Science, Empiricism, Theism - Interview with Digital Gnosis, part 1

anyway so for those of you who are just kind of uh flowing in i'm speaking to kane uh your channel's called cane bee and i'll put the link to that in the description and i came across uh your channel because i'm in my free time studying philosophy something that interests me and you've got a really good channel with a load of videos where you basically clearly walk through um various topics various arguments and um you you're not particularly partisan you're just kind of teaching the subject terrain and stuff so i thought it'd be interesting to have you on um to talk about what you're doing and then get your opinion on a few things so what got you started in kind of doing what you're doing with your channel and youtube oh i think it began because i found it useful for learning the topics myself to try to teach them to others um in fact that's that's a piece of advice that i think i heard it from john um like not personally i just heard him say it on you know an interview one time when he said if you want to the the only way that you know you really understand something is when you can teach it to others and i think that's just a general piece of advice that's like out there in the in the ether um and so that's what i did uh i wanted to understand philosophy and so i thought right i'm gonna start i started actually just writing stuff for myself where it was like i'm just gonna write it as if i'm teaching it to other people and kind of like what was that like the fireman technique sort of thing of uh you know you know like where you write um almost like a question or a topic at the top and then you try and go oh yeah that kind of thing basically i i just thought right i'll write these these introductions i'll write these answers to questions and then i thought i could just upload these somewhere put them on youtube so that's how it started as far as i recall um and as you say that's what most of the videos that i do are like that most of them are just intended to be introductory videos i guess they they would be aimed at the sort of educated lay person as as it were but i tried to go into a fair amount of detail um yeah like it's it's not yeah i i try to look at all the different parts of the argument and stuff so uh they're not all like that but that's the backbone of the channel yeah um how long does it take you when you put together put together those videos because that you know like you are um often stepping through quite a few arguments to some uh depth like i went through all of your philosophy of mind series and um i i thought like you know like you were really going like back in depth on like uh inverted qualia arguments and things like that and um whereas i was like if i if i'd done this myself i probably would have like stopped at a certain point and you you just like kept going so does it take you a really you know do you just spend a long time uh putting all that information in or how do you go about that process well yes it takes a long time um [Music] it depends on the topic some topics you just end up it's surprising sometimes you just get a video done and it's very quick and you know you write it in a couple of days but a lot of those videos there is a very very long process of because you don't it's not just like writing the video you've got to read the articles and um you've got to figure out how like where to put the different parts and it can take a long time and then there's the like just writing the slides and recording it and uh it can be a bit frustrating but um yeah i i don't know exactly what the process is uh in terms of knowing how much to put in um i guess there's a because there's always more you can say right so with every argument there's always somewhere else you might take it there are always other directions you can go and so i i don't know i i just do it based on what seems intuitively like okay this is in-depth but it's not boring um yeah to me to me personally maybe other people would have different judgments about that um there is always a danger with philosophy that you're just going to start like really splitting hairs and getting pedantic and yeah there are some philosophy debates where it's like okay does this really matter yeah um so i try to avoid going that far but yeah i i don't know it's difficult to say i um i'm not actually just in general when it comes to any kind of work that i do i'm i don't tend to be very uh i'm not sure what the word would be reflective about it in the sense that i very i don't sort of step back and ask myself broad questions about how it should be structured i tend to just start writing and yeah then stuff happens what happens yeah i i i don't understand the process myself um it's awkward because sometimes people ask me for advice and like i know that i'm quite good at this it's it's one of the it's just one of my skills um there are plenty of things i'm not good at but one of the things i do happen to be good at is writing essays writing videos and people ask me for advice about it and i i don't know what to tell them um because i don't know how i do it it just happens yeah yeah maybe just get started or something yeah so what's your overall relationship to philosophy then is it something that you studied as a degree before you kind of got into youtube deciding you wanted to teach yourself this or is it um something you studied in your spare time then did post graduate or what what's uh your association to it so i had an interest in philosophy from the age of maybe about 16. i mean obviously before then i probably thought about some philosophical problems i remember when i was a kid actually thinking to myself do other people see green the way i see red you know to come back to the inverted qualia and so i'd obviously thought about those things but not in any kind of rigorous way but i think it was probably about 16 when i i actually started trying to search serious philosophy myself um unfortunately they didn't offer a philosophy course at my school like at a level or anything so um i had to wait until university but then when i was 18 i got really serious anxiety problems um i was having i started getting panic attacks and i was having panic attacks like every day and uh i mean i i say a panic attack if anybody viewing this hasn't had a panic attack they they probably don't sort of you know it's difficult to communicate how um crippling it can be uh you know it's it's an extremely overwhelming physiological response um and it really screwed up my life for quite some time i wasn't able to go uh straight to university and it was around that time when i started the channel so i actually was doing it before i started the degree and i mean this is this is one reason why i like wanted to learn this stuff but because i had this uh you know this this problem i um couldn't do it in the normal way um that i think was so yeah it was it was around that time that was that was one of the motivations um and then obviously i got better um i did a degree did a masters i'm now doing a phd i'm in the third and final year of my phd what are you doing your uh phd on well i mean my main interest is philosophy of science and um within philosophy of science i'm particularly interested in the scientific realism debate which uh is it's basically um so scientific realism is uh i guess the common sense sort of view of what science does a scientific realist will say that science provides us with true descriptions of the world um right uh the entities and processes that are described in our scientific theories really exist um at least our best theories obviously there are plenty of scientific theories that we know are false but our best theories the ones that are really well confirmed they're just true on the other hand an anti-realist will deny this and will have a different interpretation of what science is doing an anti-realist might say that the function of science is to provide theories that allow us to predict and control what we observe so um you know we shouldn't believe that like electrons and black holes and so on really exist they're just useful fictions that allow us to uh kind of predict and control our observations so that debate has always been the thing that really fascinates me and that's what that's basically what i'm doing my phd on it's what i did my master's dissertation on it's what i did my dissertation in my ba on so i've been within this debate for a very long time um uh yeah and and well like i say uh in the final year of the phd now so who knows what will happen after that uh and are you sort of falling down on a particular side in that um in that discussion or are you bringing what's your new kind of contribution to knowledge if you're able to talk about it at all okay well there's my actual position and then there's the position i'm talking about so my actual position is i'm i'm very strongly on the anti-realist side um more specifically i i'm a certain i'm i'm a very hardcore kind of empiricist and i guess we can talk about what i mean by that later but basically just so just to give the answer to your question my view is that scientific theories are basically instruments they're instruments for um allowing us to act in the world and predict uh observations and to control things and to manipulate things i don't think that we are justified in treating them as true descriptions um the main so for me the main thing is that the central argument in favor of realism is going to involve a kind of inference from success to truth so if you ask yourself all right why is it that why do i believe that electrons exist but you know the homeric gods don't exist uh well it looks like the answer is going to have something to do with the fact that our theories which postulate electrons are so successful um in so many ways right you know they they allow us to uh successfully predict you know successfully make predictions they allow us to successfully build instruments right like we can build electron microscopes um so we apply the theory in all of these different contexts and it's successful and that success is what i think is key to the uh the realist argument is the move from we can infer from the success of a theory to the truth of the theory and it's that step that i reject um i don't i don't think you can make that step uh from success to truth so that's why i land on the anti-realist side so that tells you maybe a little bit about my own position what i'm actually talking about in my phd though is a view called perspectivism um when you do a phd you kind of have to choose a topic that is new and exciting right i mean so yeah it's yes you can put your own views in there but you can't necessarily just pursue exactly what you believe and exactly the things you're interested in like you have to find something um something new um i mean certainly if you if you want to get funding for your phd which i did you have to make it appealing to funding councils and like you you so you you've got to be a bit selective um about what you're choosing psychism here i come in right well you know pan psychiatrist if this is a good example right you may well uh think that pan psychism is a completely ridiculous view or you may be an identity theorist or a dualist or whatever but uh hey maybe it's a good idea to try to defend pan-psychism so what i'm doing in my phd is i'm trying to defend the view called perspectivism just because perspectivism is a very recent addition to the realist debate um and i i suppose the intuitive way to state perspectivism is uh what it tries to say is it tries to say okay scientific knowledge is uh kind of situated in the sense that it's you know it's dependent on particular like cultural and a kind of cultural and historical background but we can still have justified beliefs about the way the world really works right so it's it tries to it tries to say that you get scientific knowledge from like an interaction between humans and the world right and so you have perspectival knowledge um we so it's a kind of realism but it's a more limited sort of realism yeah we're limited to that perspective or that frame yeah it's it's kind of difficult to i mean i mean that there are lots of questions about whether this is really coherent as a position because um obviously if you say well we can only know the world from this perspective um that maybe looks like you're just going to be committed maybe to a radical form of relativism like because if somebody else has got a different perspective and do they know different facts or do they know the same facts but they know the same facts in a different way um so there are it's a new position it hasn't really been worked out yet and i'm trying to work it out yeah no that's interesting so i don't know that maybe wasn't such a good explanation of what it is but as i say part of the problem is is that it hasn't really been worked out yet so it's it's difficult to give a capsule statement but i guess i guess the key idea is we get knowledge from an interaction between humans and the world um and so you know what you don't get with science is this kind of completely objective view from nowhere as it were um yeah yeah so maybe that maybe that makes sense um i don't know how familiar you are with the kind of um atheism slash apologetics sort of back and forth but there's a popular youtuber called t jump who one of the things that often comes up in his discussions and he has he has some really good and uh creative arguments that you know like a lot of um natural theology back and forth can be the same kind of rehashed argument so and he's got a lot of interesting things that he's thought originally but one of the things he often goes with when he talks to theists is um he's kind he's kind of saying well um you know you can't make any uh testable predictions with your your kind of god hypothesis whereas like i can with my naturalistic hypothesis and so it's interesting what you're saying is because you're someone who would be an atheist but i'm guessing you wouldn't take that same sort of view if you're not taking the realism about science that seems kind of um almost um fundamental to to the way that someone like that might be arguing is that is that okay well i mean there's a few things to say there's a lot of so so first of all you said that you talked about making testable predictions with a naturalistic hypothesis and i'm i'm curious what the naturalistic hypothesis in that case is uh um but because you know naturalism can mean all sorts of different things i i'm a little bit skeptical that you're going to make testable predictions from like naturalism as a whole but um so the the other thing is is obviously science makes plenty of testable predictions but i will not i'm not going to infer that a theory that makes testable predictions is thereby true so for example uh the big bang model right big bang model is a fantastically powerful uh scientific model um you know we can apply it to explain a to predict and explain a whole host of uh astronomical phenomena um it makes very powerful predictions i mean it made surprising unexpected predictions right like the prediction of the cosmic microwave background radiation uh that was that was kind of unexpected and it wasn't predicted by other theories it made this prediction and then that prediction was confirmed so uh yeah very very powerful model but that only tells you something about how the world works right like on a kind of how the the the underlying like nature of the world is structured if you assume that it is true and i'm not going to assume that it's true i i will say no this is a very useful instrumental model um but how the universe actually arose is um something that is beyond our grasp um so i i don't want to say that that would be an objection to the position that you attributed to the youtuber yeah because i'm not sure exactly what his claim is um i mean certainly if we're talking about like comparing say a god hypothesis to a scientific hypothesis i i would say actually my objections to the theist if the theist is treating god as being analogous to a scientific hypothesis i think the theist actually makes two major mistakes so the first mistake is the standard argument that would be given which is well this isn't actually a very good explanation at least if you evaluate it in scientific terms it doesn't make particularly good predict it's not something that makes kind of specific quantifiable predictions i guess it does make some predictions right but it almost explains everything you know like whatever would be the case would just be explained by it because so you can't say what isn't isn't explained by it because it explains everything almost so this is i mean i i don't know if it neces does it explain everything like i feel like there are some things that it maybe rules out um like if if there was a universe where it was just like constant suffering and nothing but like morally sufficient reasons that you don't you know yeah i mean you're right like so you can make this hypothesis compatible with anything but um if you're going to take say a particular line on how to solve the problem of evil then you're going to be committed to more specific claims about how the universe is structured right um but i mean so the poi i i can imagine some people thinking that this makes testable predictions and certainly historically um there have been people who have thought you can get to god just by looking at the empirical evidence right so so okay maybe you can propose this is an empirical hypothesis but it's it's definitely not a very good one um like i say maybe there are some predictions there but they're not specific quantifiable predictions it's certainly it's not making any predictions like uh predicting the exact value of light bending around the sun uh you get with general relativity right it's not doing anything like that and if you accept that explanation then it introduces a whole load of problems because you've now got all of the problems associated with you know what exactly are the properties of god and you get like the you have to work out like the the answers to those concerns that maybe the concept of omnipotence is incoherent you've got to answer those kinds of problems you've got problems uh arising from the problem of evil um so it's sort of difficult to you know fit as it were into a coherent view of the world i'm not saying it's impossible but certainly you've you've got it introduces problems um and if you just look at the god hypothesis over the whole sort of sweep of human history it's one that has continually reduced its scope of explanatory uh like its explanatory scope so you used to be able to apply it to explain the eye the human eye yeah um but you can't do that anymore right um so the over time it seems to be kind of degenerative in the sense that it's explanatory scope has narrowed um so for all of those sorts of reasons uh it's not a very good hypothesis but the second mistake that's made by the theist is to think that even if this was the best scientific hypothesis we we had um you've then got a whole other like it's you've got to make a whole other argument before you get to the conclusion that it's true because i'm going to say well yeah okay fine um this is a very instrumentally powerful hypothesis um uh you know there's reason to work with it there's reason to accept it there's reason to act as if it were true um but we're not justified in thinking that it's true um there have been plenty of very powerful scientific theories that we now think are false newtonian mechanics was for a time probably the if you go back to like the 18th century or 19th century it was the most predictively powerful scientific theory they had on on the table um and even today we still use newtonian mechanics to do things like send probes to pluto so like we still use it but we don't think that it provides us with a true description of the underlying structure of space time the claims that newtonian mechanics makes about like the the nature of space and time and gravity and mass and light and the relations that it postulates between them it's just false um so i i would say the same with with god i was gonna you know like what with this sort of anti-realist view about science what do you think are kind of i mean obviously you you're describing describing our descriptions of reality as sort of tools almost in a sense but um what do you think that you know what is reality fundamentally like why does it follow um certain regularities or why why are there kind of mathematical relationships between things like the inverse square law so you know like um on this view why does it seem to be the k is it is it just that we're so deeply um fallible that we we can never really say well we we've worked it out or what you know like could you flesh that out for me a little bit um well the answer to the question is basically yes we don't know and there might not there might not be a a reason there might not be an explanation um but this is a this is a very reasonable intuition that leads people to realist views right which is okay like how do you explain the predictive success of these theories then right like clearly there are regularities in the world as as you said and that raises a question about what it is exactly that's supporting those regularities and um if we if we have a scientific theory and it's making really powerful predictions um i mean particularly when you look at theories that say they make they make novel predictions right so some theories are such that we derive a prediction from it a very surprising prediction from it before we've actually made the observation right um so like general relativity uh it predicted the value of light bending around the sun it predicted gravitational redshifting of light it predicted gravitational waves it predicts all this stuff um that we would otherwise have no reason to expect um that's really deeply counter-intuitive and all of those predictions get confirmed so that's really striking um you know it's it's not like the theory was constructed to fit the observations because the observations hadn't been made um yeah so yeah i mean i i i get the uh i get the intuition there and that's that's the the main um i think one of the main motivations for realism but um no my answer is well we we don't know so that may not be a satisfying answer but remember uh newtonian mechanics also made a bunch of novel predictions and that turned out to be false so you know uh i i think that um it's that stopping point it's it's how from building the world up outwards how would you say this is this is it this is that final kind of uh thing is that is that right i'm not sure i follow so so is it um you know like if with if we think of the corpus of human knowledge is like this this little kind of thing that we're building up and chipping away at it's how how we ever say well we've got to the edge you know like this really is the stopping point of uh human knowledge here this is the true description um you know you could you you'd almost need some kind of infallibility or omniscience or something to be able to say um well this is always true everywhere and and for all times or i i don't know well i don't know if you'd necessarily need infallibility most people who are scientific realists at least in the philosophy of science will be fallibilist about it i mean they will say okay these theories may not be completely true and they certainly don't give us the whole truth that's why there's still more work to be done but they'll say that they are approximately true um see i mean my claim is not a claim about um like i i'm not saying all right we we haven't got the complete truth i'm not saying i'm not saying that i'm i'm saying no no like we literally might just be completely wrong um which is a slightly more extreme position um on that but again you know um there have been plenty of theories in the past that were successful but completely wrong um yeah and even in modern science we routinely appeal to idealizations and simplifications and just like outright falsehoods so somebody might for example model a star as being constituted by an ideal gas where an ideal gas consists of a bunch of dimensionless molecules that have no intermolecular attraction and there's just nothing like that nothing like that actually exists in the world uh at least as far as we know um but by modeling the star that way we can get really good predictions out of it so you know that we we know there are cases where we have theories and models which are just false or which contain things that are straightforward falsehoods that have been successful and you know that's one reason why i will resist the move from success to truth even for the cases where we don't know that the theories are false even where the theories haven't yet been superseded um yeah so um yeah somewhat someone's kind of fluid mechanics is based on newtonian mechanics and we keep using it and another one and william paley thought that empirical evidence can get you to god but most philosophers thought that you needed a priori and metaphysical reasons uh to get to god and i was wondering with your earlier statement about being a radical empiricist if it was worth um sort of delving into that so so first i suppose um what you see as the distinction that the person you know almost the um the distinction between the rationalists and the empiricist who wants to you know that are there these a priori things um or is it all just sense data that's coming to us a blank slate what what are your thoughts around that whole discussion and why do you fall where you fall okay um so yeah empiricism um i have a very specific way of understanding what empiricism is and i think that the ways in which empiricism has been defined in the past or the ways in which it's standardly defined and not necessarily that helpful so if you go back to like the you know early british empiricists say you know people like human and lock and so on then you get this view of empiricism as uh empiricism is like a commitment to the idea that there are no innate ideas um you know the concepts derived from sense experience that kind of thing um i i definitely wouldn't be an empiricist in that sense indeed i think that's just because i mean one reason not to be an empiricist in that sense is because you do not want uh a like general epistemological framework to end up amounting to a straightforward like description of people's psychological capacities or anything like that because you just open it up to empirical refutation and some people think that empiricism in that sense has been refuted um yeah you know when uh noam chomsky uh he he made some arguments against empiricism he's talking about that kind of empiricism um and the like appeal to things like uh people have like innate structures of grammar or whatever in their head that looks like a fairly straightforward reputation of that kind of empiricism um a slightly better way to think about it is to say okay we will say that sense experience is the only source of justification so people may well have innate ideas but they just don't provide any justification for people's beliefs or anything like anything along those lines my own way of thinking about empiricism is that uh so there's a philosopher called baz van fressen who's not really a he's not like well known i guess among he's not well known outside of professional philosophy but i really like his way of thinking about empiricism he's also an empiricist and for him empiricism is what he calls a stance so a stance is a kind of attitude or commitment um uh it's it's analogous to holding maybe a political stance or a moral stance or something like that you know we're not making a descriptive claim about what the world is like um right and so for example we're not going to be committed to the claim that um we get that say knowledge is justif that beliefs are justified only on the basis of sense data because sense data involves a particular claim about how human psychology works it's a claim about how perception works which may be false um in fact which probably is false there are plenty of problems with sense data um so empiricism as a stance what it involves is first of all a commitment to anti-dogmatism uh so the empiricist is going to be open to any empirical hypothesis right like we can't just rule out empirical hypotheses april right right anything might be useful in the uh construction of science um uh and and so yeah i mean this is this is this is the uh the anti-a priori part of it right the anti-dogmatism um right just be open to any empirical hypothesis the second part of it involves a rejection or resistance maybe of demands for explanation um and a dissatisfaction with explanations that proceed by like theoretical postulation so explanations that involve appealing to a world behind the phenomena as it were um why is that could you could you go into that a little bit because like is that like um like a principle of sufficient reason type thing yeah i mean it would definitely involve a rejection of that kind of thing um so you know like the way that a lot of philosophers proceed is that they think yeah we have all of these different uh discourses let's say all of these different practices you know there's science uh there's morality there's uh modality you know we talk about things being possible necessary contingent and so on um there's religious language so there's all of these different discourses um and there's a general tendency among many philosophers to to say okay what we need to do to show that this discourse is acceptable and useful is to is to search for truth makers right to search for facts in the world right that will correspond to the parts of the discourse right and so you see this with like moral realists right a moral realist is going to say okay moral values moral properties right those things exist in the world and they're what we refer to when we use terms like good and bad and right and wrong or if i say that you know if i start talking about counterfactuals or necessity or possibility again that corresponds to things in the world an empiricist part of the empiricist stance is a resistance to that kind of way of proceeding um okay but the you know the the key point so part of it is a resistance to that part of it is going to involve saying no we can account for uh this discourse without making claims about the structure of the world um okay but the key thing to bear in mind here is that empiricism if you look at it in this kind of way um is it's it's an ongoing project right it's not it's not simply a straightforward description of the world uh it's it's an attitude which will mean that we have to look at a whole bunch of different topics and you know you can have the empiricist attitude to all of these topics um but i mean you you may not be able to uh to solve all of all of these problems if you're committed to the empiricist project then you know you want to give an empiricist account of science of mathematics of morality of modality but you might not be able to do that um yeah and that doesn't really matter because it's it's an ongoing thing uh i think actually you can similarly understand like materialism naturalism as a stance as well um and similarly as being like projects that are ongoing because similarly with materialism or physicalism if you tr if you treat that as a straightforward description of the world you've got a bit of a problem because what you you wouldn't want to say i mean presumably a physicalist wouldn't want to say that um the world is exactly what is uh say described by our fundamental sciences right because we know that science is going to change so you know physicalists wouldn't want to say that on the other hand if they say something like well um all there is in the world is what will be described like at the end of science why should you believe that there's an end of science and and like obviously we have no access to the end of science anyway so again if you if you treat physicalism materialism as a straightforward description of the world you've got a similar problem um i think that that should be understood as a stance where that stance would involve something like um a commitment to um like an attitude of deference to the content of science um and the commitment to like searching for truth makers for parts of our discourse that are scientifically acceptable or something like that um would it be right to say the the motivation behind um this project is something like um so as we don't confuse the map for the territory almost because when we're when we have these um a priori dogmas in our mind they can they can be so far from from what's actually out there you know like if we think about something like the ontological argument for example where certainly it works within the contents of my own mind but it doesn't really say anything about reality itself and um is is that sort of the motivating factor behind this empiricism or have i slightly misunderstood some of the things you're saying there i i so i mean with the the ontological argument i'm not i'm not sure what you mean by that because i i don't know in what sense it works within the contents of your mind um so i guess one of the premises i would you know what whatever um is in the understanding exists in the understanding or something like that right and and it's i i would see it as a sort of a confusion of our of our representation of reality um mentally and internally for what we can actually say about the the terrain itself out there you know like like within the um within the mind i might have um a maximally perfect being but it doesn't like it can't bring it into reality that i can conceive of that mentally almost uh that okay yeah is that um no yeah i i see what you mean i mean i think that's that's part of it uh i like so in terms of what like the point is of thinking about empiricism in this way i mean part of it is just well look we can look across the history of philosophy and we can find various various people who've hold held all sorts of different views about what the world is like but who appear to be embodying something like an empiricist spirit um like aristotle seemed to embody an empiricist spirit in his objection to plato's theory of the forms say right like you can see that sort of debate going on um and then you know much much later um obviously hume and barclay and locke had some actually quite different ideas about what the world is like but in all of them there's there's a certain spirit and so um i mean it's it's more just all right what what what do all of these things have in common and it it seems like uh what's involved in this stance is anti-dogmatism and resistance to explanations that proceed by finding facts in the world or by attributing particular structures and properties in the world that correspond with successful practices um so i and and in terms of like why somebody would adopt this position well it's um i mean i mean it's a bit it's a bit difficult to say it because because it's a stance right it's not necessarily going to be something that has the same sort of justification as like a straightforward uh empirical belief i mean you're not okay it's like you say well okay what's the evidence for empiricism i'm like well that's kind of a weird question but given the way that i've i've just defined it right it's it's a bit odd because what i'm saying is look i'm i'm making a commitment to um like understand things in a certain way or uh i i i have a certain attitude to things like it's it's a bit weird to ask for evidence of that um i mean what i can say is look you you can um obviously appeal to arguments right that will make this more or less appealing uh i've just pointed out that i think there are serious problems with the inference from success to truth and i think those problems with the inference from success to truth are obvious or at least they can be made obvious to anybody no matter what your stance is if you are a physicalist say if you think that we actually do know what the underlying structure of the world is like or if you're a theist right i mean theists similarly will claim to know what the underlying structure of the world is like you'd better have an answer to this argument right to you then have an answer to the objection um that i've raised to this inference from success to truth um and there are plenty of people who've come up with you know plausible answers to that uh i just happen not to accept them right like ultimately i think they fail um but i i i i'm quite permissive in the sense that i wouldn't say that empiricism is like the only rational attitude i think you can rationally adopt different attitudes um and that will lead you to have very different um ideas about how we should go about justifying beliefs it will give you very different ideas about you know what the world is like and what the function of science is and and and all of this uh so it's it's a bit difficult to answer the question but does does that does that make sense i'm not sure yeah yeah i was just thinking um that there's a couple of questions that i want to um ask you and then we can go into some questions from the live chat that i've been getting throughout as well if that sounds okay for time i think that would take us another like 15 20 minutes or so oh i mean it's fine i've got more than enough time i'm not um doing anything so yeah because i wasn't sure if uh if one as we were coming up to the hour if that was um going to be a cut-off point or anything oh no no no i mean um i don't know how long these sorts of things usually last but it's usually i mean the other the other day i ended up doing a seven hour stream but that was it i mean i would probably be a bit much like uh definitely too much i've started doing like an open conversation thing where um people come in and then that just got a little bit out of hand for a while with with various people coming in but yeah these interviews are generally around the hour mark and you know like give it give or take depending on um questions and things yeah okay well it's up to you so okay um so yeah we'll we'll keep going for a bit longer then and just see where the conversation goes so um something i wanted to ask you about as well is uh you know a lot of these conversations i have all with um apologists or atheists as well and i i even i actually found find myself pushing back against both groups in in a lot of senses but um you yourself i from what i understand would describe yourself as an atheist but and there's a lot of um discussion about what the what the terms like atheism or agnosticism mean you know like um is atheism simply a a lack of a belief in god or is the adoption of that you know is that um a rhetorical device to shift the burden of proof or it um as as most theists would would view it that way or is agnosticism saying we can't have uh knowledge or that simply i'm withholding my and how do you kind of approach the the various categories that people might want to put themselves in um i don't know if it it's necessarily that important how we define terms because like as long as long as you say how you're defining it right i mean as long as you're explicit about about what it what it means um yeah if somebody wants to say okay i'm an atheist and by atheism i mean i lack a belief in god and like that's it i i i don't believe that god does exist i just lack the belief um i don't know either way right so somebody could say something like that fine right you've been clear about what the term means i mean so in general right like meanings are not things that like exist uh you know it's not like the word atheist like has this meaning that's that's just existing out there and we can get it right or wrong it's just a matter of convention um i can say that the way that i the way that i think it's sensible to understand the most useful way i think to classify um the conceptual space let's say is i would say that atheism is the belief that god does not exist theism is a belief god does it does exist and agnosticism involves suspension of judgment um and that's so that's certainly the way that as far as i understand most philosophers of religion use the terms it's the way that the terms are used by most people like on the street like colloquially if somebody says they're an agnostic that generally means they don't they don't have an opinion either way about whether or not there's a god um so i'm happy to accept that there is the so the the main alternative definition i believe is the idea that we should think of agnosticism as being about knowledge and atheism theism as being about belief so the idea would be something like you know an agnostic theist believes in god but doesn't claim to know that there's a god an agnostic atheist believes there is no god but doesn't claim to know that there is no god or something along those lines um the problem with that is that so the the way that we generally think of knowledge at least in philosophy and again i think this corresponds pretty well to how the term is colloquially used is that it is literally so it's pretty much just a matter of having justified true belief um and there are problems with that definition gettier problems uh have but you know like for most circumstances we can pretty much go with justified true belief um it's it's justified true belief or something very much like justified true belief right i guess would be the way to put it and so whatever position you then hold on the the god debate right if you believe that there's a god you're presumably going to believe it's true that there's a god and surely you take yourself to have some sort of justification for that i mean maybe there are some people who hold these beliefs just without justification at all but that that i think would be very odd certainly atheists right like if an atheist says there is no god they will generally take themselves and have a justification for that they will say well there is no god because it's logically incoherent you know because of the paradox of the stone or there is no god because of the problem of evil or something along those lines right like you're giving a justification if you take yourself to have a justified true belief that there is no god then you know there is no god so you're not an actor the lack of belief position though doesn't require justification is that oh sure and so the way i mean per my classification if you just like a belief that would that would be um a type of agnosticism but actually uh i think that i think it does require a justification i mean you can't just so the point is that you are confronted with people who are making arguments for one position or another right you've got to say something about that um i mean certainly you can lack a belief because you just don't know the topic right i mean a baby lacks a belief because it just hasn't considered the reasons for and against it but if you have engaged in any way in these arguments um it it just it just isn't enough to say well you know i lack a belief and therefore i don't have justification like of course you have a justification the reason why you lack a belief is because you think that none of the arguments given by the theists are successful and none of the arguments given by the um the positive atheists are successful um i mean like you know my position so i've said i'm an anti-realist yes that i would say is a type of agnosticism because um yeah i i don't i don't claim that there are no electrons i just say i don't know um but i have a justification i at least i think i do right i i've i've explained a little bit about why i hold the position i do so um no people that lack a belief do need to give reasons they do need to have a justification for that um

Channel: Kane B

Views: 1,282

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 0H6Nm8L5ut0

Length: 49min 20sec (2960 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020