I like it.

I said in an earlier thread that I truly don't understand why it's so hard to grasp morality as a flexible system that ultimately reduces to evolutionary benefit.

I think you've got a good model, there, and I'm going to read it again when my brains not quite as mushy to see if I can play theist and find any holes in it.

And one more note: the way you left off, you would now have to prove common sense dosn't come from god.

Oh, and to your extra point, remember, the burden of proof is ALWAYS on the claimant.  Nobody has to prove that common sense doesn't come from god (disproof!).  Someone has to first prove god, then link common sense to it.

Yep, that is the same 'hole' I saw in it. However, for the purpose of debunking Divine Command theory (e.g. the 10 commandments, biblical literalism), the sports analogy works very well. 

WHOA! WAIT A MINUTE!

I was the one who started the thread with st Michael.

I wasnt arguing that morality is a scientifc formula. That is ridiculous. I was arguing that it could be understood in terms of evolution, cognitive neuroscience, neuroelectrochemistry and sociology, not God.  

This is where a lot of people get lost. The burden of proof is always, always, always on the claimant. It's just a matter of figuring out who the claimant is.

Suppose I say that there is a gremlin living in the gas tank of my car, and by a process of farting methane and then mixing it with gremlin urine, he makes more gasoline, and my car gets 80 miles to the gallon as a result. The thing is, the gremlin disappears when you take the gas cap off, and he's modified my odometer so that it looks like I'm only getting normal gas mileage. He does this because he doesn't want his kids pressed into slave labor.

Obviously, I'm the claimant. You have nothing to do but sit back and let me offer proof. If I don't offer enough proof, the job is done, and you win by default. That is, the default position is that the gremlin DOES NOT exist.

This is clearly an analogy for theists claiming that god exists. As far as defending your own beliefs, well, there's still a burden of proof, and it's still on the claimant! You are the claimant, and you have a burden of proof. If you examine your beliefs and find them lacking, then you will not believe, right? So it's no different just because it's you. If you believe without examination, then you're just naive or lazy or unconcerned -- it doesn't mean that someone else becomes responsible to prove you wrong, just because you can't be bothered to prove yourself right.

To be precise, nobody has any obligation to try to disprove your beliefs. If you start trying to impose your beliefs or preach them to someone else, the logically correct reaction is for them to ignore you completely and deny you any authority to impose your beliefs -- until you have produced evidence for their validity.

Of course, we're talking philosophically, and in the real world, people often impose their beliefs. The thing is, awareness of the burden of proof can only improve things. It won't fix politics, but maybe it will change a few people's lives individually, and maybe our culture will get just a little bit smarter.

I'm chuckling to myself.

Actually, I'm chuckling aloud, but I'm sitting by myself...

Anonymous, if by "complex" you mean "very intelligent," most of them don't need an analogy to understand it.  They figured it out long ago on their own, or after reading one or two books dealing with social structure and interpersonal relationships.

Reading is Magic!

Jesus is a Myth!

Well put.  

This is why I tried to separate the real world from philosophy.  The brain naturally forms shortcuts to leap over common logical progressions.  Even with our immense brains, we'd never manage to walk out the front door if we had to evaluate each new concept from scratch.

The old saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is very appropriate to this discussion.  Do I need to reason from scratch to figure out if this chicken sandwich is safe to eat?  No.  Do theists need to start from scratch to prove super-daddy-in-the-sky?  Yeah... because it's way beyond the realm of self evident, or common sense, or even simple logic.

The problem with this is that atheism is not a metaphysical position--at least not a positive one.  It is a lack of a particular one, usually due to lack of evidence to support it.

If you say that you start with no metaphysical position, that means that one of the positions you don't have is that any gods exist.  And since taht is what atheism means, then being without a metaphysical position includes atheism.  Again, if your metaphysical position still needs to be declared, then you don't hold belief in any gods.  Again, this is atheism.

Now, my naturalism and materialism are metaphysical positions.  However, these are in addition to my atheism, not part of or a result of it.

Shaun 

True. Problem is, atheists are also claiming something, since nobody actually witnessed humans evolve out of anything. Not to mention, people have believed in god longer than evoloution, and as the new(er) guy, it's up to us to prove them wrong. Remember, these are the people who will die or kill for their beliefs, and sometimes rationality has to be force-fed to them, because they seem to HATE the taste.

I disagree.  The reason is that atheism is not a position at all, but rather a lack of one particular position--that of god-belief.  You lack any position before you take one, right?  So if I lack any metaphysical position, then part of that is the lacking of the position that any gods exist.  While the person may not recognize this as "atheism," that is indeed what they are, an atheist.  So atheism is one of many default positions, along with afaeriyism, adragonism, and aunicornism (sorry to all you IPU devotees...). 

 A person cannot have theism as a default, because that position must be taught or irrationally derived through experience.  It is not held initially or automatically.  Unless by default you mean that after one accepts it then it's the default position, but this is not how I'm using the term.  

I don't need to justify my atheism; I need to justify naturalism.  My atheism exists because of the lack of evidence for theism.  That is, without evidence for theism, atheism remains the obvious position to hold.  I start not believing in god and I continue to lack this odd belief until evidence for it surfaces.  Theists start with this lack of belief, learn about the belief, believe it for irrational reasons, and sometime seventually realize taht their reasons are not sufficient and return to the default position.  

The arguments for theism are not a priori. 

Shaun 

I guess that's fair. I didn't liek the wording of taht last sentence, but I'll let it slide.

I'm not sure most people do pick their first position. All I'm saying is that one has to actively accept theism, one does not have to accept atheism. Without even the thought, one lacks theism, so it is automatic. Once you've made your first intentional guess, whether it's rational, irrational, arational, etc it is made from a point of not being theistic, hence atheistic.

I'll agree that for most people, our first metaphysical position is not rationally constructed--although it is possible to have this be the case in principle. And taht's the point; it is possible to rationally construct a metaphysical worldview. To do this, you must hold many, if not all, things in epistemological suspension. Thus, if you start from anywhere but atheism, you are presupposing theism. This does not mean you presuppose that there is no God, but that when you try to construct a metaphysics, you have to leave the question open, wheich means you must suspend belief either way. This fits into the definition of atheism.

The fine-tuning should never end, IMO.

This is an improved version of your point. As you said above, you must make a first choice. whether it is blind or not is arguable. I'm simply saying that if you make the first choice to believe God exists, you are claiming something. If you don't do so, you are not claiming anything. There is indeed reason to do one over the other, whether the person realizes it or not.

Thus, theism is not made by default, it is made as a proposition about the world. Whether the person making the proposition is aware of the implications of making the claim is irrelevant because they are indeed making a claim which is significant. Making a claim about the universe without considering the epistemological implications is possible, but irresponsible. Doing so means that one is responsible for the implications, and it ceases to be a default position (or a "current best" position) because it has not been justified.

This is exactly what is wrong with theism; it is not justified. This is why it can never be accepted as a metaphysical worldview without having been justified--or at least attempted to have been justified. One does not jump from the metaphysical position of "there is a god" to "I lack belief in God." rather, they discard belief in god, in which case they are left without one aspect of their previous metaphysical worldview. Perhaps other parts of their metaphysics remains (or perhaps not) but they don't necessarily make any exchange--they do not take on the metaphysical worldview of atheism (because no such worldview exists) or anything else as a necessary result of dropping god.

You are never left with a choice of the god metaphysics or the lack of god metaphysics. You are left with the possible choice of believing in gods or not accepting that proposition as a sub-set of aother metaphysical workdviews. That is why it is not a question of choosing one position over the other (and making a guess, blind or not). If you simply accept that god exists, you are simply making a leap that is either justified or not. And since no justification has been presented to me, I'll continue to say that this leap is unjustified.

It is, but I don't need to declare this, believe it, or even have thought it to be an atheist. if I've simply never thought about the existence of any gods, I'm an atheist.

Where do we get this information about metaphysics that is not empirical? If it is not empirical, where does it come from? We think about the nature of the world based on experience with the world. What would conscious experience be like--metaphysics included--if we had no perception of anything? How would metaphysics be thought about?

Or so the theist will have you believe. Anyone who thinks they are thinking about metaphysics without using a posteriori or empirical methods, they are deluded.

I would in some cases. I'm confused here a little because I don't know why metaphysics does not include empiricism.

Perhaps we all do. The point is taht this is not necessary in principle. It is possible to have a sentient, intelligent, conscious being analyze the world and rationally develop a metaphysical worldview. The point, as stated above, is taht when a theist does do this, they are doing it without justification.

Right, that is one way. They could use a priori or a posteriori methods to realize this. In fact, using both seems best.

A clarification; I believe that all argumentation, indeed all communication, thought, etc ultimately have their root in empiricism. Thus, at some point they may use a priori arguments, but they are derived from a posteriori experience.

ontological; one has to have experience with reality to abstract rationalized information about it generally.

teleological; One must have experience with the world in order to abstract the relationship between cause and effect, designer/design, etc in order to abstract that the universe must need a design.

transcendental; this is the closest to being purely a priori. But without real examples from experience to act as the basis for thinking about the structure of logic, I'm not convinced that logic would have been abstracted to be a something in need of design. That is, logic itself is supposed to be the ultimate a priori tool, but to understand it, we need to learn it by use of the same mental tools and cognitive skills that allow us to understand how the world around us--the one we experience a posteriori--works.

cosmological; this is basically the same as the design argument. We need real things, learned from experience, to abstract in order to conceive of the notion of a first cause. In order to understand the concept of a cause, we need experience.

Thus, I would argue that all a priori knowledge needs experience to exist. Once we've developed the tool, we can use it on things without experience. But the tool itself is abstracted by use of a posteriori knowledge. Hence, all arguments are, at the core, derived from experience with the world.

(This was the topic of my MA thesis, btw)

Shaun

Todangst, I have the oddest sensation after reading your last post.   I don't think I disagree with you in any significant ways, and yet I feel something in the pit of my stomach.  I think it's the use of the word, "god."

The notion of a god is one that contains an inherent complexity that I think surpasses the capabilities of the pre-sentient mind, and so I think your progression is a little misleading.

I suspect if there was a way to describe the pre-aware mind's comprehension, it would not be (I am god).  Rather, it would be something like (I am) or (I make).  We feel hunger, we react, and mother appears.  We don't know what mother is, but it makes us feel better.  Beyond that, I don't think there's any definable assignment.

I suspect you mean something like this, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.  I just think it is giving the god concept too much credit to assign the word to a pre-sentient human.

Instead of (mother and father are god), I'd feel more comfortable saying (mother and father are everything) or (mother and father are perfect).

This kind of wording might cause a problem in following the train of thought all the way to "Well, someone must be god..."   I just think it's a more complicated jump than that.  If people fell so naturally into the line of thought, then the world would be full of children asking about god before being told... maybe not using the word god, but trying to form some language to ask who is all-powerful.

While I remain sceptical that these are the ways to come to the conclusion of 'God', I did recognise aspects of these in my own personal devellopment.

That is searching for an answer, not searching for god.

"Searching for god" presupposes the existence of god, as in, "I'm searching for the Loch Ness Monster."  Somebody had to tell me what the LNM was before I could begin searching.

Asking why is just asking why.