Infinite Regress is a Slippery Slope

April 3, 2012 By leahlibresco 35 Comments

A friend of mine, who blogs sporadically as Squelchtoad, had a great response to the NYT review of Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing that I mentioned in the recent neuroscience post.  I’m excerpting Squelchtoad’s commentary, but you should hop over and read the brief piece yourself:

But it occurs to me that the Albert riposte to Lawrence Krauss might also work at least for the more naïve versions of that theological argument. What does it mean for God to be a “necessary being”? Well, some old school theologians would have said it meant He was logically necessary. That is, the proposition “God does not exist” is actually logically impossible. But there’s an Albert Problem: Why are there laws of logic? Aren’t they themselves “something rather than nothing?”

If showing that “God exists” is a necessary proposition within a given logic is enough to prove that God actually exists, the logic itself, it seems to me, must actually exist in some sense akin to the way that the laws of quantum physics exist. This brings us back into Albert territory. The logic is a “something” that really exists rather than “nothing.” Why is there that logic rather than nothing?

…At this point the theologian, I think, is forced to throw up his hands and point out that I can’t ask a “why?” question about things like logic and/or metaphysics, the existence of which are a precondition for causation. Fair enough. But then “Why is there something rather than nothing?” suddenly seems a whole lot less coherent a question overall, so long as the logic and metaphysics are taken to be part of the something.

“Uncaused first cause” is starting to sound like a much better answer than “necessary being.” The theologian may just have to accept that he can’t explain why God exists (uncaused), just that He does. Frankly, I think that ought to be enough. That said, it’s also why I don’t find the “Why is there anything?” argument to be convincing argument for theism. I fail to see how answering “Why is there anything at all?” with “(My specific) God is a brute fact” should be any more persuasive than answering it with “the universe and its laws are brute facts.”

I endorse pretty much all of Squelchtoad’s piece (that’s why I couldn’t resist grabbing such a long pull-quote.  Whether theist or atheist, everyone has to bite the bullet at a certain point and accept something without proof or cause.  We seem to (mostly) have consensus on some of these things (causality, the existence of matter, the existence of other minds) and diverge radically on others.

Acknowledging this fact doesn’t compel us to throw up our hands and let everyone assert whatever First Cause and knock-on effects that suits them.  If you assert a brute fact that isn’t meant as a solution to a problem like the origin of matter or the existence of moral law, there’s no way to contradict you, but your assertion is almost too boring to merit response.

People have proposed a number of different First Cause problem, so we can compare them and try and see if some seem better constructed that others or if (fingers crossed) a couple actually pay rent beyond the problem they were constructed to solve.

If none of them seem better than any other, then you may try just naming the thing you don’t know “First Cause.”  But if that seems like cowardice disguised as epistemological modesty, then you have to decide if and when it’s better to choose a solution instead of holding your beliefs in abeyance.

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: , , , 35 Comments

Bisexuality Q&A

October 12, 2011 By leahlibresco 17 Comments

I’d still like more responses to the questions I posed to opponents of gay marriage yesterday, but, since turnabout is fair play, I’ll take a crack at some of the questions you guys asked about bisexuality in the thread.  I’ll answer any others on this topic in the comments.

UPDATE: there’s still confusion in the comments so here’s the tl;dr takeaway: Bisexuality is totally unrelated to polyamory.  Bisexuality describes the set of people who might attract you.  Polyamory specifies what kind of relationship you want to have with people in that set.

Joe asked:

As a bisexual is it easier for you to see that sexual orientation is changeable? I would imagine that a bisexual could become more attracted to one gender while they are dating that gender but then become more attracted to the opposite gender when they are in a different relationship. Maybe thats not how it works? But it seems that the existence of Bisexual people could be proof that sexual orientation could change.

Yeah, I’d say that’s not how it works.  When I’m dating someone, I’m not more attracted to their gender generically, in the same way that someone dating a cellist doesn’t find that, in the abstract, they are now much more attracted to cellists than violinists.  Some bi people like to quantify their relative attraction to each gender, but I’ve not found that particularly personally enlightening (see statistical note at the end of the post).  Just as most readers probably don’t think of themselves as 70% brunettes, 20% redheads, 10% blondes; I don’t estimate or update my numbers on gender.  When I say I’m bi, I mean that gender isn’t a disqualifier, and I tend to leave it at that.

FCCG asked:

Many arguments for gay marriage suggest that you should be able to marry whoever will satisfy your inborn sexuality. If that is true, the bisexual should be allowed to marry at least one man and one woman. And if we allow this, how do we not allow traditional heterosexual modes of polygamy; what do we say to my friend who is convinced that polyamory is an orientation unto itself?

I’m really glad FCCG asked this, because it gives me an opportunity to address a common misconception.  Bisexuality is not the same thing as polyamory.  Let me return to the hair color parallel.  Plenty of straight men are attracted to both blondes and brunettes, but very few feel deprived or suppressed when they are dating only one girl with one hair color.  I don’t have any more of a yen to date a boy and a girl at the same time than I need to be going steady with both an American and a Frenchwoman.

I don’t have a strong objection to polyamory, but my position on that has much more to do with the dynamics of heavy obligation to more than one person than it does with diversifying genitalia.  Insofar as polyamorous marriage fits my conception of marriage — a life-long, difficult-to-exit commitment that is more focused on serving the other than securing physical pleasures for the self — I have no problem with it.  Like covenant marriage, polyamory is ok by me in theory, but they get a bad rap because it is most visibly practiced by the people we suspect are taking the principle to excess.

Finally, a statistical note on why I find the numberic labeling of bisexuals to be weird.  Let’s assume there exists a bisexual girl (Jane) who is equally attracted to men and women, so we thing of her as having a 50-50 split.  Will we see her dating men as often as she does women?  Definitely not.  About 90% of men are attracted to women while only ~5% of women are [estimates are not precise].  So every time Jane makes a pass at someone, all else being equal, a guy is 18x as likely to be receptive as a girl.  Unless she makes a special effort, someone would observe Jane dating guys 95% of the time and girls 5%.  So what number should she use to label herself?

When people are trying to set you up on blind dates (or in most other contexts this comes up), it’s a lot easier to talk about genres of people you’re attracted to than it is to come up with numbers.  And, after all, bi people are no more likely to be attracted to all men and women than a straight girl is to be attracted to all men.  You might know your bi friend tends to prefer women to men, but, if that’s all you know, she’s liable to be disappointed when you introduce her to a cute butch girl when she’s actually more into femmes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , 17 Comments

Coming up on Unequally Yoked…

July 15, 2010 By leahlibresco 3 Comments

Sorry for the slow responses to your comments. I’ve been (foolishly) trying to reply to every point raised at once. To give myself a little time, I’m using this post to outline the major questions I’m going to try to address, and give you a very brief précis of the posts coming up on these topics. Sound off in the comments if I’ve left out a topic you’d like to get feedback on!

What is your definition of God?
Aristarchus says:

What counts as a god? I say I am an atheist, meaning not only that I don’t believe in an omnipotent Judeo-Christian-like being, but also that I don’t believe in gods of the sort in Hinduism or Native American religions or ancient Egyptian mythology. I think the normal definition of a “god” would definitely include those things, but I don’t see what definition would include them but not also include oracles and wizards and other things of that sort. I therefore see basically any “entity that can perform miracles” as in fact a god. 

I tend to define a god-entity less by the powers it has and more by my own relationship to it.  A hurricane has power over me,. and its ways may be (to me) as inscrutable as the almighty, but my only duty to it is to get the hell out of its way.  I think of a god as something that provides an order to my life, not another set of accidents to avoid or ameliorate.  I know I’m defining a lot of things that traditionally got the label god out of the category (the Greek gods being perhaps the most glaring example) but I do believe these are qualitatively different gods, and should be treated separately.

How can you believe in objective morality if you only have imperfect access to it?
Hendy said:

The problem with forms of objective-morality-prescribing systems is that they are subjective in practice. In other words, these values exist but must be somehow discerned and translated. 

My answer to this is a little long (and frequently mocked by my friends, to the point of calling it my hypercube hypothesis) but I think it’s reasonable to say that we can approach the metaphysics of morality the same way we approach the metaphysics of mathematics: we ask questions, draw up hypotheticals and other analogies, and clumsily approach a workable representation of something we don’t have the language to express.  [Yes, I will go into considerably more detail in the forthcoming post, but I'll tell you upfront, I'm pretty sure C.S. Lewis agrees with me]

What if a religion is wrong, but its moral teachings are right?
Arkanabar T’verrick Ilarsadin said:

Once you’ve absorbed what the Church teaches is moral behavior, ask yourself: would the world be better, or worse, if everyone ascribed to that morality? 

I certainly won’t deny that some churches have been ahead of the curve on many moral issues.  And it’s an endless torment to me that all the good words for talking about morality (soul, sin, etc) are all extremely Christian language.  [I do promise a post soon on why I think Original Sin is a useful concept even in atheistic conceptions of morality].  My primary fear of organized religion is that it has the power to make people abstract themselves from their moral sense.  Ultimately, I think it’s bad for people to trust others too much on moral questions, to trust them to the point of ignoring their own visceral moral experiences.  No matter whether the church is preaching truths today, you don’t want to get into the bad habit of contracting out your moral sense.

Hopefully, these brief answers will whet your appetite for the longer posts coming soon.  Comments are appreciated, especially so I can refine the essays I’m writing, but please remember these are brief overviews of my positions.  I promise to justify them better soon.

Filed Under: Atheism Tagged With: , 3 Comments