thinker in addition to the flow of thoughts. This form of subjectivity does not survive scrutiny. If you really look for what you are calling “I,” this feeling will disappear. In fact, it is easier to experience consciousness without the feeling of self than it is to banish the white square in the above image.
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OrtaYol said:
He could of felt as strongly as he did and still not believed in the human ability to achieve absolute certainty. If he did have absolute certainty what was this certainty based on and why is it not hubris? Is it just because he was right?
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Intuition, I guess. The same reason I do not assume your circular argument (I doubt therefore I am) is charged with hubris: perhaps you actually know the truth intuitively. Everything doesn't need to be backed up by concrete facts. This debate about whether or not the self exists is similar to whether or not the past exists. How do you know the past exists? That you didn't just pop up at this moment? That the past wasn't implanted in your mind at this moment?

I know because my intuition tells me so! Is that hubris? If so, so be it!
 
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Why is it a circular argument?

I don't know that I didn't just "pop into existence", I just consider it more likely that I did not.
 
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