Heres a way of understanding God, it is the manifestation of the invisible into the physical. You cannot see god but you can see his works in physical form. Understanding God comes through understanding the causation of r things, whether that causation is visually apparent or not because it all came from the same source, which is God (your individual conscious mind). The unfolding of your conscious mind into reality through present tense experiences.
@@AtticPhilosophy the concept of god in itself is not to be “differentiated” by what’s real and what’s not because both conclusions are of God. That in between is the nature of God and is only manifested through belief. Just like ghosts we can’t say are real because we can’t see them with the naked eye. However because we have created a concept of it and pictures first in our minds and then describing them as “invisible” technically makes it a real thing and believable. Other example is oxygen you can’t see or even touch it but you can feel it blow through your lungs and logically or scientifically we know it allows us to breath even though we can’t see it but we have an idea of it. This is the nature of God, it can’t be proven logically to others because all things manifested can be both logically and illogically created. This is why it’s something you have to believe in order to actually see and understand the unseen works. All things that can happen with or without apparent logical causation and it all comes from the same source of creation which (in the end) can only be experienced by consciousness. Simply put a thing is only made manifest to you once you actually believe that it can be.
I’m not 100% sure what that involves, but I don’t think science is the only source of knowledge or scientific methods are the only way of gaining knowledge - just that they’re the best on the questions in their domain.
@@AtticPhilosophy would it be correct to say that the scientific method is the best we have come up with based on the system of logic we generally accept the experienced universe to seem to follow? It always seemed strange to me that the universe just seems to only be amenable to falsification type tests. Like we can know something is not something else, but we can never really prove something is something as a result of, I guess, us not having access to all information in the universe.
Classical theism holds that God is outside time and space and is simple so to compare God to invisible kittens is simply comparing two completely different things
Sure, there's differences. The minimal point here against agnosticism is that we *can* know that something doesn't exist, even if we lack direct proof of its nonexistence. That undermines the standard positive argument for agnosticism. In the case of classical theism, you might even think that God's being outside space & time makes it *easier* to know there's no God, since it's a priori that causes take place in space and time.
@@AtticPhilosophysure I understand that the goal of the argument was to undermine agnosticism, and I agree it’s not a tenable position, but using the kitten analogy still doesn’t work because when we talk about God we are talking about ipsum esse subsistens and metaphysical proofs not empirical things you can find in the world. No serious theist says you can find God in the clouds, they say that God is a necessary being with certain attributes. If you want to undermine agnosticism you would compare it to mathematics or something and saying that you can’t be unsure if a triangle has three angles that add up to 180 degrees
I strongly disagree that you don't have good arguments against invisible kittens existing - you have loads of arguments, such as that our whole physical science would be systematically mistaken if they existed. That's tremendously strong evidence against the existence of invisible kittens. The same is of course true for Russell's teapot - we have strong reasons to believe that there is no such teapot, e.g. because it would be insanely stupid for any country to put such a teapot into space, etc You are saying "all the things about invisible kittens you could also say about God", but that's of course not true - nothing in the God hypothesis would entail that our current science is systematically mistaken. In fact many theists or deists would argue that the God hypothesis actually fits very well with contemporary cosmology. Overall it seems pretty obvious that if you have neither reasons for or against the truth of p, then your credence in p should be exactly 50% (my credence in there being an even number of bicycles in Beijing is exactly 50%, for example). Therefore someone who says God is very unlikely to exist owes us an argument why that would be so.
Yes, I think we have excellent reasons not to believe in those kittens, or in God. I don’t see that much difference. But the point here was: we don’t need the full force of those arguments to know. If we did, counter-arguments might undermine that knowledge.
God is a disembodied mind, that contradicts the evidence we have of minds arising from brains. And yes, I am sure theologians have ways to think of god that are compatible with modern cosmology. Invisible kittens are compatable with it as well. And about russels tea pot, who said a country must have put it there? What if it was Bob the tea god who manipulated history in such a way so that we could discover tea. What makes things like God, Jesus ans prophets of god more reasonable than Bob?
@@AtticPhilosophy I mean sure if you want to base knowledge entirely on an externalist safety condition then that's fine. But what you were implying was that all the reasons that could possibly count against invisible kittens also count against the God hypothesis, which is just not true
Safe is word which resembles verification to me. The problem with empiricism would be Quine. You need abstract objects in a coherent worldview. If there is a underlying ontological simplicity in "generating" the abstract there can be structural similarity in consomology. I would still deny the false binary of safe unsafe knowledge in this case
It’s not meant to have anything to do with verification. For example, safety theorists think you can know you’re not dreaming, or a brain in a vat, but you can’t verify that “from the inside”.
I don't find this a plausible characterization of agnosticism *as such* (and I'm an agnostic!). There are three belief-like propositional attitudes one can take to a proposition p. One can believe p; one can believe ~p; or one can suspend or withhold judgment/belief regarding p. Letting p be , this tripartite schema very naturally corresponds to theists, atheists, and agnostics, respectively. An agnostic, then -- at least in this characterization -- is simply someone who suspends or withholds belief in God's existence. They may or may not go on to say that we cannot know whether God exists. They might think it's knowable in principle, but our current public evidence leaves the matter underdetermined; they might think some others (with different evidence bases) could be possessed of knowledge on the matter, even if they themselves -- in light of their own evidence base -- don't have such knowledge; and so on. Under this characterization, then, it is not necessary for being an agnostic that one thinks God's existence is unknowable. Consider also that people will often say they're 'agnostic about' things -- e.g., whether there's alien life. They're not thereby committing to the unkowability in principle of whether there's alien life; they're simply saying they neither believe in aliens nor disbelieve in them (or perhaps they're simply saying *they* don't currently know one way or the other, even if it's knowable in principle). In this regard, Draper (my old prof!) articulates several different senses of 'agnostic' in his SEP entry on atheism and agnosticism, and each has a proper role to play in certain contexts. There is *one* sense of agnosticism that corresponds to your characterization; but there are *other senses* that don't (like the 'neither believe nor disbelieve' characterization above), and those senses are entirely legitimate, helpful, and often correspond to ordinary usage. Draper himself quite clearly favors the 'neither believe nor disbelieve' characterization in certain contexts, as when he writes: "But after years of searching and researching, I have come to believe that the inferential evidence concerning God’s existence is, at least at the present time, ambiguous. One consequence of this is that I am an agnostic. I don’t believe with any confidence that God exists, nor do I believe with any confidence that God does not exist. Though I won’t be terribly surprised if I one day meet my maker, I also take seriously the possibility that I have no maker, that nature is a closed system. And so I find myself sitting on the fence between theistic and atheistic belief, waiting - indeed hoping - to be pulled over to one side or the other." (From his "Seeking but believing: Confessions of a practicing agnostic") Btw, to those curious, I articulate different (and by my lights quite helpful!) senses of 'agnostic' in my video "Why am I agnostic?" 🥰
I like your video! So I guess my claim here is: it’s knowable. ‘Agnostic’ usually refers to knowledge in a religious context - that’s the Greek meaning - but common definitions often slide between belief & knowledge and, as you say, ‘agnostic’ in other contexts can refer to withholding belief. Fwiw, even if what I’ve argued here is correct, it doesn’t say much about what one should believe, or where the arguments lead.
@@AtticPhilosophy I agree with that part of the video - in principle, it’s knowable! So agnosticism - in the sense operative in your video - is false. Yet I remain agnostic, as there’s at least one important sense of ‘agnostic’ not targeted by the argument(s) of the video🙂❤️
I’m no expert by any means, but it feels like your argument isn’t super sound, since even given your definition of knowledge, you can assume that there is a god, and, since the world would have to be radically different for there not to be one, it is a safe belief that god exists, which kind of contradicts your argument. I’m not trying to say that god does exist, rather that it still is a bit difficult to go against agnostics.
Good spot! In fact, I discussed this in a longer version, but cut as it got too complex. My reply: it doesn’t undermine the argument. You can’t know something that isn’t true. So the question of knowledge is: if something is true, can you know it? I think that probably applies to ‘god exists’ as well as to ‘god doesn’t exist’, but since only one can be true, only one can be known.
The argument that Mark was making is "IF God doesn't exist, then some people know it". This is compatible with "IF God exists, then some people know it" being true as well, so I don't see how this contradicts his point tbh
Well I guess it depends a lot on the definition of "God." Clearly if we have in mind a Judeo-Christian God, or something similar, our knowledge of that god is extremely "unsafe". If, on the other hand, we extend the definition of God to something less precisely defined, I don't know, the God the Spinozian one (i.e., substance), for example then I am not sure that knowledge is so "unsafe". For me it would be pretty unsafe, because I don't think there are any structures with the character of totality that have an actuale sense and existence, I think there are no such matters of fact, but for example for Einstein a God like the Spinozian substance was perfectly acceptable. And I wouldn't feel like saying that this is not safe knowledge, and who am I to contradict Einstein? : ) We could perhaps say this: the more characterized is the definition of God is, the more unsafe the knowledge of this God is. And vice versa. What do you think Prof ?
Just to clarify the theory: it’s belief that is safe or unsafe. Knowledge requires safe belief. So there’s no thing as unsafe knowledge. Second, knowledge requires truth, so there’s no knowledge of any god unless that god exists. The question epistemologists usually ask is: given that X is true, is it/can it be known?
@@AtticPhilosophy thanks! I meant knowledge defined as follows: "Knowledge is justified true belief." That is, knowledge is "believing true" by having firm justifications for something as true. In this sense I meant "safe" knowledge: I am sure that tomorrow I will "wake up late" and therefore it is true for me. Epistemologically I am unable to access *now* that truth (which I know as true in the said sense) that I know about tomorrow. You are right, though, it is an undue shortcut (assuming a peculiar definition) to speak of "safe" knowledge. Oh, and happy new year!
@@AtticPhilosophy Anyway, one can formulate the thought in the language of theory, and it still holds (if it ever held). For example as follows: "I guess it depends a lot on the definition of "God." Clearly if we have in mind a Judeo-Christian God, or something similar, our belief of that god is extremely "unsafe". If, on the other hand, we extend the definition of God to something less precisely defined, I don't know, the God the Spinozian one (i.e., substance), for example then I am not sure that belief is so "unsafe". For me it would be pretty unsafe, because I don't think there are any structures with the character of totality that have an actual sense and existence, I think there are no such matters of fact, but for example for Einstein a God like the Spinozian substance was perfectly acceptable. And I wouldn't feel like saying that this is not safe belief, and who am I to contradict Einstein? : ) We could perhaps say this: the more characterized is the definition of God is, the more unsafe the belief of this God is. And vice versa."
I tend to prefer the convention that understands atheism as not believing in any god at all, and that agnosticism is whether one claims knowledge about whether or not some god exists. These are not mutually exclusive, and I posit that they’re usually mutually beneficial as they and the relations between them bolster our philosophical toolkit.
It's perfectly possible to believe something and not know it, of course. But it's a little strange, in the first-person, to say "it's impossible to know X but I believe it anyway". I think it's a rational norm to conform our beliefs to the evidence and, if we think there's not enough evidence to be able to know X, then we should withhold belief wither way in it.
My own position is similar to this.. this argument, as far as I'm concerned, basically settles it: but I think agnosticism is more about respect and deference towards religious people
I think respect is important, but doesn't concern what people know or believe. Respect is more about how you value and treat people. I think atheists and believers can and should respect one another! - but they won't always agree on what's true or what's right.
Heres a way of understanding God, it is the manifestation of the invisible into the physical. You cannot see god but you can see his works in physical form. Understanding God comes through understanding the causation of r things, whether that causation is visually apparent or not because it all came from the same source, which is God (your individual conscious mind). The unfolding of your conscious mind into reality through present tense experiences.
That approach won't differentiate God from other supernatural causal entities, like ghosts (aside from the question of whether any such exist).
@@AtticPhilosophy the concept of god in itself is not to be “differentiated” by what’s real and what’s not because both conclusions are of God. That in between is the nature of God and is only manifested through belief. Just like ghosts we can’t say are real because we can’t see them with the naked eye. However because we have created a concept of it and pictures first in our minds and then describing them as “invisible” technically makes it a real thing and believable. Other example is oxygen you can’t see or even touch it but you can feel it blow through your lungs and logically or scientifically we know it allows us to breath even though we can’t see it but we have an idea of it. This is the nature of God, it can’t be proven logically to others because all things manifested can be both logically and illogically created. This is why it’s something you have to believe in order to actually see and understand the unseen works. All things that can happen with or without apparent logical causation and it all comes from the same source of creation which (in the end) can only be experienced by consciousness. Simply put a thing is only made manifest to you once you actually believe that it can be.
Sorry this is a lot it was just a brain dump because I’ve experienced the unseen works
I'd have put money on you going down a naturalised epistemology route for this 😆
I’m not 100% sure what that involves, but I don’t think science is the only source of knowledge or scientific methods are the only way of gaining knowledge - just that they’re the best on the questions in their domain.
@@AtticPhilosophy would it be correct to say that the scientific method is the best we have come up with based on the system of logic we generally accept the experienced universe to seem to follow? It always seemed strange to me that the universe just seems to only be amenable to falsification type tests. Like we can know something is not something else, but we can never really prove something is something as a result of, I guess, us not having access to all information in the universe.
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Classical theism holds that God is outside time and space and is simple so to compare God to invisible kittens is simply comparing two completely different things
Sure, there's differences. The minimal point here against agnosticism is that we *can* know that something doesn't exist, even if we lack direct proof of its nonexistence. That undermines the standard positive argument for agnosticism. In the case of classical theism, you might even think that God's being outside space & time makes it *easier* to know there's no God, since it's a priori that causes take place in space and time.
@@AtticPhilosophysure I understand that the goal of the argument was to undermine agnosticism, and I agree it’s not a tenable position, but using the kitten analogy still doesn’t work because when we talk about God we are talking about ipsum esse subsistens and metaphysical proofs not empirical things you can find in the world. No serious theist says you can find God in the clouds, they say that God is a necessary being with certain attributes. If you want to undermine agnosticism you would compare it to mathematics or something and saying that you can’t be unsure if a triangle has three angles that add up to 180 degrees
I strongly disagree that you don't have good arguments against invisible kittens existing - you have loads of arguments, such as that our whole physical science would be systematically mistaken if they existed. That's tremendously strong evidence against the existence of invisible kittens. The same is of course true for Russell's teapot - we have strong reasons to believe that there is no such teapot, e.g. because it would be insanely stupid for any country to put such a teapot into space, etc
You are saying "all the things about invisible kittens you could also say about God", but that's of course not true - nothing in the God hypothesis would entail that our current science is systematically mistaken. In fact many theists or deists would argue that the God hypothesis actually fits very well with contemporary cosmology.
Overall it seems pretty obvious that if you have neither reasons for or against the truth of p, then your credence in p should be exactly 50% (my credence in there being an even number of bicycles in Beijing is exactly 50%, for example). Therefore someone who says God is very unlikely to exist owes us an argument why that would be so.
Yes, I think we have excellent reasons not to believe in those kittens, or in God. I don’t see that much difference. But the point here was: we don’t need the full force of those arguments to know. If we did, counter-arguments might undermine that knowledge.
God is a disembodied mind, that contradicts the evidence we have of minds arising from brains.
And yes, I am sure theologians have ways to think of god that are compatible with modern cosmology. Invisible kittens are compatable with it as well.
And about russels tea pot, who said a country must have put it there? What if it was Bob the tea god who manipulated history in such a way so that we could discover tea.
What makes things like God, Jesus ans prophets of god more reasonable than Bob?
@@AtticPhilosophy I mean sure if you want to base knowledge entirely on an externalist safety condition then that's fine. But what you were implying was that all the reasons that could possibly count against invisible kittens also count against the God hypothesis, which is just not true
Safe is word which resembles verification to me. The problem with empiricism would be Quine. You need abstract objects in a coherent worldview. If there is a underlying ontological simplicity in "generating" the abstract there can be structural similarity in consomology. I would still deny the false binary of safe unsafe knowledge in this case
It’s not meant to have anything to do with verification. For example, safety theorists think you can know you’re not dreaming, or a brain in a vat, but you can’t verify that “from the inside”.
I don't find this a plausible characterization of agnosticism *as such* (and I'm an agnostic!). There are three belief-like propositional attitudes one can take to a proposition p. One can believe p; one can believe ~p; or one can suspend or withhold judgment/belief regarding p. Letting p be , this tripartite schema very naturally corresponds to theists, atheists, and agnostics, respectively. An agnostic, then -- at least in this characterization -- is simply someone who suspends or withholds belief in God's existence. They may or may not go on to say that we cannot know whether God exists. They might think it's knowable in principle, but our current public evidence leaves the matter underdetermined; they might think some others (with different evidence bases) could be possessed of knowledge on the matter, even if they themselves -- in light of their own evidence base -- don't have such knowledge; and so on. Under this characterization, then, it is not necessary for being an agnostic that one thinks God's existence is unknowable.
Consider also that people will often say they're 'agnostic about' things -- e.g., whether there's alien life. They're not thereby committing to the unkowability in principle of whether there's alien life; they're simply saying they neither believe in aliens nor disbelieve in them (or perhaps they're simply saying *they* don't currently know one way or the other, even if it's knowable in principle).
In this regard, Draper (my old prof!) articulates several different senses of 'agnostic' in his SEP entry on atheism and agnosticism, and each has a proper role to play in certain contexts. There is *one* sense of agnosticism that corresponds to your characterization; but there are *other senses* that don't (like the 'neither believe nor disbelieve' characterization above), and those senses are entirely legitimate, helpful, and often correspond to ordinary usage. Draper himself quite clearly favors the 'neither believe nor disbelieve' characterization in certain contexts, as when he writes: "But after years of searching and researching, I have
come to believe that the inferential evidence concerning God’s existence is, at
least at the present time, ambiguous. One consequence of this is that I am an
agnostic. I don’t believe with any confidence that God exists, nor do I believe with any confidence that God does not exist. Though I won’t be terribly surprised
if I one day meet my maker, I also take seriously the possibility that I
have no maker, that nature is a closed system. And so I find myself sitting on
the fence between theistic and atheistic belief, waiting - indeed hoping - to
be pulled over to one side or the other." (From his "Seeking but believing: Confessions of a practicing agnostic")
Btw, to those curious, I articulate different (and by my lights quite helpful!) senses of 'agnostic' in my video "Why am I agnostic?" 🥰
I like your video! So I guess my claim here is: it’s knowable. ‘Agnostic’ usually refers to knowledge in a religious context - that’s the Greek meaning - but common definitions often slide between belief & knowledge and, as you say, ‘agnostic’ in other contexts can refer to withholding belief. Fwiw, even if what I’ve argued here is correct, it doesn’t say much about what one should believe, or where the arguments lead.
@@AtticPhilosophy I agree with that part of the video - in principle, it’s knowable! So agnosticism - in the sense operative in your video - is false. Yet I remain agnostic, as there’s at least one important sense of ‘agnostic’ not targeted by the argument(s) of the video🙂❤️
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I’m no expert by any means, but it feels like your argument isn’t super sound, since even given your definition of knowledge, you can assume that there is a god, and, since the world would have to be radically different for there not to be one, it is a safe belief that god exists, which kind of contradicts your argument. I’m not trying to say that god does exist, rather that it still is a bit difficult to go against agnostics.
Good spot! In fact, I discussed this in a longer version, but cut as it got too complex. My reply: it doesn’t undermine the argument. You can’t know something that isn’t true. So the question of knowledge is: if something is true, can you know it? I think that probably applies to ‘god exists’ as well as to ‘god doesn’t exist’, but since only one can be true, only one can be known.
The argument that Mark was making is "IF God doesn't exist, then some people know it". This is compatible with "IF God exists, then some people know it" being true as well, so I don't see how this contradicts his point tbh
Well I guess it depends a lot on the definition of "God." Clearly if we have in mind a Judeo-Christian God, or something similar, our knowledge of that god is extremely "unsafe". If, on the other hand, we extend the definition of God to something less precisely defined, I don't know, the God the Spinozian one (i.e., substance), for example then I am not sure that knowledge is so "unsafe". For me it would be pretty unsafe, because I don't think there are any structures with the character of totality that have an actuale sense and existence, I think there are no such matters of fact, but for example for Einstein a God like the Spinozian substance was perfectly acceptable. And I wouldn't feel like saying that this is not safe knowledge, and who am I to contradict Einstein? : ) We could perhaps say this: the more characterized is the definition of God is, the more unsafe the knowledge of this God is. And vice versa. What do you think Prof ?
Just to clarify the theory: it’s belief that is safe or unsafe. Knowledge requires safe belief. So there’s no thing as unsafe knowledge. Second, knowledge requires truth, so there’s no knowledge of any god unless that god exists. The question epistemologists usually ask is: given that X is true, is it/can it be known?
@@AtticPhilosophy thanks!
I meant knowledge defined as follows: "Knowledge is justified true belief."
That is, knowledge is "believing true" by having firm justifications for something as true.
In this sense I meant "safe" knowledge: I am sure that tomorrow I will "wake up late" and therefore it is true for me. Epistemologically I am unable to access *now* that truth (which I know as true in the said sense) that I know about tomorrow.
You are right, though, it is an undue shortcut (assuming a peculiar definition) to speak of "safe" knowledge.
Oh, and happy new year!
@@AtticPhilosophy Anyway, one can formulate the thought in the language of theory, and it still holds (if it ever held). For example as follows:
"I guess it depends a lot on the definition of "God." Clearly if we have in mind a Judeo-Christian God, or something similar, our belief of that god is extremely "unsafe". If, on the other hand, we extend the definition of God to something less precisely defined, I don't know, the God the Spinozian one (i.e., substance), for example then I am not sure that belief is so "unsafe". For me it would be pretty unsafe, because I don't think there are any structures with the character of totality that have an actual sense and existence, I think there are no such matters of fact, but for example for Einstein a God like the Spinozian substance was perfectly acceptable. And I wouldn't feel like saying that this is not safe belief, and who am I to contradict Einstein? : ) We could perhaps say this: the more characterized is the definition of God is, the more unsafe the belief of this God is. And vice versa."
This channel is so underrated
Thanks, I’ll take that as a compliment!
I tend to prefer the convention that understands atheism as not believing in any god at all, and that agnosticism is whether one claims knowledge about whether or not some god exists. These are not mutually exclusive, and I posit that they’re usually mutually beneficial as they and the relations between them bolster our philosophical toolkit.
It's perfectly possible to believe something and not know it, of course. But it's a little strange, in the first-person, to say "it's impossible to know X but I believe it anyway". I think it's a rational norm to conform our beliefs to the evidence and, if we think there's not enough evidence to be able to know X, then we should withhold belief wither way in it.
My own position is similar to this.. this argument, as far as I'm concerned, basically settles it: but I think agnosticism is more about respect and deference towards religious people
I think respect is important, but doesn't concern what people know or believe. Respect is more about how you value and treat people. I think atheists and believers can and should respect one another! - but they won't always agree on what's true or what's right.