March 28, 2011
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(argument map) Why should atheists care about truth?
Intro:
I've taken the liberty of argument-mapping my exchange with Christian apologist, Steve Hays, on the topic. The history of this particular conversation started with Triablogue's "The Infidel Delusion" (TID) response to atheist, John Loftus' "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" (TCD). Hays started responding to my review of TCD and that generated three rather long posts of his and contributed a significant chunk to my review of chapter 4. Hays attempted to undermine TCD in his intro in a number of ways, one of which was questioning the epistemic duties of non-theistic worldviews.
SPOILER ALERT: All you need is some motivation and some utility to it to care about truth in order to bother addressing or refuting the beliefs of anyone on any topic. Iknowright? But that doesn't stop Christian apologists from "objecting" with nonsense anyhow. It also ends up churning up some interesting other nonsense as well (for those interested).
"Atheists have no principled reason to care about truth" is a stock objection from Hays so any time he wants to toss this onto the path, it'll be pretty clear where that gets him.
Click on the thumbnail to embiggen:
If anyone would like to contribute more iterations of the debate, feel free. Also, if there are any typos or grammar errors, I'll make corrections.
I've used Compendium to start mapping out a huge network of interrelated debates. A fellow atheist challenged me to a public debate on the TAG which is the Christian presuppositionalist beachhead of all forms of naturalistic incredulity. Hence, as you can see:
Each of those nodes opens up a whole other argument map (each of which I'll eventually post I'm sure). I had to be prepared for just about any tangent that could come up. That's the whole idea of the TAG strategy is to be vague and presumptuous, and then pretend that nonbelievers have to solve every problem in philosophy and metaphysics before they are "allowed" to doubt all the other evidential claims of Biblical Christianity. It would almost be "fair" (since some of the issues are legitimate enough) if they didn't ignore the worldview shopping cart of all things Christian they could honestly at-least-as-equally doubt as well. But giving all the tough questions of one positive worldview a pass while holding another to the grindstone is dubious to say the least. Are you not sure about all the implications of metaphysical naturalism? Okay...we have a word for that. It's called "agnosticism." Not "Christian."
Outro:
I'd covered the vast majority of the material already in my review of TCD, so it was mainly a matter of appropriating it for the argument map network. Eventually I'll have a network that covers pretty much all the most typical philosophical issues that come up in these debates and I can provide that meta-file to download. It's on the "to do" list.
Ben
Comments (1)
The argument that anyone, much less atheists, has no reason to care about truth is just retarded. While instrumental conclusions may be sufficient for all of our decision processes, there is nothing barring one from desiring truth, given that truth is beyond sufficient for improving decision processes (but not necessarily). I don't even find the argument philosophically interesting. What is more interesting is trying to understand and identify truth. What entities are truth-apt? Thoughts? Propositions? Beliefs? Sentences? How do we access truth? Intuition? Experiment? Observation? How do we identify truth once we have access? Many take science to track truth, but this is highly controversial. While most take some sort of realist perspective on the matter, trying to isolate that precisely is a wholly other matter. Nevertheless, anti-realists and postmodern critiques are severe since our best scientific theories are always revised, but this isn't a mere revision of the conceptual landscape; it is a remodeling of the very ontology of entities posited by the theory (is light vibrations of a mechanical or non-mechanical medium? Fresnel's theory obtained great predictive success while being wrong under our current Maxwellian view of light qua electromagnetism; however, the equations of Fresnel's theory were retained exactly under Maxwell's theory). Should atheists care about truth? Yes, because truth provides understanding, and as long as anyone desires correct understanding of something, they ought to care about truth. Understanding and knowledge are two different things, mind you. For instance, the social sciences, one might argue, are more instrumental. Neoclassical economics makes use of an idealization of economic agents so as to describe and predictive behavior. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is wrong if someone tries to use an instrumental theory to understand what is going on. If it is false but instrumental, then it cannot give you understanding of the event: it's false in that regard. (The same can also be demonstrated in cases from the natural sciences.) Purely on epistemic grounds, no one can claim they ought to desire truth. There are many desiderata on that regard. But when it comes to understanding, truth is prerequisite.