The Trouble With Truth

The Trouble With Truth: Freedom vs. Subservience

Freedom is the advantage of Atheism, while subservience is the plague of religion: that is the message from PZ Meyers last Sunday. The perfect freedom that Atheism provides is a release from authority and obligatory moral tenets. According to Meyers, the Atheist has,

”...no gods and no masters, only autonomous agents free to think and act”.

The Trouble With Truth: Rebellion

Many Atheists arrive at their Atheism during or after a journey of personal rebellion. Rebellion is part of the adolescent process of determining who one is. An adolescent is captured under rules of behavior that restrict. The restriction is resented. If the person is to be self-sufficient, then those rules made by others are onerous. Many youth rebel, and some rebel against all authority over them. In the manner of a prisoner rebelling against captors, the youth rebels, seeking personal control. In many cases, the youth is released from the restrictions as he reaches legal maturity, and he becomes independent and moves on, having accomplished personal control at last. In others, the resentment lingers, and rebellion continues. For some it continues throughout life. Some never reach the degree of personal control they seek.

So it is no wonder that the ultimate freedom and personal control that Atheism promises is popular amongst the young. And it is no wonder that it, rebellious Atheism, declines with age, along with Leftist, omni-control political leanings. But there remain those who cannot let go of the resentment they felt at the restrictions placed on them during their formative years, who retain the need for personal control over everything to the very end.

Another factor is the type of fathering that the youth received. In today’s distributed families, the fathers very often are not present. The youth are raised in an estrogen-rich environment, one which tries valiantly to provide the needs of the young person, but fails to provide a stable masculine role model. It is now known that male rebellion against the single female parent is a direct link to Atheism, and that faulty fathers produce the same issues in children, especially males.

When Meyers promises the great relief of omni-freedom and personal control via Atheism, he knows what he is doing. Freedom from all constraint is the main offering that Atheism has to bestow. Complete freedom is an attractive feature to a person who has been afflicted with onerous restrictions, real or imagined.

But freedom always comes at a price. Complete, unrestricted freedom costs dearly. It costs the connection to reality through truth, because for the Atheist there is no truth, it is all relative. Relativity gives one freedom to choose, whereas truth can restrict you to predetermined answers.

The Trouble With Truth: Definition

That’s the problem with truth. Or at least one of the problems. Truth has some characteristics that are uncomfortable for the rebel, the seeker of perfect freedom. Because truth, by definition, is uncompromising. Truth is incorrigible, unchangeable by the opinions of humans. Truth is not controllable by humans. Worse, logic and rational thought require that truth exists. And worst of all, truth might not be on the side of the rebel.

Humans are not the source of truth. The universe is not the source of truth. The source of the universe and humans is the source of truth. So controlling truth and bending it to an individual’s personal needs is out of the question for actual, universal truth. Any concepts that are manufactured for personal benefit are opinions, not truth. So it is opinion that is relative, not truth.

How should truth be defined then, in order to capture its incorrigible, universal quality? There are so many definitions of truth, that I have condensed them before;

Here is another condensation:

”Original Truth reflects observable characteristics of the universe that are inferred to be incorrigibly valid and perpetually unchanging within our universe, and which, if not so, would require a different sort of universe than ours in order to accommodate them.”

The Trouble With Truth: The Role of Inference.

Inference of truth is the only possible manner in which it can be apprehended. It is not possible to use empirical scientific methods to generate a truth, ever. This is because of the “inductive defect” and its spawn, the deductive defect, upon which empiricism depends. Truth is known only through the process of observation, inference and introspective examination. Before any objections about using inference for truth are raised, consider the widespread use of inference to declare the truth of the evolution hypothesis. Empirical science also infers a probability of the validity of an hypothesis after performing experiments that fail to falsify the hypothesis. Science is no stranger to inference: it uses it extensively.[1]

Inference of universal truth is different only in that the validity is inferred from the consequences that would be seen if the concept were not true, universally. It would take a much different universe to accommodate realities where a tautology was not valid, where cause and effect was not valid, or where an large, non-quantum object could both exist and not exist simultaneously. Our universe would not be what it is if these concepts were not true.

It is certainly valid to declare that these concepts cannot be proven, especially empirically. But it is not valid to declare them false because of that. Nietzsche did that and invented anti-Rationalism. But rationality remains a desirable characteristic amongst most humans today. In fact, rationality is an inborn human faculty that is well described in Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”. If a person denies rationality as a valuable trait, then a rational conversation cannot be had with him.

There are also arguments against introspection, declaring that mental activity such as that is subject to error. But this neglects the fact that all decisions are mental activities which are carried on in the individual mind, and which use the same Lockian human faculties that are exercised when analyzing empirical data. Moreover, introspective conclusions can be compared against those of others who have considered the same issues and have come to conclusions. Differences between individual findings can be considered evidence for consideration, just as is done in empiricism, comparing experimental results. The declaration that introspection and other mental considerations are faulty is a fallacy of failing to consider the full use, and consequences of full use, of the mental faculty and using only data favoring the desired conclusion (Exclusionary Fallacy). After all, Atheism is itself an inference which would automatically fail if introspection and mental agitations are not valid by definition.

The Trouble With Truth: Subservience.

Since it is demonstrable that truth does exist, and that it is incorrigible and its validity is not dependent upon what humans think about it, then it is necessary for human thought, if it is to be valid, to work within the framework of that truth.

I have been lucky enough to have observed and worked with some individuals who were independently brilliant. These individuals all exhibited a singular characteristic: intellectual humility. None of these people considered themselves to be “intellectuals”, especially “Public Intellectuals” endowed with the duty to moralize to the masses. What made them special was their willingness to look into physically abstruse matter with a totally open mind, a mentality that wished to know and understand rather than to control. By objectively exercising causes and observing all – All – the effects, or vice-versa, the truth of the phenomenon being examined could be found.

In other words, the observations were subject to the principle of cause and effect. The entire environment was allowed to be subservient to that principle. And the other First Principles as well, all were assumed as axioms. Valid thought can only happen under such subservience. Rebellion against these axioms produces the Nietzschean anti-rationality, which has no place in science, math, logic or rational discourse.

In fact, one can see that coherent information converges into knowledge, while incoherent information, i.e. noise, disperses into the chaos of more noise. Coherence is the First Principle of Non-Contradiction. Another way to say this is that denying Non-Contradiction produces chaotic thinking. So the total freedom that is the objective of Atheism and Materialism, the open thinking that denies absolutes, that claims control over its thoughts while denying external limits as arbitrary constructs, this total freedom brings only chaotic thinking.

Rebellion against absolutes and external control over the thought process is a faulty mind set, one which prevents the submission of thought to the reality of truth.

The Trouble With Truth: Reality.

Consider this. If there is no truth, then there is no reality, at least none that is stable and consistent. If there are no absolutes governing the universe, then the universe has no stable characteristics that we can call laws. And there is no consistency in an unstable reality that we can use to produce rational decisions, and thus rationality is non-existent.

Are we to believe this? Can this be inferred from any observations of the properties of the universe? Is language merely unintelligible mutterings without any logical meaning? Is there no personal experience with the reality that is described by the First Principles? Are there no absolute principles governing the behavior of the universe in a consistent and stable?

We can only infer answers to these issues. But if Atheism is valid, if there is no meaning to the principles of consistency, if total freedom of thought reigns, then all these things are so: and the consequence of that is another tenet of Atheism – we are meaningless, valueless, irrational creatures in an irrational, valueless, meaningless universe: so anything goes, anything whatsoever.

The Trouble With Truth: Ethics

Which brings us to ethics and truth. The most common ethic of Atheists is Consequentialism which is focused on the masses as Humanism. Here Atheists are forced to consider whether Consequentialism is “truth”, or whether it is merely a tactic.

It almost seems that I needn’t say any more about that, yet I am compelled to point out that ethics are never “truth” for Atheists, who deny that truth exists. So the default is “tactic”. They do claim loud and long that they are moral, Meyers does so frequently. But that resolves to “tactic” as well, since it cannot be truth either. And tactics are what Consequentialism is all about. It is no different than the procedures for carrying on warfare; once again, anything goes, if it produces results.

The Trouble With Truth: Not-Truth

The final yet universal problem for Atheists is that truth, when denied, produces an environment of not-truth. Without truth, only not-truth remains. That is the environment of Atheism: not-truth. In such an environment, as was pointed out earlier, anything goes, including all sorts of denials of the obvious. Atheism cannot be true for several reasons, in this case, the fact that it denies the existence of any arbitrary, uncontrollable, external, incorrigible, absolute… truth.

So it cannot be true.

[1] Note that science does not warrant inferred results to be truth: science, including empirical science, produces only contingent factoids, tentative information that is always subject to further investigation and findings.

Quote of the Day 07.02.10

"In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief

In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011...

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011...

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes

When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired."

Americans for Tax Reform

And don't forget,

"No family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase"
Barack Obama, 9.12.2008

Death of Exceptionalism

Perhaps they are right. The American experiment is so easily brought down that it actually was not exceptional at all. Maybe it was at one time. Like when it fought two simultaneous wars against two fascist aggressors, and won. Or when it met the soviet challenge, and won.

But those abilities are gone, long gone. Now our own government cannot seal our own border. Rather, it wishes to control us. It now passes two kinds of laws, those to spend more money, and those to clamp down on our freedoms.

All it took was a long Hegelian march to the Left, one that promised more and more entitlements – read “sending my money to those guys” – to more and more non-producers. The crises thus created have burst one by one, and now with the government’s full assistance we are in a depression, accompanied by massive and exponentially growing debt. The U.S. Congress has decided not to even produce a budget this year; too much trouble for a meaningless document.

The three alternatives for our fiscal future, forfeiture, inflation, taxation, are all possible, but maybe only serially as they fail, one by one. Taxation is being increased selectively, now it is banks being taxed more heavily, and that taxation will escalate but fail to produce the trillions in revenue needed. Then inflation will be fired up to reduce the actual value of the trillions owed. Only after that fails, and brings on the massive social discomfort and unrest that hyper-inflation always produces, will forfeiture be exercised. Forfeiture will produce international enmity and increased tensions with China, which is arming itself at a magnificent rate right now.

It is forecasted that by mid-century the USA will be dominated by minorities, meaning non-whites. How many of these accept the values that created a free and strong USA is not known. But it was the minority vote that handed the country over to an unknown and unknowable pretercommunist in 2008. The future, even if it is temporarily in the hands of the Republican limp rags, is decidedly on the side of permanent social discomfiture and reduced standards of living. The exceptionalism of the USA is being destroyed in favor of punishment of its citizens and wealth producers, on the track to third world status and permanent peasantry.

On our current path, a permanent peasantry under a class of elitists looks imminent. In fact we are almost there, at least we are in the third act. Living as a peasant, possibly under Sharia, is not a desirable outcome. But even Rome fell to its excesses and barbarian incursions. In our case, the barbarians are running the show.

Massimo on Ghosts

Atheists like to conflate non-material things like ghosts and the first cause with material effects having material causes and therefore providing material evidence. Massimo Pigliucci does so, and manages to completely misuse fallacy theory in the defense of his Philosophical Materialism.

Massimo’s claim that the negative defense is not proper logic goes like this: believing in something because there is no evidence against it does not have the same logical weight as believing in not-something because there is no evidence.

The idea of weighting one irrational belief more than another irrational belief is something new to logic theory as far as I know; I doubt that it will catch on.

The remaining problem with that position is that it doesn’t reflect the issue. The issue is as follows:

If a non-material effect is observed as a temporary material effect by person A, is person A justified in believing that it happened as observed?

And if person B was not there when the non-material effect is observed as a temporary material effect, is person B justified in instructing person C that the event could not have happened, due to lack of evidence?

And is person C justified in claiming that lack of evidence does not indicate evidence of non-existence of the non-material event? And that agnosticism is justified?

Massimo has run into a situation where his daughter, age 13, is more correctly skeptical than he is. Massimo is not skeptical; he is dogmatic. He insists on physical evidence for non-physical phenomena. And he insists in a belief, without positive evidence to defend the belief, that there is no non-physical reality.

He wraps up with the following amazing piece of justification:

”The job of the skeptical critical thinker is to convince people that these seemingly different situations are logically equivalent, and that it is therefore not rational to believe in ghosts without evidence at the same time that one wouldn’t dream of convicting a person of a crime just on the basis that she cannot prove her innocence. But as is often the case, human psychology gets in the way of rational thinking.

Actually the job of a critical thinker is not to be skeptical as an a priori defense against non-material reality. Skepticism in modern terms is a belief system that represents itself to be the repository of rationality. Yet there are certain things that cannot be argued for, and certain things that cannot be argued against in this Skeptical society, or cult, if you will. These dogmas make Skepticism more religious than rational, and contradict the entire concept of Skeptics as rational priests, bringing truth to the masses. They are dogmatic priests bringing Philosophical Materialism and Consequentialist Humanism.

A critical thinker is not tasked with convincing anyone of anything, except convincing himself that he has followed a valid, rational path with available evidence to a rational conclusion, which can include agnosticism regarding the subject. The idea of a skeptical critical thinker, when taken in Massimo’s meaning, is an oxymoron.

The comparison of material evidence of a material crime event in a court situation with evidence of an evanescent, non-material event, is ludicrous. But it is necessary for Materialist, Atheist, dogmatists to represent evidence without qualifiers such as non-material. This is because their logical defects are easier to cover up that way.

And finally, human psychology does get in the way of rational thought; Massimo’s illogic proves that, consistently.

I hope his daughter grows up to think straight anyway, it would be interesting to follow this case. She should know that a burden of proof is always accompanied by a burden of rebuttal, which carries the same evidentiary burden. Someone please tell her.

PZ's Sunday Sermon 06.28.10

PZ has taken to giving Sunday sermons. This Sunday he elevates the Atheist by first denigrating the Christians. Christians, says PZ, have no more value to life than the father / child bond; they are subservient and like to be ignorant. As usual PZ gives reasons that the Bible is evil and that God is even more evil:

”and what are we atheists doing? Telling them that no, he is not, and not only that, you don't even have a heavenly father at all, the imaginary guy you are worshipping is actually a hateful monster and an example of a bad and tyrannical father, and you aren't even a very special child — you're a mediocre product of a wasteful and entirely impersonal process.”

And,

” Your daddy was a film of chemical slime on a Hadean rock, and he didn't care about you — he was only obeying the laws of thermodynamics.”

And,

”Your genome is a mess of detritus with a tiny fraction of well-honed functionality, and your body is cobbled together from the framework of a tetrapod — you bear the scars of chance throughout, and you are mostly unaware of them because selection, that is the death of millions, has patched them over…but they're there to the eye that will look. You aren't even the best at much of anything: you're weaker, slower, more fragile, clumsier than the other species we compete with, and although you've got a bigger brain, the majority of Americans, at least, consider it a virtue to keep it ignorant and unused…”

Sounds great so far, this Atheism based on evolution. Also, father / child relationships aren’t what they’re cracked up to be:

” Father and child is inadequate; we have to think in terms of populations and species interacting (not dominating), of being part of an environment. There is more to life than the father and child bond.”

So rather than a relationship and servility and stupidity we must consider ourselves to be,

” That's the next step in human progress, is getting away from the notion of minions living under a trail boss, and onwards to working as a cooperative community, with no gods and no masters, only autonomous agents free to think and act.

Ignoring the usual observation that free agency is considered an illusion or delusion at best by Atheist apologists, this statement really does sum up the total freedom from all constraint that Atheists assume that they get by just denying the existence of a first cause. Certainly no gods, and certainly no masters. You are able to make up your own rules as you go. Ah the freedom.

PZ quite frequently makes these declarations that wind up being contradictions of other declarations he has made. It’s like that with non-truth. If you need something to be valid at a certain point in an argument, you merely assert it and it is so. No need to recognize that it refutes earlier positions. Or future positions.

But this sermon was directed at those who feel so alone in their decision to abandon the concept of first cause: they should rejoice at their total freedom, the freedom from intellectual integrity, personal responsibility for actions, truth as a value, truth as an entity, and all the other onerous restrictions of absolutes that are indicative of religious servility. Freedom. Freedom from rational constraints and logical processes. Yes. Freedom.

PZ says,

”We are apes and the descendants of apes, who were the descendants of rat-like primates, who were children of reptiles, who were the spawn of amphibians, who were the terrestrial progeny of fish, who came from worms, who were assembled from single-celled microorganisms, who were the products of chemistry.”

And this makes us free.

New Blogger Template

Blogger has some new templates. I thought I'd try this combination of colors. Any opinions? Is it harder to read? Or easier on the eyes? Or don't care?