This is approximately the talk I gave on October 3rd at the Atheist Alliance International convention. You see, that presentation was not recorded; so I did it myself, a few days later, at home in Sacramento. Therefore, this video shows something similar to what you would have seen in Burbank. Here is an abstract:
As Wittgenstein observed, “one cannot mean a senseless series of words.” Religious propositions have no meaning, so they cannot be meant; and if they cannot be meant, they cannot be believed. One cannot believe a pseudo-proposition. “I believe in God” (for example) sounds like a report of an internal state, but that cannot be exactly what it is. What, then, is it, really? If the person making this statement it is not meaning or believing, what are they doing? Here at last is a question about religion that can be answered! Such “professions” are not reports of private mental states, they are public tokens of affiliation. Thus, the “sincerely held beliefs” paradigm used throughout our society (in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, for example) is wildly inaccurate. This has important implications for cultural debate and for public policy.
YASHWATA 
That’s right. “God” is characterized entirely by pseudo-propositions; in other words, it is completely undefined.
What do I know about God? Let’s say I start out unfamiliar with the term. First, I am told that God is everywhere, AND nowhere. Well, both these predicates cannot hold simultaneously; so I don’t understand the claim; so I have learned exactly nothing. Next, I am told that God loves us, AND that we have no hope of truly understanding this love (since it allows, for example, the annihilation of entire populations). Again, I have learned nothing whatever about God. Finally, I am told that God is one being, AND three beings, AND that there is no contradiction between these two descriptions. Again I am bewildered and uninformed.
At this point I have heard an awful lot about God, but nothing I have heard has increased my knowledge or understanding even a little bit. I know nothing about God. And therefore, any opinion I now express about God is guaranteed to be bullshit. If I say that “God is love”, I am bullshitting, because that is not something I know. Neither can I know that I “believe in God”. The statement is not necessarily incoherent (I’m still wrestling with this question), but it is either incoherent or false. I can’t know that I believe in God, because I don’t know what the word “God” means.
On the other hand, to reply, “No, you don’t believe in God, because that’s not possible,” is not incoherent. It is shorthand for “Your claim to be ‘believing in God’ is not credible, because you don’t know what ‘God’ means (nor does anyone else).”
The sentence as a whole can be coherent even if the quoted phrase (“believing in God”) is not. “I believe in God” is nonsense; “‘I believe in God’ is nonsense” is not.
I just can’t make any sense of what you are arguing here. Maybe I’m an idiot, because I really can’t get to grips with this. Your argument appears to go something like this:
No one can believe in “God” because it is characterised by pseudo-propositions; despite all surface appearances of grammatical soundness and normative standards of language use, propositions about “God” are of the pseudo variety only because “God” is not really a word at all; it just looks an awful lot like one. It merely maintains syntax but is completely incapable of having anything predicated of it, any semantic content, or even attempting to refer; it is just an audible sound, an ecumenical grunt (you can have that one). And it is also impossible to argue for or against this position because we can’t even form a coherent sentence about the pseudo-word in question. By your own admission, your arguments are literally meaningless! You should, of course, excuse me if I don’t take meaningless arguments too seriously.
You can’t even step back from this radical argument either because as soon as you admit that “God” is a word like any other those pseudo-propositions become propositions again. You have to stick with your unsayable and arbitrary (it has to be arbitrary because you can’t even say why it is so)exclusion of a single (and relatively consistently used) word of the English language.
No, you don’t. No one does. That is the point.
What is the difference between what “klarn” refers to and what “God” refers to? You don’t know. For every instance of “God” you really could write “[proper name]” and you’d be getting just as much meaning out of it – that is, none.
Note that a sentence with “[proper name]” as the subject can never be about the being that the placeholder refers to – because it does not refer to a being. (By definition, it is not a name; it is a symbol for a name.) Such a sentence can only be about the sentence itself, or its grammar, or some other abstract entity. It cannot be about the entity named by the thing the placeholder stands for. The thing the placeholder stands for is not part of the sentence – only the placeholder is. “God” is a placeholder.
Well, I have never heard a theist say that God is both everywhere and nowhere (which I will understand as the negation of everywhere as I believe was your intent) but even if they did it is not meaningless and it is not a pseudo-proposition. “God is everywhere and nowhere” is a perfectly meaningful proposition, it has to be, it’s “false” and propositions must be meaningful if they are to be false, nothing can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it is a logical contradiction. Significantly this is a composite proposition of “God is everywhere” and “God is nowhere.” Correct syntax prevents us from forming illogical simple propositions (maybe, I think) but not complex propositions. The proposition “God is everywhere and nowhere” is simply a composite proposition of the two simple propositions and it is false but not meaningless. It really had better be false, we really don’t want these propositions to be meaningless because this is how we understand the laws of logic. The proposition negates itself and effectively amounts to a formulation of the law of non-contradiction. If it were meaningless it could not be false and we really don’t want that.
We can keep doing this all down the line, all the pseudo-propositions which are supposed to form the characterization of “God” will turn out to be meaningful because “God” is a proper name which serves to designate a thing and the rest of the propositions will be constituted from meaningful words in correct syntactical relations. If at some point a theist, when asked why they believe, replied “God baboon sneakers optometrist” then your argument would work. But that is not very likely to happen. Now some of the composite propositions may well turn out to be illogical nonsense, in which case, they will be false, but they will all be propositions if they have the correct syntax. Just insisting that a perfectly formed proposition are meaningless doesn’t really hold water when we have a proper name which refers, or at least seems to, even if only to something mythological, and a syntactically sound form with meaningful predicates. “Jesus loves me” is a perfectly formed “proper name – verb – object” sentence, surely you can see that this is not the same as ““Europe albedo artichoke!” which is just a list of nouns, it has no syntax, and is not capable of being true or false for this reason, it really is meaningless, but it is very different from the sentence you compared it to.
If you are using Klarn as a proper name then I would ask you what you are referring to, I might then be interested to know whether it exists or not. I currently have no idea what you are referring to with Klarn though. I do have an idea what you are referring to when you say “God” and so do you, you admit this much just by using the word, your use of the word really does prove that you believe it to have some cognitive weight, unless you think that every instance of your use of the word could be replaced with something like the place holder [proper name] which makes no attempt to refer to anything but could maintain syntactical form. Personally, I would think of something like “the god of the old testament” or “a omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being.” It might be the case that these formulations are inconsistent, illogical and impossible but not meaningless. The same way that Pegasus is inconsistent and impossible but not meaningless. “Does a omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being exist?” has correct syntax and we know what these words mean even if there is no reason to believe that anything can exemplify them. It is also very different and considerably more common than your obviously contradictory examples.
The point of “Europe albedo artichoke!” is that if you speak nonsense you are not making a statement. “Jesus loves me” looks like a well-formed sentence, but it is not. It has no more meaning than “Europe albedo artichoke!”, and therefore it cannot be anyone’s belief.
It may be that “a solution to the problem of true negative existentials” is needed (by someone, somewhere), but that is not the problem in front of us in this thread.
I did not say that “we can’t refer to a non-existent”. It is rather that we can’t make a meaningful statement about an entity that is entirely undefined. “God does not exist” is meaningless – not because it’s a “negative existential” but because that famous noun has no definition. It is characterized only by pseudo-propositions like “God is everywhere, and nowhere” – that is, not at all. It is unspecified. It is an empty placeholder.
We do often say things like “God does not exist”, but that does not prove that they mean anything. Even considered as shorthand for “the question of God’s existence was settled a long time ago”, it is not quite true, if by settled you mean answered. “Does God exist?” cannot be answered, because it is not a question – just a meaningless series of words with a decorative curlicue at the end.
“The USSR does not exist anymore” is true, because we know what the term refers to. “Does the USSR exist?” is a proper question and has a proper answer. “Does klarn exist?” is a question that cannot be answered until we know what klarn is; and if we are certain that the word “klarn” has no meaning, then the question also has no meaning.
You might insist that even if “klarn” is known to be meaningless, “does klarn exist?” is a properly formed question and has a clear answer (“No”). But consider this. Let’s say we also know “blemb” to be meaningless. Is the question “does klarn exist?” the same question as “does blemb exist?”, or a different one? There is an infinite set of such mutually indistinguishable questions – and of course this set includes “does God exist?”. It is indistinguishable from “does klarn exist?”. Do you really think that “does klarn exist?” is a good question?
You seem to be confusing syntax and semantics, the sentence “Europe albedo artichoke!” is syntactically malformed “Jesus loves me” is not. It is a “proper name – verb – object” sentence even if the proper name does not refer to anything. Even to treat it as reference to a non-existential begs the question massivley against the theist, but never mind about that.
Frege might have been wrong about senses, most people think he was but the problem still remains that we need a solution to the problem of true negative existentials. I mean, “God does not exist” is true right? You say it quite often, something along the lines of: “We don’t need to entertain talk of God because the question of God’s existence was settled a long time ago, we need to figure out what this God talk really means.” On your account this is utterly meaningless, we can’t refer to a non-existent at all. “I don’t believe in your silly impossible God” is as hoplessly unintelligible as “I believe in God.”
Take a less controversial negative existential to better indicate why we need a solution to the problem: “The USSR does not exist anymore.” This is true, cognitivley meaningful, believable and about a negative existential. And the reverse is also believable, it would be a false belief in a non-existent thing.
No, if it does not refer then it does not have a sense. I don’t care what Frege says. If you are not saying anything about anything, then you cannot even claim to have made a statement. No statement has been made.
Picture this. I stride to the podium and I proclaim, “Europe albedo artichoke!” Then I challenge the audience: “Are you with me, or against me?” They can’t be with me or against me. Why? Because I have not said anything! And in exactly the same way, you can neither agree nor disagree that (for example) “Jesus loves me.” It is not a statement, just a senseless series of words. And therefore, if I tell you that I believe it, you should say, “No. I don’t think you do.”
First off I want to apologise for being so relentlessly rude, I think I just started off in that vein, and then couldn’t stop myself. Anyway, full respect to you for not just blocking my comments. I did get genuinely annoyed about the Wittgenstein thing but never mind.
As for the argument though, I’m sorry but it just doesn’t work. If “Vicky loves me” is a proposition then so is “Jesus loves me”, they are grammatically identical in form. Both “Vicky” and “Jesus” are proper names. If “Jesus” is an impossible being then the proposition is false, or if Jesus exists but does not behave in a loving way the proposition is false, but either way the word “Jesus” is still functioning in as a proper name in truthbaring sentences. Just as it does in the proposition “Jesus was not the son of God.” The same is true of propositions like “God is omnipotent.” “God” is a proper name which serves to designate a referent and omnipotent is a property of the referent. If “God” fails to refer the proposition is still meaningful because “God” has a sense. God is imaginable even if not conceivable (logically possible). This talk of sense and reference is from Gottlob Frege’s “Sinn and Bedeutung” if you’re interested. If God is genuinely logically impossible then the word fails to refer to any actually existing entity but this does not rule out truthbaring propositions which include the word. Like “God is logically impossible” for example.
I’m glad you’re still thinking about this.
I’m humoring you way too much, but here goes another try.
When I say that Vicky loves me, I know who Vicky is and I have seen evidence of her love. The claim that Jesus loves me has neither of these properties. No one knows what this “Jesus” entity is. Clearly I can’t be loved by a man who is no longer alive, or by a pile of bones in the desert. Of course the loving “Jesus” is not a man but a special, immortal, non-human agent – but that’s a fairy-tale. We have no real information about this special Jesus. None. It’s all hearsay, and contradiction, and bluster. And what is the evidence that this impossible being loves anyone? What does that even mean? How do we know what it considers loving behavior? It’s not even human! Maybe it thinks that giving us occasional heart attacks is the kindest thing to do – or the funniest.
A statement like “Vicky loves me” might be vague, or false, or both – but “Jesus loves me” is utterly vacuous. So if ‘to believe’ means ‘to regard [a proposition] as plausible’, you cannot believe that “Jesus loves you”, because it’s not a proposition. It only looks like one.
It came to me like a flash last night. You were right I hadn’t understood your arguments! Or at least I hadn’t understood how bad they were! It isn’t even a philosophical problem; it’s just basic English. In my defence it is kind of unbelievable that somebody could make such a spectacular error, maybe that’s why I didn’t understand what was going on. I was getting far too complicated in my responses. The argument still makes absolutely no sense at all, but in quite a different way from how I thought the argument made no sense before. I’ll tell you what Roy, it doesn’t matter that you refuse to engage with me on Wittgenstein past telling me that I was wrong, even to tell me why I am wrong. Maybe you are the world’s foremost expert on Wittgenstein. I guess it’s possible. But just tell me how “Jesus loves me” differs grammatically from “Vicky loves me” assuming the word “love” to be entirely synonymous with the sending of postcards? And assuming that Vicky does in fact send me postcards. Or how about “God is maximally perfect” and “Steve is pretty nifty,” are the differences grammatical or semantic? Are some true and the others false or are some true and the other ones pseudo-propositions? To be honest with you Roy you might be better off pretending that you were arguing for the first position I attributed to you all along. The only problem is, I don’t think you know what that is.
Is this a bloody joke? I have just given a fairly lengthy summary of my interpretation of Wittgenstein and I am the one trying to wiggle out of something? Seriously? I am afraid you are either delusional or a snake oil salesman. Nobody could be fooled by your insistance that you have some kind of understanding of Wittgenstein’s project while you refuse point blank to say anything about it. Pathetic.
It can’t be game over because the game never began in the first place. It was a no show on your part! Oh but you would have won if only you could be bothered, right? What a joke. Who are you trying to convince? You? Me? Or any gullible fools that happen by this corner of the internet? Surely not even the dullest new atheist is quite that gullible.
The only reasonable inference I can make at this point is that I was right all along, you are indeed a quote fishing snake oil salesman!
You can’t wiggle out of this one, Socrates. I claim to understand something about this book I have read; you claim to know that I do not understand it, though you have not read it. Game over.
It is not a rhetorical trick at all. It is the Socratic method. It is the dialectical process. The method for finding truth through the powers of reason alone. I have stated my thesis several times. I am still waiting for an antithesis. I will say it again anyway, and in more detail, so it’s easy for you to respond to if you wish:
Wittgenstein sought to get away from the way of understanding language pursued by his mentor Bertrand Russell (and the early Wittgenstein), who liked to examine propositions and their logical relations to the world. Wittgenstein believed that semantics (meaning) was reducible to pragmatics (use). In essence language is, for Wittgenstein, a rule governed social activity, made up of an interconnected plurality of “language-games.” To understand the meaning of a word is simply to be able to use it successfully. Wittgenstein thought that it was not the task of philosophers to tell people the real meaning of linguistic phenomena lying behind use, but simply to observe the way words are in fact used – and hence their meaning.
It should be clear now that this incompatible with your argument — for Wittgenstein all our language is a public and rule governed language-game — a community of speakers using religious language is all that is needed for meaning; forget about analysing the propositions which are supposed to be being expressed by our sentences. The reason that “gabba gabba gabba gabba” is meaningless is not because it is a pseudo-proposition but because it has no place in our social, rule governed, language games.
Wittgenstein was fond of using the example of “game” which he said was impossible to define and capture all examples (game’s just have family resemblances rather than a shared definition), to show that even without a definition a word can be used successfully by a community of speakers and therefore has meaning.
Now, maybe all of that is a load of garbage, but you would need to actually offer an argument to persuade me. All I want is an interpretation of Wittgenstein by a self proclaimed expert on his work. That’s not so hard is it? You have not said a single word about why I am wrong on Wittgenstein. Not one. Just brute assertions that you know I am wrong. Then to have the balls to accuse me of rhetorical trickery is quite something.
Generally when someone who knows more about a subject than ourselves, and they tell us that we are getting it wrong, we ask them why, they tell us, and that is what is called learning. It is highly unusual for an expert in a subject to react to a request by a layman for information on why they are wrong to refuse to explain and accuse them of rhetorical trickery.
“Explain to me exactly how I’m wrong” is a cheap rhetorical trick, equivalent to “Prove you’re smarter than me.” This would be a fool’s errand. As a matter of fact, I’ve already spent a lot of time explaining how you’re wrong. So, now you want to change the subject.
Why did you not quote the next bit too: “How is it that someone who has read a book six times is incapable of saying a single word about it?”
I will sit down and read the whole book, just for you, after you have told me why my interpretation of Wittgenstein is wrong, something a scholar like you should be able to do easily.
As Dostoevsky said in Crime and Punishment “Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.” Now, whatever you think of that book you don’t know it as well as me and I am right about it because I have read it more times than you! But I’m not going to tell you anything about it, apart from the fact I understand it more than you! And that I have read more of it than you! And that you are wrong about it and I am write about it, but I absolutley will not say why or how!
Why? Maybe because I am lying and I haven’t really read it. Maybe I just went quote fishing to lend my words some gravitas. Perhaps I have read it lots of times but never understood a word of it. Would those be fair inferences in this situation? A situation where someone proclaims expertise but then with their next breath refuses to demonstrate them. Maybe? I’ll let you decide.
Maybe you disagree and believe that I should take your word for it on your authority alone, not ask any questions, and don’t doubt that you hold the truth. In which case, you missed your vocation as a catholic priest. Now I know you don’t like me much, or find me very funny, but you gotta admit, that’s a good’un!
You have read part of it. I have read all of it. Therefore, I have read more of it than you have. Are you surprised yet?
Oh, come of it mate, I’m the only one in this discussion who has even offered an interpretation of Wittgenstein, you, the Wittgenstein scholar, on the other hand, have dodged doing so at every opportunity. I may be honest enough to admit that I have not read the whole of PI, but I would be very surprised if I have not read more of it than you. How is it that someone who has read a book six times is incapable of saying a single word about it?
You started this thread with a comment in which you accused me of failing to understand a book that you have not read. The story should have ended right there — but I tried to engage with you in a discussion of ideas. Big mistake.
I’ll take that as a “no I can’t tell you what is wrong with your interpretation, because I don’t know what I’m talking about” then.
Why not bring your Wittgenstein scholarship to the table, and make me look really stupid? It’s kinda funny, you know, that I admit I have only read bits of PI and you have read the whole thing six times and yet you don’t seem to want to tell me where I am going wrong in my interpretation. Even after I have been so terribly mean to you by accusing you of “quote fishing.” Anybody can say they have read a book six times but people who actually have tend to be able to convey the intentions of the author to a complete layman like me.
It’s also kinda funny that you pointed me towards that edition of PI; it’s a highly regarded translation, and the standard one, by someone who actually studied under Wittgenstein and a hugely influential philosopher in her own right, but I thought you didn’t read the work of christian apologists?
Your desperate plea touches me deeply. I can help you, but it will not be easy. Here is your first assignment: read Part I (sections 1 through 693) of the Philosophical Investigations.
Actually he is an analytic philosopher, don’t let that get in the way of you dogmatically dismissing him though. It is because of this dogmatism you don’t know what you are arguning against, which seriously hampers your arguments. And if you have really read PI six times and it wasn’t completely wasted, please please please tell me why my understanding of him is wrong! Does he not think that semantics is reducible to pragmatics?
Your dogmatism is astounding and you are incapable of putting me right on Wittgenstein, because you don’t understand him.
Quote fishing? You, Adam, are confessedly the one who has not read Wittgenstein’s most important work. I have read it cover to cover six times.
Your endorsement of Plantinga is telling; he is a Christian apologist — an occupation at odds, by definition, with reasoned discourse. He makes his living by insisting that Christianity is reasonable. In other words, he is a professional liar.
Putting aside arguments from authority, the bottom line here is that you have not understood my arguments. I no longer care why.
Quote fishing is not the same as reading. If you had read PI you would be aware of the consequences of Wittgenstein’s “meaning as use” theory which makes semantics reducible to pragmatics and hence clears the way for the wittgensteinian fideists. You would also be aware that he was a fierce critic of Russell and Frege and their attempts to understand language by examening propositions. Although I have never sat down and read PI from cover to cover, I have read quite a lot on the philosophy of language (including extensive passages from PI and the whole of the tractatus), I am quite comfortable with my interpretation of Wittgenstein, but of course it could be improved by reading PI.
Your dismissal of Plantinga is also telling, frequently ridiculed by new atheists as he is, he is considered one of the most important epistemologists of the last fifty years and a hugely influential figure in contemporary analytic philosophy, and his theodicy is almost universally accepted amongst his peers, far from being the insoluble problem you suggest, Plantinga dissolved it 30 years ago. A genuine interest in discovering the truth would have made Plantinga unmissable.
Have I read Plantinga’s theodicy??? That is hilarious! — especially coming from a guy who has not read the Philosophical Investigations.
Wittgenstein (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)
“For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI 43). This basic statement is what underlies the change of perspective most typical of the later phase of Wittgenstein’s thought: a change from a conception of meaning as representation to a view which looks to use as the hinge of the investigation. Traditional theories of meaning in the history of philosophy were intent on pointing to something exterior to the proposition which endows it with sense. This “something” could generally be located either in an objective space, or inside the mind as mental representation. As early as 1933 (The Blue Book) Wittgenstein took pains to challenge these dogmas, arriving at the insight that “if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use”
Ontological Arguments (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)
“Modal arguments: These are arguments with premises which concern modal claims about God, i.e., claims about the possibility or necessity of God’s attributes and existence. Suppose that we agree to think about possibility and necessity in terms of possible worlds: a claim is possibly true just in case it is true in at least one possible world; a claim is necessarily true just in case it is true in every possible world; and a claim is contingent just in case it is true in some possible worlds and false in others. Some theists hold that God is a necessarily existent being, i.e., that God exists in every possible world.”
Also, my nicked stereo argument is not at all different from your miracles argument if both our protagonists profess ignorance of the event in question. Unfortunately, you also fail to understand the meaning of “miracle.” A miracle is (supposedly, I’m actually a bit dubious) a single non-repeatable violation of the laws of nature caused by God. If you understood that, you would recognise that asking for a mechanistic explanation of the event is mistaken; an explanation in terms of God’s agency is required.
Now all of this, the fact that you don’t recognize an ontological argument; you have no idea how a theist would describe a miracle despite giving talks and writing books on the subject; and you use Wittgenstein quotes without having the slightest clue what he was talking about, all point to the fact that you are a blagger. It is for this reason that I am not too concerned that you doubt my interpretation of Wittgenstein, or that I have hurt your precious feelings, or even that you will not understand what I have just written about miracles. If you actually read some philosophy instead of just “fishing for quotes” you would understand Wittgenstein, recognise ontological arguments, and understand theological positions, not to mention understanding that meaningful propositions are constituted by the meaningfulness of individual words and not the other way round (and, yes, “God” has a sense, even if it fails to refer).
Oh, Jesus, I just remembered the “Jesus loves us” argument, man, that’s a real stinker of an argument, and it also shows, quite clearly, that you have never made any attempt to seriously engage with religious or philosophical thought. Dolores just doesn’t cut it I’m afraid, if you had been serious you would have quoted and attempted to show where people like Swinburne, McGrath, Keith Ward, Plantinga et al. are going wrong. For example, you just bluntly assert that the problem of evil is insoluble, but without any damned reasons or arguments? But have you read Plantinga’s theodicy, or any other? Or were you too busy imagining bashing imaginary Dolores over her imaginary head with your imaginary arguments?
I mean, take them as insults, or take them as a reminder that it is only the dim-witted new-atheists that will be taken in by your inappropriate-Wittgenstein-quote-laden approach to the subject, the choice is yours.
Thank you for watching the video. I’m sorry that the presentation did not convey to you a proper understanding of the arguments.
Macbeth’s report of a dagger floating in the air is not “characterised by pseudo-propositions”. The proposition is not incoherent, merely impossible. If he told us that he perceived a dagger that can’t be perceived; or claimed that it had no blade and no handle, but was still a dagger; that would be incoherent. The theological Jesus cannot exist in any possible world, not because it is physically impossible but because propositions about Jesus are grammatically malformed.
I see no reason to believe that you understand Wittgenstein more clearly than I do. Besides, my argument does not depend on his long-ago intentions. Pretend that “a meaningless series of words cannot be meant” is my own formulation. I am reminding you of a fact about language, not just quoting some dead guy.
As an analogy for my analysis of the idea of “miracle”, your burglary story fails entirely. And here again you are accusing me of applying the term “pseudo-proposition” where I did not use it. It is not a pseudo-proposition to say, “Someone got into my house but I don’t know how.” It is not even a pseudo-proposition to say, “After Jesus died woke up again, but I don’t know how.” That is not the problem. The problem is that the fact that you don’t know how it was done contradicts your claim that it was a miracle!
If you tell me that your stereo makes music not with electricity but by magic, AND you tell me that you have no information whatever about how magic works, you have given me no reason at all to suppose that your stereo is unusual.
I don’t understand your paragraph about the problem of evil. But now I am getting tired of all your insults, which I have had to re-read dozens of times in formulating this reply. Perhaps you will understand if it is unlikely that I will put much more effort into correcting your misperceptions.
Yes, I watched the video, and I just watched 20mins of it again to see if I missed anything, I am still nonplussed by it.
Do you have any objections to my objections? My objections really are very simple:
1.People can believe in false or imaginary things; when Macbeth saw the dagger before him his belief was mostly (in your terminology) characterised by pseudo-propositions, but he was able to believe in the impossible imaginary object anyway. Beliefs do not need to be consistent in the same way that knowledge does.
2.Your deployment of Ludwig “meaning as use” Wittgenstein is unfortunate.
3. Your argument is a standard argument for the conceptual incoherence or logical impossibility of God, but fails to establish the conclusions that you draw from then on.
Damn, man, I really need to start accepting a weakened version of the principle of charity, your arguments are pretty difficult to reconstruct charitably. I mean, dude, the miracles argument, seriously? I’ll give you a modified version:
A man comes home to find somebody has nicked his stereo, and he says “dagnabit, somebody has broken into my house,” well, this is a pseudo-proposition, because if you asked him how the man had broken in he would say “gee, I don’t know, the backdoor, upstairs window, through the cat-flap?” This is a terrible argument, I feel kind of ashamed to write it.
Now for another argument:
A maximally perfect being (classical Christian God) is logically possible (the problem of evil seeks to establish the incompatibility of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God with our world, not the logical impossibility of a maximally perfect being). But the god of classical theology is a necessary being; if God is possible then God is actual! Therefore God exists necessarily. And the atheist’s favourite statement “god does not exist” means the same thing as “a necessarily existing being does not exist!” Pseudo-proposition!!! Atheists don’t REALLY believe… It is only a public gesture not a private mental state… You get the idea.
Perhaps you will at last see how bad the argument is, now that I have flipped it round.
Did you watch the video, Adam? Yes or no.
The idea of free will (rough definition: that some events are describable in terms of agent causation and not physical causation) is not incoherent, even if it turns out to be untrue, much like God. You might have a point that omnipotence is incompatibe with omnibenevolence but it is a big jump from there to saying that the concept of God is literally unbelievable by anybody. For one thing it makes it almost impossible to have a false belief about anything, all our beliefs are true and the false things just aren’t beliefs.
It is possible for people to be wrong about their beliefs but if people think they believe something and behave as if they believe something, and report a belief in that thing – they believe in that thing. This is just what belief is.
Perhaps part of the problem is that you fail to distinguish between what is imaginable and what is conceivable, your argument is an attempt to show that God is not genuinely conceivable (logically incoherent), but why the hell would that matter, people can believe in whatever they can imagine, whether it is possible or not.
You also fail to take account of speaker meaning, which is seperate to propositional content; it is also really the relevant linguistic phenomena for talking about linguistic meaning in relation to an individuals beliefs.
I really do think that you misunderstand Wittgenstein (or at least fail to appreciate the divergence between his early and later work fom the tractatus to PI). Wittgenstein thought that the kind of method for understanding language in terms of propositional content was doomed to failure. A wittgensteinian theory of language seeks to collapse semantics into pragmatics and a wittgensteinian fideist might agree with your assesment that proclemations of faith are a public gesture. I am telling you for your own sake, using Wittgenstein in this argument does you no favours at all, and that is putting it mildly.
This is wrongly put. What I point out is that because the concept “God” is entirely characterized through pseudo-propositions, it is not really a concept. Therefore, it cannot be the object of anyone’s belief. Just as you cannot paint a wall that is not there, or eat a meal that is not there, you cannot believe a concept that is not there.
Um, did you watch the video? I do not say that they know it is incoherent. They don’t. They say it without knowing that it has no meaning. One of the aims of the book is to show that it is incoherent.
Well, if the idea of free will is incoherent (I don’t know if it is or not), then no one can truly be said to have free will. There’s nothing there to be “had”. It is not even be possible to believe that one has it, because one cannot believe a pseudo-proposition. One can say it, write it, shout it, tattoo it on one’s chest, but one cannot believe it.
Oh, yeah. As if you obviously understand Wittgenstein better than I do.
Let me ask you again: did you watch the video, so as to honestly try to understand my arguments, or did you just read the abstract? Because that would be kind of cheap… know what I mean?
Wow, this terrible argument is the central thesis to an entire book! And nobody pointed out how bad the argument is before now? I assume you realise by now, or you woud have made some attempt to defend the argument, right? I guess this is what happens when you only allow your cherished beliefs to be challenged by imaginary friends called Dolores.
You don’t seem to want to answer any of my questions, but I’ll try again anyway.
Do you admit that a Wittgensteinian theory of meaning, if true, would ENTIRELY destroy the argument you are making here, and Wittgenstein was probably not the best choice of philosopher to quote?
Do you admit that your “argument from evil” fails to establish the lack of belief in God just as hopelessly as my argument from causal closure fails to establish the lack of belief in free will? If not, how are they different?
Correct me if I am wrong, but, in the video, you appear to be arguing that because you believe God’s omnipotence is incompatible with his omnibenevolence, nobody can believe in God. Are you a solipsist? Do I really need to go into how bad this argument is?
If you think that the concept of God is incoherent, fine, be an ignostic atheist, but your argument does not establish that everybody knows that the concept of God is incoherent, as your conclusion suggests.
You see, what you have here is a fairly standard argument for atheism, before you make the crazy jump from there to saying that no theist has beliefs about God. For that jump to work everybody would have to accept your basic argument. Maybe you think everybody accepts this argument tacitly or unconsciously? God only knows? This is unbelievable!
It’s like me saying: “free will is incompatible with the causal closure of the physical; the causal closure of the physical universe is true; therefore nobody really believes they have free will!”
I could have said that free will does not exist, or that all this talk of free will is incoherent nonsense, but to conclude that nobody believed they had free will would be an appalling error! It just doesn’t work, it’s a non-sequitur, but throw in a quote from Wittgenstein and I might be able to get a few “free-thinkers” to buy it.
On what basis do I assert. . . ? I guess you haven’t watched the video.
You did indeed hit a nerve – I have an irrational hatred of people sticking the words of famous philosophers or scientists into their own writings in an attempt to gain credibility, and not worrying about misrepresenting the words of the philosopher/scientist in the process. It is a weakness of mine, I know.
I’m glad to know you have no problems with the content though, question my motives all you want, I am still right on the substance. Although I could have phrased things a bit better, went off track a bit in the middle and got a bit personal at the end. But, hey, you can’t get it all right all the time, right? Let he who is without sin… and all that jazz.
Just to be absolutley clear on this though, do you admit that a Wittgensteinian theory of meaning, if true, would ENTIRELY destroy the argument you are making here, and Wittgenstein was probably not the best choice of philosophers to quote?
Also, I would love to know, on what basis do you assert that propositions about God have no meaning? Are you a verificationist?
Wow, sorry, Adam — I guess I hit a nerve there!
You are completely misrepresenting Wittgenstein. You are using his words in a context which makes them mean almost exactly the opposite of what he intended. Words don’t get their meanings from being associated with mental events or expressing propositions, according to Wittgenstein at least. And Wittgenstein was arguing that meaning is use, he thought that there was no sense (excuse the pun) in asking what the words represented – ask how they are used – if a community of people use words like god, soul and transusbstantiation in a consistent manner, and as part of their daily routine, that is all there is to meaning. God means what the word is used to mean by a community of speakers.
Wittgenstein (and nearly every other philosopher of mind/language since Locke) disagrees completely with the ridiculous idea that words get meaning from being associated with mental states. Wittgenstein spent much of his time arguing against it, have you ever heard of the private-language argument? It has been thoroughly refuted and leads to an infinite regress of “meaning providers” and many other problems.
The field is split between use theories and propositional theories. And I have no fucking clue why you think religious propositions have no meaning, positivism is dead in the water don’t you know? Wittgenstein didn’t much care for that either. I would also like to remind you that if propositions about God are meaningless, then propositions to the effect of “God does not exist” are also meaningless. I mean they aren’t, they are perfectly meaningful, but I just thought you should know anyway.
Please stop crowbarring Wittgenstein quotes in to your blogs in a lame attempt to convince people that you are really intelligent. It makes you look really stupid to someone who as actually read some Wittgenstein. And I haven’t even read very much, I don’t even fully understand Wittgenstein and I haven’t read PI (where the quote comes from). It doesn’t take much knowledge of the big W to know that you are talking out of your ass.
On the positive side though, you have given me much encouragement that I could possibly get a job as a journalist, now all I need is a currently popular subject that I can blag my way through. I need a cause that is the current trendy thing for a large number of idiots. Hopefully idiots that think themselves really intelligent and like to read nonsense that reinforces their poorly reasoned but dearly held beliefs.
Leaf blower.
great video…was that a vacuum cleaner running in the background at the end? lol
I agree. It’s loyalty, not belief.
The ideas expressed in the beginning of the video were a bit unintuitive to me, but it shapes up nicely toward the end when he talks about religion being an exclusive club based upon a tradition of semantics. It’s been a couple years since I’ve read any books on religion/philosophy because after a certain point in my exploration, they became stale and repetitive. One of Daniel Dennett’s books on memes looks more appealing after this little insight. So, thanks muchly for the post.
It is amazing how relevant the story of the emperor’s new clothes is. For generations people could go to church and profess their faith, almost no-one would publicly express doubt. No-a-days, with the help of the internet atheists everywhere people are standing up and saying I don’t believe. Others are coming out saying ‘I always had doubts’.
For me faith is an expression of loyalty to leaders, here on earth the religious leaders and the great (imaginary) leader in the sky.