One thing I dislike about theism is that there's almost a duty for a theist to be locked into specific positions on metaphysics and ethics. For example, Plantiga's free will defense is one of the strongest responses to the problem of evil, but it presupposes the libertarian position on the nature of free will. The thing that really bothers me is that people are so stuck onto such positions that they see nothing wrong with making a claim that's essentially equivalent to saying that Inferno is a better move than Heat Wave.
On a personal note, do you think I tend to be locked into this tendency that most theists tend to be locked into?
In my personal experience, most devout theists do not have a strong interest in philosophy nor have an inclination to engage in deep philosophical inquiry concerning the existence of God outside of the confines of Church dogma and scripture. If my Catholic peers are interested in exploring this issue, they tend to focus on doctrinal differences in between other Christian sects (while emphasizing that the Catholic Church as the "fullness of truth" in both its doctrine and in the sacraments) and liturgical differences between other rites, but not any potent secular arguments and perspectives. For instance, some would interpret John 6 to adduce scriptural evidence that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ while addressing Protestant objections and theology.
Most are not informed in modern philosophy or have demonstrated competence in any domain of natural science; they would unlikely understand concepts such as the principle of falsifiability, a normal distribution, statistical significance, anthropic principle, and exaptation – concepts that would likely arise in a theological debate. Understanding science is integral, since, obviously, science, at least to some degree (and that’s an understatement!), has been successful in elucidating our understanding of natural phenomenon with considerable predictive power and practical utility. Even the most devout zealot implicitly acknowledges the success of science; since they can appreciate that they live a technological milieu where almost every facet of modern life has been tangibly shaped by the fruits of scientific knowledge.
The epistemology of science -- consisting of its methodology, social institutions, and theoretical models -- provides a nice contrast between the epistemology of faith, which relies more on faith, dogma, and revelation as opposed to empirical inquiry and experimental testing. Naturally, one who is competent in science would ask whether religious claims warrant the same credibility and esteem that one grants to the many contemporary scientific theories. Also, one wonders whether the methods of science can also be employed in assessing the veracity of theological claims, and how disconnected the domains of theology and science are or whether there is some potential intersection between them.
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Here are some positions that the Catholic Church (to my knowledge) holds that I philosophically find indefensible:
(1). God's existence can be proven through the light of human reason, without the aid of divine revelation (although the Church does maintain that one's needs God's grace for salvation). My quote summarizes my objections to this position.
(2). Design is apparent in nature.
(3). Abortion can be demonstrated to be "wrong" using secular ethical reasoning.
(4). Suffering is not senseless and pointless and it should be embraced because it gives us merits and graces
I still find secular utilitarian arguments permitting abortion quite compelling, and I believe that the only way one can consider abortion to be considered "wrong" is if one ascribes to the fetus a transcendent (spiritual) property that confers it more “value” than its neurological, psychological, and physical properties and faculties. From my particular perspective, the latter refers to my belief that each individual human is created for God’s glory, but that requires either revelation or divine grace. Most Catholics are against abortion because they are immersed in a culture that condemns it, and often their opposition of abortion is a part of their religious and political identity and expressing vociferous opposition to it is an opportunity to demonstrate moral righteous in the presence of their peer group. As an autistic who is largely immune to peer pressure and a person not reared in a Catholic environment since I am a convert, I am unaffected by this group dynamic and apathetic concerning sectarian opposition to abortion. (It is “sectarian” because the issue is nary presented in an abstract, detached philosophical way.)
Admittedly, there are times were my nominalist instincts impel me to flippantly disregard some aspects of Christology us that Jesus is “homoousios” to the Father (my more politically realist nature sees the Council of Nicaea as a means to create polarization in early Christendom and to alienate the Arian barbarians) due to its focus on the dubious metaphysical concept of “substance”. Even though my intellect has been cultivated by skepticism and nominalism and primed to reject such doctrines, still, regarding this doctrinal issue, my intellect does not consider it to be a foreign antigen, and any immune response is not triggered (unlike my immune system which decimated my beta cells in my islets).
I find scholasticism as grandiloquent obscurantism.
Another one of my pet peeves that is prevalent among most of my Catholic acquaintances is the facile attribution that a large portion the events that transpire in their lives – whether it is triumph, strife, trials, or adversity – as a part of God’s will. There is sparingly consideration for the probability or desirability of the occurrence of counterfactual scenarios that are within the realm of possibility; they just focus on what has occurred and accept it as God’s providence. Even for minor and mundane occasions of good fortune, not something that is indubitably good and improbable (such as Yusei Fudo drawing five Tuners for Shooting Star Dragon’s effect against Placido), God receives praise and thanks for allegedly precipitating the event. It is pervasive teleological thinking that interprets all personal events as having enormous significance as opposed to being the consequence of a fundamentally random phenomenon. I regard this attitude as rather naïve and inane, since it reflects a lack of understanding of probability and statistical reasoning, and it is a form of intellectual laziness that is averse to analyze the occurrence of events based on prior experience. In contrast, I see the many of the events throughout the world as the aleatory outcome of impersonal probabilistic processes; the outcomes of these processes can be statistically modeled if one possesses a sufficient amount of data to find, within a reasonable margin of error, the parameters of a statistical model (such as the frequency, mean, variance, number of trials, and independence of the trials) that can generate the distribution of outcomes of the events. For instance, one could arrive at a probability for smokers developing lung cancer using epidemiological data. Of course, such a rigorous and formal analysis is not necessary when considering the probability of mundane events, precisely because they are mundane and uneventful to be worth the subject of one’s intellectual energy. Or there may be an insufficient data to infer any conclusions about a given process or the outcome, but any application of statistical reasoning is often eschewed just to give glory to God instead of the pondering the possibility that such an event is just the outcome of a stochastic process. It is difficult to see a given process as the consequence of a probabilistic process, especially if it involves theoretical variables (‘theoretical’ roughly means ‘inaccessible to direct sensory experience’), such as the probability that a carcinogenic molecule would react with a region in the genome that encodes an oncogene, that cannot be readily observed nor understood. These theoretical variables not overtly probabilistic in the sense that a dice roll and coin flip are because the latter’s distribution of outcomes correspond to known, simple, uniform probabilistic distributions.
Yes, I have a predilection for frequentist as opposed to Bayesian statistics.
To me, the world is a macrocosm of the stochastic, molecular world of statistical mechanics, where there are innumerable probabilistic events occurring at any moment. A certain molecule, for example, has a given instantaneous probability of undergoing a chemical reaction. (This is proportional to exp(-E/rT) where E is the activation energy of the reaction, r is Boltzmann’s constant, and T is the absolute temperature. This probability is independent of the state of other molecules not in the molecule’s vicinity since it is unaffected by them as they cannot react. Other factor are the availability of reactants in the system, which is proportional its concentration, and the mechanism of reaction, which determines the “order” of the reaction.) In the world of statistical mechanics, while each individual event is fundamentally random, the operation of random processes on large number of molecules renders certain macroscopic outcomes inevitable, such as a dynamic chemical equilibrium in a chemical system when the rates of formation of the reactant and product become equal or the uniformity of temperature of a fluid at equilibrium.
Some more canny individuals may argue that a personal God can work through stochastic processes (as opposed to enacting “miracles” which involve violations of what are considered to be the laws of nature) due to his transcendental nature. This “transcendental” quality of God prevents him from being comprehended as the “alternative hypothesis” who is in competition against a designated “null hypothesis” and can be dismissed by a statistical inference [edit: when the p-value is smaller than some alpha threshold of significance]. This view, however, wields no explanatory or predictive power since, regardless of the outcome, any event can be ascribed to God’s will. Furthermore, one could always look for redeeming qualities and mitigating factors in ostensibly undesirable outcomes to make the outcome seem to be an ultimately salutary event that is part of God’s plan. But again, that is just one imposing their subjective biases with their limited perspective in one’s interpretation of personal events to prevent one from seeing oneself as a hapless individual under the influence of impersonal random processes.
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