Are there any non-fallacious arguments for non-theism?

[EduChris]

Let's assume for sake of argument that if non-theism were the objective reality, we would be able to offer some positive and non-fallacious argument to support the philosophical viewpoint known as non-theism.

In this discussion, we will use the following definitions:

Theism: the philosophical viewpoint that the non-contingent source and fount of all possibility is not less than personal.

Non-theism: the philosophical viewpoint that theism need not be the case.

God: the non-contingent, not-less-than-personal source and fount of all possibility.

Our universe and our selves constitute the evidence, and we must provide arguments as to why, given this evidence, we should adopt the philosophical viewpoint known as non-theism. In this thread we are not allowed to rely on some supposed "default position of non-theism"; rather, we must provide an actual, non-fallacious argument for non-theism.

After all, if non-theism can be asserted (or adopted, or held) without evidence, then non-theism can be dismissed without evidence.

[Bust Nak]

A religious theist might not accept that possibility, based on the revelation that theists accept on other grounds. However, religious theism is not the direct comparison to non-theism. If you want to compare apples to apples, then you can only directly compare non-theism against a bare philosophical theism.

No, if you want to compare apples to apples, you would be comparing your version of theism with the corresponding bare philosophical verson of non-theism that doesn't need to argue that personal causation is impossible, the version that would survives even if some universes derive from personal means.

You are still not addressing the point that there that any assumption made here is on one meta universe, not on possible universes. Either the fount is less than personal or not less than personal.

But anyway, if the "nearly nothing" universe is a possible universe, as it seems to be, then any universe such as ours would have to be contingent, which means it cannot be necessary. And if our universe is not necessary, then it can only have derived via personal agency.

That's incorrect. It could have derived via impersonal agency. Which reminds me that you have yet to acknowledge that an "absolutely nothing" universe is not impossible.

So ultimately the religious theist and the philosophical theist have very good justification for the view that our universe derives from personal agency. The contrary view requires more assumptions.

No the corresponding contrary view doesn't require any more assumptions, you aren't comparing like with like.

[EduChris]

...You are still not addressing the point that there that any assumption made here is on one meta universe, not on possible universes. Either the fount is less than personal or not less than personal...

You have some large number of possibilities, all of which derive from a single "possibility source." You need to decide whether that "possibility source" involves the two known causal mechanisms of necessity and/or agency. The "default position," per standard and normal rules of epistemology, is to assume "both." In order to choose just one over the other, you need justification. If you have no justification, your answer is arbitrary and unjustified.

...you have yet to acknowledge that an "absolutely nothing" universe is not impossible...

Any universe is part of the set of all possible universes. Therefore, any universe must involve differentiation (it is not the set); relationality (it is a member of the set); and information (i.e., that the universe contains nothing). There can be no such thing as an "absolutely nothing" universe.

[Bust Nak]

You have some large number of possibilities, all of which derive from a single "possibility source." You need to decide whether that "possibility source" involves the two known causal mechanisms of necessity and/or agency. The "default position," per standard and normal rules of epistemology, is to assume "both."

Whatever standard and rules of epistemology you have in mind, it's not normal. The two known causal mechanisms are necessity and agency. I am not even sure how it can be both, looks like a true dichotomy. The "default position," per standard and normal rules of epistemology, is to say it's "necessity or agency."

In order to choose just one over the other, you need justification. If you have no justification, your answer is arbitrary and unjustified.

Which is why you need justification to show "both" is possible and why you choose that over the other two options.

Any universe is part of the set of all possible universes. Therefore, any universe must involve differentiation (it is not the set); relationality (it is a member of the set); and information (i.e., that the universe contains nothing). There can be no such thing as an "absolutely nothing" universe.

Those are properties of a universe, not contents of a universe.

[EduChris]

...you need justification to show "both" is possible and why you choose that over the other two options...

We see both necessity and agency at work in our universe; thus, both are viable options and you must justify any decision to rule one or the other out. Without justification, your choice to eliminate either one is arbitrary and unjustified.

Any universe is part of the set of all possible universes. Therefore, any universe must involve differentiation (it is not the set); relationality (it is a member of the set); and information (i.e., that the universe contains nothing). There can be no such thing as an "absolutely nothing" universe.

Those are properties of a universe, not contents of a universe.

You cannot separate the properties of a universe from that universe. Without properties, there is no universe to speak of.

[Bust Nak]

We see both necessity and agency at work in our universe; thus, both are viable options and you must justify any decision to rule one or the other out.

Sure, both are viable options, exactly as I said. But you haven't shown "both" is a viable option. Show me something that is caused by both necessity and agency. As far as I can see, if I am doing something by necessity, that's not agency, if I can choose something else, then it's not a necessity.

Without justification, your choice to eliminate one is arbitrary and unjustified.

But I have yet to eliminate one - I clearly stated it's either necessity or agency. You want to go from "either necessity or agency" to "both" then first justify that "both" is a possible option and then justify that it is better than the other two options.

You cannot separate the properties of a universe from that universe. Without properties, there is no universe.

Sure but I can seperate the properties of a universe from the content of a universe. There is nothing impossible about nothing existing.

[Haven]

Earlier back, I was asked by EduChris to defend the problem of evil. First of all, I want to point out that I'm arguing for the evidential problem of evil, that is, that the existence of evil makes it highly unlikely for a god to exist (in other words, that the existence of evil is strong evidence against a god). I'm not claiming that it is logically impossible for a god to exist if evil exists.

Any being that is good -- let alone maximally good -- will want to eliminate the suffering of innocent people. It does not matter if the suffering serves some "higher purpose," as in a perfect world, suffering would not exist in the first place (even Christians agree with this, as "heaven" is said to be a perfect world in which there is no suffering). The fact that suffering exists is devastating to the notion that there exists an omnipotent, benevolent god.

[EduChris]

...The fact that suffering exists is devastating to the notion that there exists an omnipotent, benevolent god.

This post demonstrates why the above claim is logically (but not emotionally) invalidated due to its reliance on numerous unsupportable assumptions.

[EduChris]

...you haven't shown "both" is a viable option. Show me something that is caused by both necessity and agency. As far as I can see, if I am doing something by necessity, that's not agency, if I can choose something else, then it's not a necessity...

Doctors choose to cut out a cancerous tumor; by necessity, they cause trauma to the body at the point of incision.

...You want to go from "either necessity or agency" to "both" then first justify that "both" is a possible option and then justify that it is better than the other two options...

We have three options: 1) necessity alone; 2) agency alone; or 3) necessity and agency.

The default assumption is that all three options are possible; to assume otherwise requires justification, since the arbitrary assumption of "impossible" is always less justified than "possible." So it is your burden to show why option #3, above, is "impossible."

Theism survives if either option #2 or #3 is the case. Non-theism survives only if #1 is the case. Thus, non-theism assumes more, and is less justified than theism.

None of this shows that theism is indeed the case; however, it does show that theism is clearly more justified than non-theism.

[Mithrae]

With that said, I would like to return to a point regarding the problem of infinite regress which I made during our previous discussion. If I'm not mistaken, you've yet to comment on it and I would like to hear your response. I said the following:

The problem here is there could be no meaningful context from which to coherently conceive a state of being "different" from its own. From what experience might it derive context regarding the concept of additional states of being which are fundamentally antithetical to the only states of being it possesses an experiential referent for? How could spacial existence be meaningfully implied from a non-spacial framework? How could the concept of "matter" be conceived from a state in which there is nothing from which to provide the term meaningful context?

Now I suppose this mind might derive the concept of finitude from witnessing its own thoughts come in and out of being. Perhaps this also might imply causality. However, this notion would prove lethal to the argument for the simple reason that if we assume this mind has always been thinking finite thoughts causally connected to corresponding antecedent thoughts, then it would seem that our eternal mind would suffer the problem of an infinite regress of thoughts which would prevent the concept of a "physical universe" from ever arising. In other words, there would always be an infinite number of antecedent thoughts preceding the thought which prompted the choice to create the universe. Thus the universe could never come about.

If you posit an eternally thinking mind which conceives increasingly complex concepts over time, by way of extrapolation, then you place before the concept which prompted the creation of our universe an infinite number of preceding thoughts from which it was extrapolated. It seems to me the problem of an infinite thought regression proves fatal to any notion of a Theistic mind, conjuring up the universe through extrapolated thought. What say you?

Howdy again Ionian. I'll comment on this first, because you're right that I only replied to it briefly before.

It seems to me that any speculated explanations for reality will be reduced to apparent absurdity one way or another: Either we'd need to imagine some kind of infinite regress, or some kind of eternal or necessary state/s of being, or some kind of uncaused or random event. I agree that any kind of infinite regress seems the most absurd of these, since the existence of something which was actually infinite would lead to logical contradictions - if it were infinite, what is half of it? However there is the caveat (which is relevant to the notion of necessary existence also) that logic describes how we think, and might not describe constraints on reality.

That said I think the idea of an original mind, rather than an original something else, makes sense for three main reasons:

1 > Thought is an indisputable characteristic of our being (cogito ergo sum), but supposing that it's not a basic characteristic of reality in general raises the problem of how thought (most specifically subjective experience) came to be at all. We might say that whereas alternatives involve presumption about what we can't experience as subjects, idealism simply involves extrapolation from what we do experience as subjects

2 > As I suggested towards the end of post 92, it seems to me that the nature of thought is intimately associated with choice. Thought or minds are the only type of being I can imagine which have a necessary association with a type of behaviour, whereas supposing that reality consists of some other type of being/substance still leaves us with the problem of why it should behave in any particular way. In that respect idealism could be considered a simpler theory than alternatives

3 > While there are limitations to what we might reasonably theorize thought could accomplish, as you've persuasively argued here, ultimately I suspect that it's a more inclusive type of theory than materialism (and perhaps other alternatives). Things like divine intervention and possible life after death are neccessarily excluded by materialism, which means that reported first-hand experiences regarding such things must be either plausibly addressed or dismissed out of hand by a materialist, whereas the idealist is not commited to a view on them one way or the other. To put it the other way around, we might say that idealism has a wider range of potential 'explanatory' scope


With all that in mind, if the problem of an infinite regress in thoughts were an insurmountable problem (rather than merely a limitation in how we can think about it), I don't think it's a crippling blow to the theory. We would simply have to propose one of the other absurdities which any theory of this type must appeal to: Perhaps this original mind came into being uncaused or randomly, with the simplest thoughts/experiences of different aspects of its own being in place. If my three points above are valid, that would still be a more reasonable theory than any alternatives I've encountered. Or perhaps the mind and some of its 'thought' exists eternally or necessarily, but certain particular thoughts arose spontaneously and began the progression which led ultimately to our reality. Again not a very satisfactory notion, but again it's no different (and for the reasons above potentially better) than an eternal singularity which spontaneously expanded.

So you raise a good point to bear in mind, but I think at most it could serve to shape how we think about this hypothetical original mind or 'God,' not disprove it.

Nevertheless, I think I might be able to condense my response into three points which I don't think you have sufficiently answered in this or the other thread. As long as our hypothetical original mind was not completely homogenous - ie, it must have more than one aspect of its being (as indeed it must to be a thinking thing at all!) - I think it remains possible (or even plausible) as an explanation for the rest of existence. The three points which I feel need to be addressed are:

1> Concepts form not only from direct experience, but also from extrapolation and negation of experience (and existing concepts)
Concepts of dragons, faeries and so on amply demonstrate this

I believe I agreed with this statement during our previous discussion. My only caveat was that such concepts require a particular set of experiential references in order to form. Without the proper experiential referent, certain concepts cannot logically be conceived. Take the concept of a "fearsome fire breathing dragon in flight", for instance. The concept of a "fearsome fire breathing dragon in flight" is certainly an extrapolation upon prior experiences (visual perceptions of color, fire, size, flight, etc. coupled with sensory experience of heat, fear, breath, etc.). However, I ask you, if such experiences were completely foreign to the mind to which we ascribe this concept, could such a concept logically have been formed? Can the concept of a dragon in flight exist in the absence of the aforementioned referents? I personally believe the answer is simply no. There is no context by which to lend coherency to the concept of a fire breathing dragon in the absence of experiential knowledge concerning color, fire, size, flight, heat, breath etc.

With the exception of 'fearsome,' everything in the concept consists of different types of substance, shape, size and motion. It seems to me the biggest hurdle - really the only one - we're facing here is whether our hypothetical mind could develop a concept of space. From that, shape, size and motion should pose no problem. Concepts of changes over time and different types of being or substance would be part of its experience as a thinking thing, and we can't really say there's certain types of substance it could not imagine (though again, how it would conceive matter, fire and so on might not be the same as how we perceive them).

2> We cannot arbitrarily define limits on what might be conceived by extrapolation and negation (and relationships between subsequent concepts)
For example, it's probable that with no limit on time a mind with concepts only of 1 and 2 could ultimately conceive of thousands, billions, and arithmetic, and algebra. On this point, and related to what you above dismiss as a "set of utterly absurd contradictions," your response to my earlier argument seems uncertain/incredulous at best:

• Mithrae wrote: Could adding and subtracting numbers plausibly produce some concept of linear space?
  
  Ionian_Tradition wrote: I think at best mere addition and subtraction will produce an increasing range of values. Notions of linear space however are contextualized by spacial existence...Something our hypothetical mind would surely lack, provided it preceded the physical universe. I'm not sure a strong correlation can be drawn between purely quantitative values and spacial occupancy.

I'm not so sure. Its not an appeal to incredulity to state that a knowledge of quantitative values cannot provide the necessary context required to render concepts of linear space intelligible. Quantitative value and spacial location are, by definition, two very different things. The extrapolation of quantity will certainly produce a greater range of values and may also produce increasingly intricate ways in which said values relate to one another, but to marry quantity with spacial location requires that some concept of space already exist. Abstract quantity, in and of itself, carries with it no notion of spacial occupancy. It is only when we introduce spacially located objects that we can apply abstract notions of quantity to such objects in order quantify to how they relate to each other within the space they occupy. In the absence of experiential knowledge concerning spacial occupancy, the notion of applying abstract quantitative values to spacial objects would utterly lack coherency, and thus could not logically constitute a truly intelligent thought.

I'm afraid I just can't see how you can feel so sure about this. Our own experience of space always precedes our concept of numbers, and I think it's a fairly safe guess that even as children we all think of numbers in linear terms. Beyond that we have no point of reference one way or the other - that numbers could produce a concept of space or that they couldn't. But they would obviously have to involve the concept of a non-temporal relationship between the different numbers. Again, the question isn't really "could this mind conceive space as we experience it," so much as "could this produce a concept which we experience as space?"

I really think that you've got no basis for arguing that it could not.

3> A hypothetical original mind needn't experience or even conceive everything we experience and conceive; it need only conceive the reality from which our experience is drawn
Earlier in the thread I commented...
Mithrae wrote: But as far as I can imagine the simplest form which any metaphysical theories could take would have to involve both substance and behaviour (and arguably a substrate, or place to be and happen, such as the dimensions of time and space).

But as I suggested to you in our discussion, time and space are ways of describing relationships between things which (despite our perception of them) current physics suggests may be inter-related. And since behaviour merely describes changes in state of being over time, it's possible that every objective thing might be reduced down to different states of being and the description of relationships between them.

The idea that everything might be broken down to numbers may not be as absurd as it seems.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "different states of being", in regard to an immaterial mind. Perhaps you mean that such a mind might think one thought and then another and this shift in thought would constitute a "shift in states"? The fact remains that the intrinsic state of immaterial being does not shift or change in the sense you imply. Immaterial entities, are by definition, bereft of constituent parts. In the absence of any and all constituent parts, there is nothing intrinsic to an immaterial mind's being which would constitute an actual shift in state, such that an entirely new state of being ( a material or spacial state of being) could be derived. I'm just not convinced you've shown that knowledge concerning quantitative values, acquired within the context of an unchanging state of immaterial being, provides the necessary experiential context required to render concepts like "matter" and "space" even remotely coherent.

What you're saying about immaterial entities doesn't make sense, unless perhaps you were talking about a 'god' which is substantially different from the universe (ie, not idealism). From the state of the universe now, with its stars, galaxies and so on, we can infer that its initial state was not homogenous. That holds true whether we're talking about its initial 'physical' state involved in the big bang theory, or about the initial state (or arbitrarily pre-big bang state, if such a thing makes sense) of reality itself. It doesn't make sense to talk about 'immaterial' things at all in that context, any more than it would make sense to talk about material things. You're slipping in dualist thinking, but I'm talking about monism.

All that's fundamentally necessary, I think, is a concept of change/time (a concept of relationship between things) and a concept of differences, any kind of differences. The latter comes necessarily with non-homogeneity. The former must be introduced in any theory (else there would be no change or time), so for now I'm not particularly concerned with whether we're introducing it arbitrarily or not. But whatever inhomogeneities that concept of 'different' came from, there's no reason to suppose that there couldn't develop a concept of 'more different.' If memory serves you don't accept dualism either, so immaterial and material aren't the right way to think about it: Whether we imagine that light, matter and consciousness are different arrangements of strings, or different frequencies of some kind of 'energy,' or different types of thoughts, we agree that they're basically the same stuff - just different types of it.

The only big question seems to be whether a concept could arise of relationship between things which is not temporal. That's what we experience and describe as space, isn't it? And I gather current physics suggests that space and time are both part of the same package, both simply ways of describing things relative to each other. The concept of numbers, which would almost inevitably arise from concepts of differences and change, could provide that concept of non-temporal relationships even if we assume (as I have been, perhaps errantly) that this hypothetical mind must not originally have any spacial characteristics or concepts.

[Goat]

Earlier back, I was asked by EduChris to defend the problem of evil. First of all, I want to point out that I'm arguing for the evidential problem of evil, that is, that the existence of evil makes it highly unlikely for a god to exist (in other words, that the existence of evil is strong evidence against a god). I'm not claiming that it is logically impossible for a god to exist if evil exists.

Any being that is good -- let alone maximally good -- will want to eliminate the suffering of innocent people. It does not matter if the suffering serves some "higher purpose," as in a perfect world, suffering would not exist in the first place (even Christians agree with this, as "heaven" is said to be a perfect world in which there is no suffering). The fact that suffering exists is devastating to the notion that there exists an omnipotent, benevolent god.

I would point out that this just is a good argument for an all powerful benevolent God. Now, if God was just uncaring about humanity , God could still exist.