Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: Incoherence means the parts do not relate correctly to each other, not inconsistency with evidence. ... You should be clear in your own mind that lack of evidence is your issue, not incoherence.

The meaning of coherent and consistent are not that simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth explains that coherence and consistency are primary criteria of truth, and suggests quite different meanings of these terms from yours. It argues “To be coherent, all pertinent facts must be arranged in a consistent and cohesive fashion as an integrated whole. The theory which most effectively reconciles all facts in this fashion may be considered most likely to be true.” Consistency is just when a theory does not contradict itself.

That is a highly specialized use of "coherent" and applies to explanatory systems, or systems of formal logic, but not really to "working mental models of the world" in general. It is also far from universally accepted even among scholars of epistemology.
From wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_theory_of_truth
"coherence theories have been criticized as lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about the natural world, empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth.[3] The response has been that empirical data does not often form a consistent whole, and that truth should not be used in contexts where consistency fails."
So somebody wants to reserve the term "truth" for theories that are both consistent and comprehensive. I note with some skepticism that they have not proposed an alternate term for theories that can't handle some of the data. "Incomplete" is the one most favored in economics, but we also have a huge category known as "partial", reserved for cases where a theory can be derived which is "general" (even though the evidence is much stronger that partial equilibrium forces actually function, than general equilibrium forces). Note that only the consistency part of the criterion is generally accepted as disqualifying a theory for the label "truth".

And none of this even applies to the subject matter of theology. It is neither explaining facts nor making predictions using them. (Oh, I know, some people think that a prediction of judgment of the immortal soul after death has been made, as well as a prediction of the end of time at some definite time in the future. I kind of doubt they are trying to do science using that prediction.)

An account of the relation between the self and the absoluteness of moral truth is not explanatory but advisory. It is an encounter in itself, and as Martin Buber has pointed out in "I and Thou", you cannot do such an encounter in an instrumental mode, trying to achieve some goal that is external to the person encountered, and have it be genuine encounter. Heisenberg in the context of relationship.

To assess such an account using criteria suited for science is to exclude the possibility of success, since as soon as you posit a "truth" that is external to the person being encountered, you have stepped outside of genuine engagement with the subject matter. One can only do theology successfully when one relates genuinely to another concerning the relation between self and the absoluteness of moral truth.

Robert Tulip wrote:The use of such incoherent methods is a primary reason for the low intellectual reputation of theology. While there is some excellent theology that does strive for logical coherence, the widespread use of questionable assumptions puts the general coherence of theology into doubt.

The primary reason for the low intellectual reputation of theology is the ignorance of the people holding that reputation. If people like Richard Dawkins had the intellectual moxie to take on reading Kierkegaard or Buber, they would know better than to spout the nonsense they do.

Robert Tulip wrote:Traditional theology suffers from intense political bias. For example, hidden agendas regarding bolstering the power of the church are at play regarding which theologies are preferred. The false assumption that the Bible is largely historically accurate is a common failing, as is the magical view that reality is actually very different from what our senses reveal, instead being governed by an invisible and undetectable personal intentional entity, known as God.

True enough.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: I tried to use the case of your own interest in astrotheology to point out to you that the motivation is distinct from the truth value, but you missed that point completely. It seems to be a bit difficult to get you to look at the two separately - you seem to consider the motivation to be worthless if the truth value is wrong, and irrelevant when you are still investigating the truth value.

Yes, I am still missing that point. My particular interest is to show that astrotheology shows the truth value of conventional theology is weak, since the claims of religion have a better explanation in allegory than fact.

Okay, but you also said you are motivated by the hope that restoring a nature-based worldview will unite environmentalist values with a general ethic (or something like that). Such a motive may be worthy, someone else's motive may be terrible, but the validity of the motivations is independent of the truth value produced by the results.

So it is incoherent to say, "Their motivation is all wrong, because they build on epistemelogical foundations of sand." Some of the motivation is wrong when it willfully leads a person to repudiate evidence. But it is quite possible for them to do this thinking that it is required for a greater good, and their motivation to still be a good one.

Suppose J. Edgar Hoover had gathered evidence of Dr. King's giving in to sexual temptation, and asked me to distribute it to discredit Dr. King. Whichever choice I make, distributing it or not, will be a less than perfect choice, with some element of compromise of ideals involved.

Now suppose I decide it is fabricated evidence, not based on any evidence of my own but just because I think J. Edgar Hoover would do such a thing, and giving credence to the evidence would be a destructive act. Am I acting in bad faith? Do I have an obligation to get the evidence assessed for its truth? I would say there are competing values involved, and my motives are not assessed by assessing the validity of Hoover's evidence. They are related, but separate, issues.

Robert Tulip wrote:I can accept that there is sincere motivation among Christians, for example creationists, who see their community cohesion as blown away by the observation that Christ was not in any literal sense the Second Adam. If Paul’s claim that Christ repaired Adam’s sin is incoherent, then the central faith idea that we are washed in the blood of the lamb starts to look false.

I think they believe the general issue of biblical authority is involved more than the particulars of repairing original sin. Paul's presentation of the Second Adam is not the developed doctrine that Augustine used, but more in the category of a useful metaphor for a sermon illustration.

Robert Tulip wrote:But this sincere motivation is irrelevant to efforts to construct an ethic that coheres with evidence.

Fine, but your condescension about their methodology does not have to lead to you being condescending about their motivation.

Robert Tulip wrote: Your argument reminds me of an analogy with the labour theory of value. Marx held that economic value is a function of labour, and therefore of effort. But if you put immense effort into something no one wants to buy, your labour is worthless.

That is actually a rather unsophisticated presentation of the matter. Marx's labor theory of value was taken from Ricardo, who was presenting a stripped down version of the full modern theory: the use of a scarce factor of production will, over something like "the long run" have to justify the foregone alternative uses of the factor. So it is reasonable to propose that the cost of the product is determined by its use of mobile factors of production, which in the context of early 19th C. Britain, meant labor.
Marx extended it to a moral claim, that only humans have a claim on the value produced. Property is essentially a fiction from the standpoint of morality - it has no legitimate claim on the value produced. (That interpretation can be critiqued, but the standard right-wing claim that it means "whatever gets produced must be valuable" is simply wrong.)

Robert Tulip wrote: Similarly, sincere motives that rest on false premises have little worth.

But it is your confusion to imply that the motivations rest on the false understanding. The motivations may be good or bad, and the beliefs with which they surround themselves may be accurate or inaccurate, but inaccurate beliefs do not make motivations bad.

As an example, I would use eugenics. The core of their beliefs were correct. Their motivations were wrong. People like Stephen Jay Gould have gone to a lot of trouble to poke holes in their beliefs, and that is all to the good. But nobody besides the eugenicists believed that the facts they adduced led to the conclusions they advocated, and in fact William Jennings Bryan's opposition to Darwinism was entirely due to his opposition to eugenics. Gould did a far more valuable service in showing why eugenics is not implied by genetically inherited properties, than by demonstrating the bad science that was motivated by eugenics.

Robert Tulip wrote:Your argument implies we should respect people who are manifestly deluded. Medieval popes thought that geocentrism bolstered their values of social order.

I think that is an enormous oversimplification of the matter. It is true that Galileo's work was suppressed, but not because somebody believed that geocentrism per se was important to the social order. Galileo thought that his former relationship with the Pope, who had actually supported Galileo's research, could be used to trounce traditionalists who believed the scripture should be the decisive factor. He made the mistake of ridiculing his adversaries, and his former patron paid more attention to the pressures of his job than to the lofty goal of supporting learning, which he had previously pursued. You could think of the Pope's choice as being similar to democracy: letting the procedure be correct, in the light of their understanding of the world to that point, (e.g. letting a large order of friars have a say commensurate with their contribution and claim to authority) rather than opting for this strange new claim to revelation by telescope. I am not saying we should take a vote about science, but I am saying we have the benefit of four centuries of hindsight in assessing that question.

Robert Tulip wrote:Their motive may have been sincere, but the growth of science showed that the popes were deluded, and their worldview was subject to tectonic breakage once the pressure became to great.

Why is it that people have trouble saying "wrong" and feel they must use terms like "deluded?" The church did not, in fact, systematically oppose heliocentrism after the time of Galileo. The universities of the Catholic countries went right on participating in science as equal partners with the Protestants (and eventually the rest of the world).

Robert Tulip wrote: I don’t agree it is ever completely wrong to point out that a fantasy is factually incorrect.

My complaint was with your insulting characterization of their motives, when in fact your contempt is for their beliefs. You persist in claiming that the two are inseparable. Perhaps I should diagnose your subconscious motivations for persisting in this error.

Robert Tulip wrote:A sound evidentiary basis in knowledge is rather what I contend is the real basis of sound values.

I prefer Gould's analogy to bipedalism. Without being able to use both legs, sound knowledge and sound motivations, we are crippled. But they are still separate legs.

Robert Tulip wrote: This discussion raises the vexed problem of the relation between facts and values, a central theme in philosophy brought to focus by Hume’s assertion that you cannot logically derive an ought from an is, that factual statements never entail a decision about what we should value.
While perhaps logically coherent, I think that Hume’s view, at the basis of positivism, fails in practice because we do routinely believe that facts entail moral response.

How can you claim it fails in practice when it is simply a proposition of logic? You seem to have in mind some program of action (or inaction) implied by Hume's observation, but that would be a derivation of ought from is. You need to spell out what you think the link is, so we can look at it explicitly.

Perhaps you are arguing that we "ought not to" separate values from factual assessments because you believe every set of facts carries with it an inescapable moral conclusion. Hitchens argued that. I think it fails utterly.

It may be rhetorically useful to claim that we "ought to" exclude all immigrants from the U.S. because some of them are criminals, but that would obscure the choices to be made about what is right and wrong.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: If you are so blinded by issues of epistemological justification that you cannot see the person and the meaning of the proposition in their life, you become worse than irrelevant.

Really, that is an excellent point you are making here Harry, and I am alive to the dilemma you raise. Political stability depends on social consensus and trust.
But there is also a slow tectonic issue at play here, that rigid beliefs eventually become obsolete, and so far removed from experience that they collapse.

Sure, and I have not argued for holding rigid beliefs, but I do argue for respecting the motivations behind them, which are treasured by the people involved. (Well, some of the motivations are contemptible, but they should be rejected as motivations, not wrapped up in a package with the rigidities of belief).
It is often possible, for example, to show how the rigidities can be by-passed and the values safe-guarded. The motivation to do this may find its emotional strength within the old framework, once an alternative is pointed out.

Robert Tulip wrote: That is why I call for faith to shift its base from myth to reason, to develop a theory of social evolution that builds upon the valuable precedents within religion rather than proposing some revolutionary abandonment of all faith.

Okay, and I applaud that. I am also pleased that you recognize there may be more than one way to connect reason to a particular value.

Robert Tulip wrote:I certainly do not dismiss anyone’s entire life purpose. However, when a person sincerely believes that their purpose in life is to get to heaven after they die, I try to find a valid unconscious meaning within this delusion. For example, Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that such heavenly aims enabled deferment of pleasure and promoted an investment culture.

It could also be that educated, cultured children are an investment requiring steadiness of purpose, and are facilitated by marital commitment.

Robert Tulip wrote: Believing in Jesus in the fundamentalist sense has proven a highly adaptive moral system, justifying stable conservative values and protecting against anarchic experiment. That seems to me a big part of why Christianity still has such strong social purchase in ways that appear superficially irrational, such as fear of hellfire.

You think?

Robert Tulip wrote:We can look elsewhere for discussion of Crossan. An example is http://vridar.org/2013/01/09/crossans-p ... did-exist/ which argues that Crossan applies dogmatic presuppositions to defend the incoherent belief that gospel fiction is compatible with the existence of Jesus.

Of course "gospel fiction" is compatible with the existence of Jesus. Carrier makes this point many, many times. It is possible that Jesus existed historically and was later elaborately surrounded with legend.
The Neil Godfrey passage you cited, reviewing a minor part of a book aimed at a different point, does raise reasons for questioning Crossan's objectivity, but he does not refute any of Crossan's methods. And he engages in so much motivated reasoning himself (such as implying the complete uselessness of the argument from embarrassment because its use has been challenged) that one is hardly left with any reason to decide between their views from that review.

Robert Tulip wrote:Ehrman has been cited by some rather rank rationalisers as providing proof that mythicism is incoherent, even though his slapdash review does nothing of the sort.

I gather Ehrman turned to a full book-length treatment of the topic, and I hope he did a better job of it than he did with the review that Carrier was so scathing about, but I don't really care.
My skepticism of mythicism is based almost entirely on what I have read of Carrier's OHJ, which is such a brilliant example of motivated reasoning that it could be used in university courses on critical thinking. No matter - as I said, I think motivated reasoning is part of the detective process, and I am reasonably confident that the evidence will shake out when the name-calling is done. I am a great believer in the adversary system in ambiguous cases.

Robert Tulip wrote:I think the fidelity dynamic you mentioned is an important subconscious background here, especially considering Carrier’s rather disturbing comments about polyamory. Many Christians would accept the ad hominem argument that a person who promotes adultery cannot be a serious scholar.

I am not one of them. I don't care that Jung had an atypical sex life, or Warren Buffett, or Jean-Paul Sartre. I don't care what Carrier has said about sex. If he has persuasive arguments to offer (and he certainly has interesting ones) I am interested.

Robert Tulip wrote: My citation of critique of Crossan above does in fact cast his methods into question, illustrating that mysterious commitments to religious tradition exercise a power over people’s thought processes which can be hard to explain and understand in purely rational terms.

I understand that social dynamics affect people's perception of the arguments. When I went to work for Office of Management and Budget, for awhile, I found myself adopting the perspective of the OMB. Why? The questions that seemed most relevant were different from the ones that had mattered to me before I was hired.

I was expected to do well a job that entailed questioning the arguments of anyone asking for money. Sure, I might prefer that the people asking prevail, but it was part of my job to see that they do it honestly, and so I began to adopt skeptical perspectives I would not have employed before.

Hi Harry, and all.

i really enjoyed these and i thought you might enjoy them as much as i did, in the case that you hadn't already seen them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gHSKdX66tY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilRzf6SRfZI

and another you might like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhQhBtHjqAA

youkrst wrote:Yes Harry

Possibly I was thinking of theology as in a bunch of crap that justifies absurd doctrines that ruin lives, the word traditional there may have been the red rag.

As something of a ‘theology tragic’ myself, I often look at the theology section in second hand book shops and book fairs. My rough estimate is that about 90% is delusional junk, and of the remaining 10%, much of it is redeemed only by the fact it sticks to evidence rather than speculation. Most theology is fundamentalist in some way. For example “Christian book shops” tend to be the outlets for evangelical churches and will not stock books by authors like Paul Tillich. That is why theology has such an extremely bad reputation in the secular world, with the term “theological” used as an insult to mean an argument that lacks evidence and logic but is solely based on proselytising ideology.

youkrst wrote: But perhaps you were thinking of something other, say some fine Tillich essays or such.

That illustrates the disjunction some readers have regarding The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. His book was addressed to mass thinking, and he states at one point that he is happy to have a conversation with intellectuals like Spong but does not at all see such coherent work as representative of Christianity.

So when theologians said that Dawkins was constructing a straw man, they were expressing a largely emotional and political argument. Dawkins was pointing out that theology involves bad method, and to gain any respect should learn something from science. He has not been refuted on that, despite extensive apologetic efforts.

I think that there is a similar problem in both Christianity and Islam, that rational critics point to the craziness of the extremes, and observe that so-called moderates seem incapable of properly dissociating themselves from the extremes. For example, I do not know of a church which would welcome a sermon disputing the existence of Jesus Christ. That means the supposed rational liberal Christians provide the sea in which the extremist fish can swim.

youkrst wrote:
To me great tomes dedicated to an imbecilic misreading of mythology was the sort of thing the term "traditional theology" was bringing to mind.

Yes, it is amazing when you see multi volume works supposedly dedicated to systematic theology, where the founding premises of the system stand in sharp conflict with science and history.

youkrst wrote:
It is much easier to fool someone than it is to convince them they have been fooled, as the saying goes.

Great saying youkrst! People have a natural pride regarding their personal beliefs, an insistence that their beliefs are rational and sensible. And yet the syndrome of the Emperor’s New Clothes is alive and well, as an important and accurate parable for social consensus.

People simply cannot tolerate heresy. Some of the great heretic theologians of the twentieth century were ignored until their deaths, such as Teilhard de Chardin. I see the Christ Myth theorists as great heretics who are still ignored – to wit Ehrman’s comment that he was blissfully unaware of that entire tradition of thought.

Robert wrote:Great saying youkrst!

yeah i loved it, from Mark Twain i think, he had so many beauties.

great post too Robert, it is always such an encouragement to me when i see someone totally "gets" what i'm saying.

may the Barry be with you

youkrst wrote: may the Barry be with you

And may the farce be with you too

Harry Marks wrote: I took your proposal to "make the unconscious conscious" to be something like Freudian dream interpretation, in which a person becomes able to recognize hitherto incomprehensible experiences as results of forces which can be described and analyzed. I see now that you are satisfied with any process which analyzes the unconscious of anyone, so that it does not necessitate a change in internal perspective by the person experiencing the unconscious phenomena.

Harrison provide some good analysis of the unconscious in Good Thinking, noting that our conscious mind is only a tiny fraction of our mental process. As we see in debates with religious believers, people have strong blockages regarding their unconscious drivers, and it can be a better ambition to discuss typical thought processes than to expect people who are beset by delusion to recognise their own problems. Even so, I think that Christianity has the kernel of an ability to be self aware in the teaching of John the Baptist that forgiveness is conditional upon repentance, which means that addressing sin requires understanding.

Harry Marks wrote:you should assess values propositions by different criteria than fact propositions. Values propositions can be apparently contradictory but in fact both true or correct. "Truth" about a should is not the same as "truth" about an is. The epistemology is different, and the notion that contradictory claims cannot both be true simply fails to understand the nature of truth in the context of values.

That is some very thorny ground, opening the same themes that Tillich discusses in terms of faith in an absolute. Back to Hume, he argued that values are expressions of sentiment or preference, not correct statements of true fact. My sense here is that values always rest logically upon moral axioms that are statements of principle, unlike empirical facts which can be proven true or false by observation of evidence. The type of world that we personally think it is good to create can only be called a correct view on the basis of faith, and I would tend to see ‘true or correct’ as a category error to describe values, except in terms of an agreed social framework.

Harry Marks wrote:
It would be good if you would query that if you disagree, because I find it frustrating to proceed without it having been clarified when you regularly show evidence of confusion on the point.

The relation between facts and values is among the most interesting and confusing problems in philosophy, for epistemology and for ethics. I don’t think your introduction of the idea of correct values is particularly clear, for example. My thinking on this topic is influenced by Heidegger, from my MA thesis on ethics and ontology, especially his central idea that care is the meaning of being. People do routinely imagine that facts imply values, and that effects have a necessary connection to their causes, despite Hume’s famous scepticism about both. I think that Kant’s idea of necessary truth as discerned by transcendental imagination is a good way to address these philosophical problems systematically.

Harry Marks wrote:
I am arguing second that you should distinguish between assessing the motivation for beliefs and assessing the truth of beliefs. You have repeatedly, on this thread, dismissed the possibility that worthy motives could be behind a belief on the basis of your belief that it is factually incorrect. I understand the notion of "bad faith", in which wrong motives can be uncovered based on refusal to consider evidence, but that is itself easily used as an excuse not to assess the actual motivation involved.

You seem to be trying to make excuses for why people believe things that are not true. That is a reasonable exercise, since often untrue beliefs such as heaven can be socially adaptive. And in Plato’s terms, there could be a case for the noble lie, teachings that are factually incorrect but socially useful. The Historical Jesus springs to mind as a great example. I heard a superb radio program last night about a girl who recovered from heroin addiction and prostitution through faith in Jesus, and was able to use her sincere faith to help rescue other lost souls through evangelism. This psychology of the armour of faith can be a highly valuable motivation, and its epistemic basis can be secondary. But it is still a reasonable question to explore its epistemic and neural basis.

Harry Marks wrote: We are claiming to understand the reasons why a myth (or a presidential candidate) "resonates" in a force of which the resonated person is not aware. Some of it operates like movie music: going on in the background without conscious processing. But let's face it, people are often all too aware of why they respond to what they respond to.

Tyrants are the worst example of people who can manipulate sentiment to achieve mass popularity. Hitler was particularly astute at that in the design of symbols and use of rhetoric. I have a far lower opinion of human rationality than you evince regarding why people respond. The ability of marketing to use symbols to manipulate desire is well recognised, except by those who are manipulated.

Harry Marks wrote:
A broken myth is essentially a parable, or perhaps if it operates on a more limited scale, a symbol. And since the whole point is to learn to process these effectively, recognizing the reasons for their effects, I think it would be a good idea not to start with claims of superior insight until that has been demonstrated.

You might like to expand on that point Harry, since I don’t understand it. What do you mean by processing parables and symbols? I thought breaking a myth in Tillich’s terms was about demythologising, and the broken myth about a functional story whose epistemic foundations have begun to totter. The feet of clay spring to mind as an example of a collapsing story, in this case both literally and symbolically.

Harry Marks wrote: I remain dissatisfied on some relatively minor aspects, and one of them is the requirement that the function of myth must operate by means of unconscious factors.

I will dig out Harrison’s comments about the unconscious, since I think they nicely address your point, and help to show how our very extended digression has been relevant to the original topic of the thread. It is absolutely clear to me that myth mainly operates unconsciously, much as trends in popular music and art and politics involve deep shifts of the zeitgeist rather than the superficial factors that can be consciously understood by mass opinion. I think that Jungian analysis provides the best tools to bring the theory of the unconscious into explicit focus, especially his concepts of symbolic types as applied to religion.

Christianity also provides tools for its own redemption by bringing unknown factors into awareness, such as the line that the truth will set you free, and Paul’s comment that we see through a glass darkly.

How very darkly ironic that the line that caused Trump such grief recently from Second Corinthians was 'where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty'. Liberty is a concept that is used now by American politicians much in the way jingos used to speak of glory, in terms astutely mocked by Humpty Dumpty as concealing unconscious motives.

Robert Tulip wrote:Harrison provide some good analysis of the unconscious in Good Thinking, noting that our conscious mind is only a tiny fraction of our mental process. As we see in debates with religious believers, people have strong blockages regarding their unconscious drivers, and it can be a better ambition to discuss typical thought processes than to expect people who are beset by delusion to recognise their own problems.

There are two processes being jumbled together. Harrison's note is based on the huge amount of processing that "stays under the radar", not requiring any awareness to get it right. The entire operation of the cerebellum, for example, simply stays outside conscious processing.

The second process is the more dangerous business of repressing knowledge. "Blockage" occurs when someone is unconsciously suppressing awareness of something whose recognition triggers threat feelings. I recognize there is plenty of this going around (including among militant atheists - we all do it) but I tend to be skeptical of those who claim to know why others repress knowledge.

I am not a lot more impressed by skeptics' analysis of cognitive dissonance among creationists than by evangelicals claiming atheists don't see the evidence for God because they don't want to change their ways. In both cases it is at best a working hypothesis to be investigated.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:you should assess values propositions by different criteria than fact propositions.

That is some very thorny ground, opening the same themes that Tillich discusses in terms of faith in an absolute. Back to Hume, he argued that values are expressions of sentiment or preference, not correct statements of true fact. My sense here is that values always rest logically upon moral axioms that are statements of principle, unlike empirical facts which can be proven true or false by observation of evidence.

Yes, that is the point. I fail to see why it is thorny ground. Maybe I haven't read enough Tillich.

Robert Tulip wrote:The type of world that we personally think it is good to create can only be called a correct view on the basis of faith, and I would tend to see ‘true or correct’ as a category error to describe values, except in terms of an agreed social framework.

That used to be my complete position. I now have moved a bit, based partly on the recognition that there is a logical framework implicit in agreed social frameworks. My current view is that the meaning of the terms (located in the way our brain processes the terms, not in some dialectical space in the noösphere) emerges as a reflection of the Golden Rule, or reciprocity (Rawlsian justice). As a result, a proposition may be demonstrably false morally if it contradicts the Golden Rule, but that not all true moral propositions can be demonstrated to be so. Incompleteness, a la Gödel, in a sense.

Imagine a very large number of non-Euclidean geometries, to get the flavor. Lots of propositions can be shown false, but some propositions are true in some geometries and false in others. That is how I think epistemology of values works.

Robert Tulip wrote:I don’t think your introduction of the idea of correct values is particularly clear, for example.

Well, I can hardly imagine anything I say being unclear. But just in case, feel free to ask about them. Maybe I will end up agreeing with you.

Robert Tulip wrote:My thinking on this topic is influenced by Heidegger, from my MA thesis on ethics and ontology, especially his central idea that care is the meaning of being.

I think that is excellent. I must admit I have not encountered that idea, but it works brilliantly, if you ask me. Can I get a source by Heidegger (not too tough to read, please, though I did get through Buber)?

But yes, when people say "life feels meaningless" I think they are expressing the same idea as "I don't care about anything". It is interesting that those two ways of expressing a similar concept are so intimately related.

Robert Tulip wrote:I think that Kant’s idea of necessary truth as discerned by transcendental imagination is a good way to address these philosophical problems systematically.

I am not familiar with that idea, at least not expressed that way, but it sounds vaguely reminiscent of my use of "the meaning of the terms" right and wrong above.

Robert Tulip wrote:You seem to be trying to make excuses for why people believe things that are not true.

That is not how I see my efforts. I would argue that the continuum of arguments for believing something, between "evidence" (think of it as the real axis in complex numbers) and "usefulness" (think of it as the imaginary axis) is not very clear to the average person, and they have a sort of fuzzy version of the modulus, in which either a very useful idea or a very well evidenced idea have roughly equal status.
Combine this with an unwillingness to question beliefs which are both socially useful and accepted by general society and you have the situation of the religious literalist.

Robert Tulip wrote:That is a reasonable exercise, since often untrue beliefs such as heaven can be socially adaptive. And in Plato’s terms, there could be a case for the noble lie, teachings that are factually incorrect but socially useful.

Although there is undoubtedly something corrupting about sticking to a noble lie despite knowledge (or even strong suspicion) that it is false. Public affairs leads to all sorts of corrupting influences, but that one may be one of the most overlooked, as the current state of the Republican Party attests.

Robert Tulip wrote:But it is still a reasonable question to explore its [traditional Christian theology's] epistemic and neural basis.

Oh, aye, but it is also a good idea to learn to examine motivations separately from epistemological methods, if only to avoid confusion.

Robert Tulip wrote:I have a far lower opinion of human rationality than you evince regarding why people respond. The ability of marketing to use symbols to manipulate desire is well recognised, except by those who are manipulated.

An excellent example to raise. We have a good idea that marketing works mainly by manipulating the price someone is willing to pay to buy something, and only secondarily their motivation to buy it in the first place. (There is little science in marketing, and that recognition only goes back about 30 years. Efforts to demonstrate efficacy of advertising have routinely failed.)
This makes sense in light of general vagueness in the average person's evaluation of the worth of an object (anchor effects are demonstrable) but fairly clear idea whether they think the product or service is worth buying at all.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: A broken myth is essentially a parable, or perhaps if it operates on a more limited scale, a symbol. And since the whole point is to learn to process these effectively, recognizing the reasons for their effects, I think it would be a good idea not to start with claims of superior insight until that has been demonstrated.

You might like to expand on that point Harry, since I don’t understand it. What do you mean by processing parables and symbols? I thought breaking a myth in Tillich’s terms was about demythologising, and the broken myth about a functional story whose epistemic foundations have begun to totter. The feet of clay spring to mind as an example of a collapsing story, in this case both literally and symbolically.

A broken myth is one that we can "see through". Nobody really believes Theseus killed a minotaur, regardless of the bull leaping and tribute collection of Knossos which may have been the basis for the tale. So we treat it as fiction and think about why it engages us. The point has little to do with whether its epistemic foundations are strong, weak or somewhere in between, but we are wiser if we learn to recognize when our reasons for believing are essentially independent of evidence and (instrumental) usefulness.
Why do people continue to spread de-bunked history, such as the claim (once found in textbooks) that the Church opposed Columbus' belief in a round earth? It was a complete fiction, invented by a couple of propagandists against religion on the basis of one quote that wasn't even close to saying that. But as you said, people often hear what they want to hear, and if we can detect that before we know anything about evidence, we are wiser for it.

Robert Tulip wrote: It is absolutely clear to me that myth mainly operates unconsciously, much as trends in popular music and art and politics involve deep shifts of the zeitgeist rather than the superficial factors that can be consciously understood by mass opinion.

So you think it is not worth asking people why they like Trump, but we should just proceed on the basis of what we know about human psychology universally? I don't see it, I have to admit.

I don't doubt these forces exist, but (as I once said in another context) our t stats are good (i.e. the forces we posit really are in operation) but our R-squareds are low (i.e. we can't explain much of the variation in the world with the forces we posit).

Robert Tulip wrote: How very darkly ironic that the line that caused Trump such grief recently from Second Corinthians was 'where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty'. Liberty is a concept that is used now by American politicians much in the way jingos used to speak of glory, in terms astutely mocked by Humpty Dumpty as concealing unconscious motives.

Sure, but we have plenty on our plate already with the conscious motives. Liberty means lack of government regulation to a large number of people, by which they mean freedom from busing students for racial integration, freedom from restrictions on their use and purchase of guns, freedom from high taxes, and, ironically enough, freedom to control the sex lives of others based on religion. Not much of that is unconscious.

Harry Marks wrote: It seems to me that suspension of disbelief works primarily by excluding the distraction of fact-checking. We don't really care whether Hamlet talks with a ghost or the whole conversation occurs in his head, or whether Macbeth got some reassuring guidance from wielders of dark power or just decided "to hell with it, I am going for the crown." The interesting use of the plot device is to raise aspects of the matter that would lose their emotional force if we had to keep assessing whether we believe that things happen that way.

Another way of putting that is that when the story captivates us we are swept up in it emotionally and have no conscious attention space for asking if it makes sense from some objective reference point.

Harry Marks wrote: I don't think that means the emotional force is unconscious, only that it is a whole lot more work to access it and work with it by explicit means than by a good story.

Well I do think the emotional force is largely unconscious. It touches on the quality of the acting, which is about the ability of the players to fully enter the characters. The difference between compelling natural acting and wooden stilted acting can be very subtle, and while it might be describable for an expert critic the ordinary person is not really conscious of why one performance is great and another is pedestrian except in terms of feelings that are hard to describe.

Harry Marks wrote: the need for femininity to be controlled by masculinity strikes me as an example of an unconscious force at work, but I fear I cannot see how it is at work in the Immaculate Conception material.

That is the main point of the dogma of the virgin birth, that for Catholicism woman is the devil’s gateway, as the ancients put it, and so sexuality must be sublimated into a framework of patriarchal control that separates spirit from flesh. The iconic virgin mother on the pedestal emerged from the demonising of Eve as the source of original sin. This is a fascinating area of study, for example in Pagels’ Adam, Eve and the Serpent, and in feminist theology that explores how the equal female Lilith, a goddess of power and dignity, was replaced by Eve, a deceptive twit, as Adam’s partner in the process of destroying the stone age matrifocal cultures.

The Biblical demotion of the female goddess Asherah from Yahweh’s partner as the first of the real ten commandments in Exodus 34 http://biblehub.com/niv/exodus/34.htm similarly prepared the way for the Christian cult of sole male leadership. There are massive unconscious factors at work in exploring the whole attitude of Christianity to sex and power, but that analysis is still hindered, in the academy as well as in broader society, by the aggressive magical fantasy of patriarchal monotheism.

Harry Marks wrote: some cultural relativism is inevitable. I do not hold that it is impossible to ever make judgments about which values are better (though I do believe it is impossible to demonstrate them with the methods we use for adjudication of factual claims), only that it is an incomplete system of comparison. It works sometimes, but in many, many cases one cannot give arguments from one perspective that a different perspective will find persuasive, nor demonstrate that the reason for this is a violation of moral principles. Liberal tolerance emphasizes cultural relativism for good reason, and the inevitability of cultural relativism, that is, the dependence of a principle's value on the conditions in which it is held, is part of that reason.

A good example of the problem of cultural relativism is seen in the development challenges of a nation such as Papua New Guinea, large parts of which were in the stone age almost in living memory. Keeping tradition alive is valuable, but the old myths were broken by the arrival of guns, germs and steel, to use Jared Diamond’s summary of the main factors in western conquest of the world. I think there is a need for a Hegelian dialectic in the relation between tradition and modernity, seeing primitive traditions as the original cultural thesis which was overturned by a modern antithesis, with these conflicting ways of thought gradually evolving towards a synthesis. In one sense such a synthesis is relativistic, in seeking respect for diversity, but then it also involves genuine difficult debate and conflict about social values.

Harry Marks wrote: accepting the onus to understand [a culture] is not the same as being required to agree or even tolerate.

I don’t think that distinction works in practice. Pure relativism says we cannot say one culture is better than another. It is political correctness gone mad.

Harry Marks wrote: I know people who will not drive on Third World roads. Are they just sissies, or are they going by sensible precautions? That is not adjudicable because right and wrong are internal categories. And for the same reason, cultures may differ in the relative emphasis they put on competing values.

People who have internalised a strong moral system regarding the value of human life can find it very difficult to understand different views. The military ‘do or die’ ethic of king and country which produced the slaughter of the Somme is hard to imagine for people who see individual rights as the framework of value. Human life is given lower value in societies that see risk as character building.

Robert Tulip wrote:Another way of putting that is that when the story captivates us we are swept up in it emotionally and have no conscious attention space for asking if it makes sense from some objective reference point.

We have spent quite a few words on "subconscious", and I am not really feeling it is worth the effort. Let me propose that a fruitful program would be to work out some of the ways which story makes use of emotional "current" to bypass the fact-checking process we call "reason". I am not sure anyone has looked at the ability of story to capture attention, but there is some neurological stuff out there about competition for attention by different motivational factors.

Robert Tulip wrote:It touches on the quality of the acting, which is about the ability of the players to fully enter the characters. The difference between compelling natural acting and wooden stilted acting can be very subtle, and while it might be describable for an expert critic the ordinary person is not really conscious of why one performance is great and another is pedestrian except in terms of feelings that are hard to describe.

This sounds like a model in which the subtleties of non-verbal communication, subconscious if you will but not repressed, can either facilitate or obstruct the emotional sweep of the story. There is some interesting sociobiology stuff on lying, or mimicry, and I would guess that if bad acting sends up signals of inauthentic non-verbal communication that it triggers our fact-checking reactions and interferes with the sweep.

This is rather like the "less trouble" version I proposed of how suspension of disbelief works. But the "unconscious forces" version says they causing particular emotional triggers to be more captivating - more of a "more meaning" effect than a "less trouble" effect. I expect both are going on in good story-telling.

One of the problems with the Trump phenomenon, like the Reagan phenomenon it stems from, is its emotional basis in over-riding some people's concern for reason. As people said about Goebbels' spectaculars, they want to be fooled. The followers of Trump have recognized that the complexity of the real world is overwhelming, emotionally and cognitively. They want to be told "complexity, comshlecksity - everything is simple, really."

All this reminds me of Oliver Sacks' story of how patients whose ability to translate speech into meaning was lost, but they could still read non-verbal cues. They found Reagan hilarious. Presumably he was sending up conflicting signals: the world is dangerous **and** there is nothing to worry about, etc.. That takes a special quality of acting ability, and I think Trump has it.

Robert Tulip wrote:That is the main point of the dogma of the virgin birth, that for Catholicism woman is the devil’s gateway, as the ancients put it, and so sexuality must be sublimated into a framework of patriarchal control that separates spirit from flesh.

I will take your word for it. These ideas are not especially new to me, but it still feels like a stretch from the self-control and sublimation ethic to patriarchal control as the mechanism. There is at least a backdoor connection through the pagan view that the victor gets the maiden, in which military effectiveness was seen as an expression of masculine virility. That was evidently how patriarchy was established. I have some trouble connecting the dots to sublimation as an expression of the same force.

Robert Tulip wrote:I think there is a need for a Hegelian dialectic in the relation between tradition and modernity, seeing primitive traditions as the original cultural thesis which was overturned by a modern antithesis, with these conflicting ways of thought gradually evolving towards a synthesis.

Sure, and not just in Papua New Guinea, for sure. "Primitive traditions" come from a setting which omits many of the things that are driving us crazy in modern life, from the seemingly infinite supply of women-who-are-more-physically-attractive-than-my-wife, to half a billion Chinese workers competing for jobs with me.

We've got to get ourselves back into the garden.