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God's existence and the problem of induction
Qingu
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This is a thread about whether or not God's existence can be derived from the problem of induction—that is, the problem that we can't know, inductively, that we can use induction to learn things about the world.
This thread is NOT about God's existence in a general sense. This is a specific argument for God's existence so please don't litter this thread with any of the following:
• Atheism/agnosticism, or atheism is dumb cuz you can't know 100%
• The watchmaker argument or argument by design
• Historical argument or the Bible really happened/the Bible is bullshit
Ain't No Sunshine: allow me to restate your argument for God's existence, as I understand it.
1. Induction cannot be used to prove that induction can tell us true things.
2. A world without induction would be irrational/impossible.
3. God, if he exists, could be used as a rational justification for our ability to use induction.
4. Therefore, God exists, because of the "irrationality/impossibility of the contrary."
Is this basically your argument?
This thread is NOT about God's existence in a general sense. This is a specific argument for God's existence so please don't litter this thread with any of the following:
• Atheism/agnosticism, or atheism is dumb cuz you can't know 100%
• The watchmaker argument or argument by design
• Historical argument or the Bible really happened/the Bible is bullshit
Ain't No Sunshine: allow me to restate your argument for God's existence, as I understand it.
1. Induction cannot be used to prove that induction can tell us true things.
2. A world without induction would be irrational/impossible.
3. God, if he exists, could be used as a rational justification for our ability to use induction.
4. Therefore, God exists, because of the "irrationality/impossibility of the contrary."
Is this basically your argument?
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Okay, let me present you with another argument and you tell me if you are rationally convinced.
How do we know this? Because Din, Farore, and Nayru are the best explanation we have for our ability to use rationality and induction.
We cannot use induction to prove induction. We cannot use our rationality to prove that we have the capability to use rationality. That would be circular, and furthermore, we would be appealing to our own "autonomy," as rational actors, which we do not know for sure that we have.
The only way we can be sure that we can use induction is by appealing to an outside source that grants us our rational capacity.
According to the Legend of Zelda, Nayru, the goddess of Wisdon, created the world with the other two goddesses. We know from the fact that she is the goddess of wisdom that wisdom proceeds from her. She is the source of wisdom, and is likewise the source of our rational capacity and our ability to use the inductive method.
This has been revealed to us by Nayru and the other goddesses through the Legend of Zelda games.
Thus, the only way we can rationally know anything is by first appealing to Nayru, from which rationality itself proceeds.
1. It's not at all clear to me that God is the only, or best, explanation for induction.
2. The universe appears to be based on cause and effect; this is by itself good reason to accept induction, if only until we see evidence otherwise.
3. Does God not simply move back the problem? If we need God to make a rational universe (which we don't, but even if we did...) then wouldn't we need a God to make God? And so on- there's an infinite recursion problem.
1 and 3 I agree with. However, 2 is invalid. You use induction to make the observation that the universe appears to be based on cause and effect, so this observation cannot be a justification for induction.
Nice. I'm quoting the full image because every thread needs more Venkman.
Good substitution. I have a criticism, a warning, and an explanation. The criticism is towards "The only rational way we can be sure that we can use induction is by appealing to an outside source that grants us our rational capacity." I don't know what the justification for induction is or where it comes from, outside or in, but it doesn't matter - the endpoint of this argument for it to be successful is that there must be no justifications for induction (including its 'being an intrinsic, natural property') that are more believable than any others.
The warning is that until induction is justified, we can't trust induction or its processes as means of determining whether a justification is believable or not.
The explanation is that this argument looks useless, but it's actually pretty valuable to any theist in that (if it's true) it defuses atheist criticisms. You can't claim a theist is irrational if his explanation is just as rationally believable as yours. You can't claim induction is a natural property without falling prey to the same kind of criticisms as theism (celestial teapot, FSM, so on). So, there is a reason to debate the argument even if it isn't, in itself, a theist's argument. (It pairs well with another one, meant for another thread).
Edit: I forgot the important point. Given that these characters from Zelda mythology conceptually have the power to justify induction, I see no issue with accepting them as a choice. Things that do not have the power to justify induction don't cut mustard for obvious reasons.
Edit2: Professor Phobos, I agree with Qingu here, that #2 premise needs induction to make a point about induction. Your #1 is the point of this argument and I agree. Your #3 I sort of agree with, in that this question can be raised regarding any justification we give about induction (wouldn't a natural law need a natural law to establish it/continue it?...no suggestion will be immune to the two-year-old "Why?")
Unless you can rationally justify your use of rationality, you cannot rationally criticize any worldview.
This is essentially the problem of knowledge that Socrates supposedly spoke about thousands of years ago. If you keep on asking "how do you know that" to someone for every answer they give you, eventually you're going to get to a point where they say "I don't know." In other words skepticism is inevitable.
I'm failing to see how appealing to God or Nayru somehow lets us escape from the inevitability of skepticism. Can you explain how you arrived at "belief God is rational" from this? Because all you've showed so far is that "belief in God may be as irrational as any other irrational belief."
This belief is mutualy incompatible with your belief in God, but we'll leave that for now.
You: Induction needs to be rationally justified.
Me: Okay. (insert deity or monster here) rationally justifies induction.
You: Alright. Belief in (deity of monster) is rational then.
How is my above claim "rational"? Why do you accept that any monster or god I think of that I say can justify induction is rational to believe in?
Why not?
True. I spent the last several minutes trying to break the circle, but you're probably right.
It's more limited than that, in several important ways. The first is that only beliefs with the power to justify induction are valid (the rest, deductively, we can rule out). This leaves us more or less with natural occurrences and extremely potent beings, while cutting out junk, and describes how practical people try to understand the problem. The second is that, since induction is ultimately accepted, we have a wide variety of observations about the world with which the beliefs about justification must agree with, which more or less demands that religious fundamentalists get wise.
Inductively, the argument is likely to be true because it has lots of explanatory power regarding how people approach the question of God.
The argument doesn't fall prey to skepticism (well, alright, every knowledge argument ultimately does - but this one isn't as nihilistic as just agreeing with skepticism itself). It's fundamental that induction is sound, or else we could have no knowledge and no debate. Buying this argument limits skepticism to a question that really is unknowable at this juncture and forces us to apply a healthy skepticism to every argument on the table.
"Belief in God may be as irrational as any other irrational belief" is close to what I want. The ideal conclusion is, "Belief in God is (no more, no less) irrational than any other irrational belief [edit: about the justification of induction]". The implications are more important than the piece.
I wouldn't say that your belief is rational - what I would say is that it's an equally valid choice as mine. We both know that we have to pick something as a justification or else we can't move on. I picked God. You picked Din, Farore, and Nayru. They both meet qualifications as long as it's conceptually possible [edit: for them to establish induction as a truth].
What's important is that because we picked different justifications, the way we think about induction is different, but without intense scrutiny nobody would know. We both commit a logically equivalent, not-quite-rational decision, and from then on post-induction our beliefs about the world converge. After accepting induction we more or less need to agree on facts in the world (X happened here, experiments show Y causes Z, so on). Furthermore, we're doing an equally good job in interpreting those facts, all other things being equal.
Again, implications. This being the case, it explains why really smart people talk past each other on God, all the time.
[edited where noted for more precision]
The God you believe in, whatever it is, must be consistent with induction in order to rationally believe in?
So your rational for believing in a force that justifies induction is that, if we didn't have induction, things would suck?
Why not cut out the middleman and just assume induction is true? How is this different from assuming something exists which proves induction is true? The assumption has the same logical validity.
Well, you said you had a rational reason to believe in God.
You've admitted that your reason is as (ir)rational as the belief that the Zelda deities created the world.
Do you seriously believe that this is a defensible position? Presumably you would think someone who believed in the Zelda deities was wrong.
Okay. Well, the problem with what you're saying, to my eyes, is that you've tautologically defined "God" as "whatever justifies induction."
So your God isn't even necessarily a God. He could be three goddesses. He could be a magical guitar that somehow justifies rationality. It's a great big mysterious X that you feel you need to plug into an equation in order to know anything.
Worse, you certainly cannot rationally know that X, whatever is, justifies induction or rationality. Because using induction or rationality to "know" that X justifies it is just as circular as using induction to know that induction works.
You're basically just widening the circle.
Thank you! I've been trying to figure out how to say something like that, but I didn't have the words.
People's idea of "God" isn't as vague as "Whatever organizing principle makes the universe appear designed."
Though again Evolution teaches us that you can get Design from Order, and Emergent Complexity teaches us you can get Order from Chaos, so we have no need of a Mind to create Design...but anyway...
People's idea of God is specific. It's more than just the Great Mover or the Great Organizer- it's an intelligent, active entity that does stuff. It makes statues weep blood, has children, throws lightning bolts, grants Cleric spells...
Yes, but it's not hard. If you have a being of this power, then natural laws bend for miracles and whatnot. I'm honestly divided about miracles, personally, so for the purposes of this position I'll say yes.
That's the conclusion, I'm glad you agree. It's equally rational to say "God, then Induction" as it is to say "Induction on its own". The concern is that if this is true, there's no rational reason to attack God using the tools of induction, such as via Occam's Razor (the most common tactic). It washes the slate entirely of arguments for and against God, unless there's a purely deductive argument out there somewhere. Buying this effectively ends that debate.
I didn't say I had a good theistic argument, but I have made a valid rational decision between all available choices. In the previous thread, you may notice I took pains to note that my beliefs were unjustified, but that doesn't make it a bad decision in this specific case, where everyone's having at least one unjustified belief (leading to induction) is necessary.
Your analysis is correct, but you keep trying to use the position offensively against me somehow, and it doesn't work that way. You already concede that something needs to be plugged into this equation in order for us to know anything. And we can't know that it works, certainly, we can only deductively rule out the things that could never work. Still, we [edit: truly believe we're having a rational] chat, so at some point we both plugged in whatever tickled our fancy.
I believe this argument we're discussing. I needed something to plug in, so I did; and so has everyone (even "I withhold judgment, but induction is the case" is such a plug-in). The point is that nobody, regardless of what they did pick given certain criteria, made a "bad" choice, and there are no rational grounds to criticize anyone else over the matter. A simple substitution makes every person who uses induction guilty of the same crime.
I think this whole God concept--which I DO NOT buy into, just for the record--is a tapestry that families weave into their mythology.
I've asked myself this question: could I tell a child that death is just a true end for all living things? Does your dead puppy/kitty/fish/bird just "stop" or "cease" and there's nothing beyond that end? There's nothing after that? They'll never see their kitty/brother/mommy/grandma ever again? Regardless of what I believe, can I tell that to a 2-year old cousin, or child, or neighbor's child? When a child asks what happens when a pet or relative dies, do you make up a bullshit story? Do you take the logical route?
I think this is how "God" gets perpetuatued... and abused. Don't know about you, but I'm not all that interested in advising children about the end of their life or telling them that their pet--after being run over by a car--is simply "gone," "done" or "finished." And that's how God comes into the equation. And that's why God is still in the equation, and will stay in the equation. The concept and idea of God will get used, raped and abused by all sorts of assholes and institutions, but the initial, pure concept--the mysterious numenous concept of "God" that parents discuss with their kids after a kitten or puppy or family member passes--that's not a bad thing... at least I don't think it is. Aetheists and Agnostics... I'd like input on your plans for dealing with your children's questions regarding the passing of family members, or pets, or just existential crises in general. I don't ask that from a confrontational standpoint--I truly want to know.
Here's the the thing: adults abuse the concept of God in order to inflate their egos while attempting to assail "evil" in the world. Adults try to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Adults, being human beings, totally fuck all of this up. Before, during, and after this whole fuck up situation, adults attempt to explain to innocent children that everything they've done--and everything that the children have done and will do--is for God's wil.
Then.............. some fucking asshole tries to dictate what God's will is.
So, long story short: my personal opinion is that you're a complete asshole if you want to take the agnostic/aetheist route with your young cousins or grandchildren. If you really have an aggressive reason to take the aetheist path... cool. I just want to aks you this: do you have any young members in your family, and can you turn your balls to cold steel and tell them--regardless of how things are going--that there is absolutely, positively NO GOD?
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That label would really come down to how you define that "the" in "atheist." I would agree that "some universal force" is far too broad to be a theist belief. A deity is, by definition, not just a force, but rather a personality or distinct identity, some kind of sentient or intelligent being. In believing in a god, one ascribes certain characteristics to a "universal force." If you are of a specific religion, then those characteristics are pretty well defined.
Some people believe that an entity of some kind, or at least some kind of directed or deliberate force, generated the universe, without any additional qualification of it. It's hard to state that belief since words like "mind" or "intelligence" or "consciousness" don't really seem to apply to the level of existence involved in the creation or generation of a universe. I most definitely wouldn't call believing in such a force or entity a religious position, but I'm not sure if I would call a believer in it an atheist.
But I can pull your trick with the circularity of deduction too. You can't deduce that deduction is a valid technique, can you? Does this mean that you also need to invoke another X to justify your use of deduction to rule out things that could never work for your first X?
Again, the whole problem with your approach is that your God doesn't mean anything. It literally could be anything. It's just an X—by definition, an unknown—that you place in front of a gap.
X could be Zelda goddesses. It could be a magical guitar. It could be your ego. It could be nothing at all, as you've said it's equally valid to simply assume that induction works as it is to invoke X.
The fact that your X, your God, could very well be nonexistent does not bode well for the rationality of believing that he exists. Your argument is more an argument for agnosticism than it is an argument for the existence of God.
Important enough to separate out, because it evolves the position.
The thing is, I'm not an atheist - I really did pick out of the handful of equally rational choices I had, and it was God. My conception is that guy that grants Cleric spells (well...alright...not lately, but you know what I mean), nothing else.
If this argument is true, it's not acceptable to sit back and object to the choices that others make - in order to understand induction/my words enough to object, you had to make a choice of justifier yourself, and you more or less have to really believe in that thing that you chose.
The end result of this line of thinking is that, because everything we know rests on assumptions (axioms, really), about induction and rationality, we can't know we're right about anything and therefore cannot hold any beliefs or criticize any beliefs. To you, someone who believes in God is no different than someone who believes in a magical guitar that justifies induction, or someone who believes in Zelda.
What led you to choose "God" out of this grab bag anyway? Was it induction or was it just random?
You're not alone. Catholic theology, when you get technical with it, defines "omnipotence" as God being able to do anything that it is possible to do; i.e., even God can't create logical paradoxes
The real trouble comes in- outside of logic, there is a limited range of "possible" in the real world. Even if a vagued-up "Force" as you're advocating is logically possible doesn't make it actually possible.
Not equally likely, because one is more parsimonious than the other. Especially if we can determine some method for induction's appearance in the universe, which is at least conceivably possible, particularly if we work off the examples we already have of Design emerging out of Order without a Mind guiding it.
Not really, because we still know nothing about this "God". It's an unsatisfying answer.
You have two unjustified beliefs, though. You've got God and Induction. Plus, that we can not now justify induction does not mean we will not be able to in the future- if our understanding of the universe deepens, we might eventually discover a mechanism by which universes organize themselves inductively.
But it isn't the same crime. Deferring judgment or simply assuming that an already established pattern continues are both more reasonable than introducing a supernatural explanation. There's no reason to expect that if no where else we require a supernatural explanation, that the universe's organization requires one. There's no further investigation possible by settling for a supernatural explanation, and most importantly, if you introduce the the supernatural...you've eliminated induction! One true miracle eliminates the clockwork precision of our universe.
You can't have both a supernatural God and an inductive universe, since said supernatural god could alter or change anything It wished at any time. Unless you are going to argue that God itself is subject to predictable natural laws ,at which point it stops being Miraculous and just Really Hard to Explain, and we've just moved the argument back further...
Am I making sense? Your "Equal Validity" argument only holds water if the "God" involved is natural and so vague as to be practically undefined, at which point you are not really saying something that is distinct from atheism. Atheists, at least those who enjoy Science Fiction, will certainly acknowledge the possibility of "Godlike Beings" who manipulate or benefit from pre-existing rules of the universe. The fundamental atheist position is one against the supernatural...and once you've got the supernatural, you've eliminated induction.
I honestly hadn't thought about it, because I always considered deductive thought to be an objective truth - I'm not sure if content of thought could be without it, and it's pretty essential to our discussion. I think we can temporarily suspend the question by requiring a conceptual justification for both, or else ablating the requirements altogether. Makes the argument a worse theory about behavior, but doesn't really stop the conclusion.
It doesn't bode well for a standalone, rational reason, no. It works just fine out of a meshwork of choices, one of which we must pick. Agnosticism (depending how you define it) doesn't work either, because there's no such thing as a conditional belief. One gives a belief a truth value - true, or false - or one withholds an opinion. However, you can't do the latter two with induction, because it's essential to function. You must have chosen true. To do that, you need to provide a why, and pick.
I'm still waiting for a reason on why you picked God instead of Nayru or nothing. (edit: no rush, of course. My sympathy goes out to slow typers.
I trimmed, thought it would help get us more space if it turns out we needed it.
Your analysis is close to right, except you can't reductio this argument. You and I agree that we know we're right about induction, or else we wouldn't be talking to each other and making sense. Therefore, induction can't rest on an assumption. That's why we had to pick a justification, and that's what separates this argument from just about every other similar one.
By definition, I had no rational reason to prefer the one I did. Neither you, whatever you did. It definitely wasn't induction. I honestly don't know if it was random or not.
All you can conclude is that there is a justification. You have no rationally justifiable way to pick one. Even if you assign a being as that justification, assigning qualities to that being is even more rationally unjustifiable.
I don't agree that we know we're right about induction. We assume we're right. It's an axiom, like "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line." We don't know axioms are right, we assume they're right.
So induction does rest on an assumption. You can add another assumption in front of that assumption—X, or God, or Nayru—but like I said, that's just adding another assumption to the circle. It doesn't change our predicament. It certainly doesn't mean the assumption about X is rational.
I thought you said you had a rational reason to believe in God?
Ultimately, I don't know for a fact that I need to drink water to live. I could be plugged into the Matrix. I'm still going to drink water.
The first bit is exactly correct, except we know that we must pick. That's why it's interesting. I'm going to repeat that I never made this out to be a theistic argument, merely an answer to other theistic/atheistic arguments.
The second bit isn't true - we're making this choice before we can use induction to separate out the choices, the way Occam's Razor would. Whatever choice we make is immune to Occam's because it will turn out to be an essential thing (for Occam's). You could propose a million-item chain, as long as it justifies induction in the end.
Again, the implications are what count. This is just the excuse for an explanatory model of the theistic arguments we usually see.
Right. And "As far as we can tell" doesn't mean that it is reasonable to believe in God, because...as far as we can tell, there isn't one of those either.
Sure, God is possible, but that's not really saying much.
We don't know that we must pick. I would posit that we know we cannot pick because there is no way to rationally select an option. All the choices are rationally invalid, not rationally valid. ie the only correct answer is "I dunno," because we really don't. Seems like an argument for agnosticism, sure, but I am applying this only to the induction argument. On a purely rational level there is no way to be anything but "agnostic" concerning axiomatic concepts, like the effectiveness of rationality itself.
Sorry for misinterpreting you, let's go here for a while.
Let's treat induction as an assumption, in the hard semantic logic sense (and to do that we'll also have to suspend your question about deduction...I don't know how that will go). This means that, for any belief you claim that isn't prima facie, you instead have a phrase, "IF induction is true, THEN X....whatever". And you accumulate a lot of these. The problem is that these statements aren't knowledge, and I'm pretty sure that doing this makes you a radical solipsist.
This is different from the obvious analogy, The Matrix. In that example, we're considering whether the knowledge we have is correct knowledge. We believe X, Y, Z, but it turns out they're all wrong. With this case, you're not believing anything, because conditionals can't obtain independently of fact.
Assumptions are a tool of semantic logic intended to ferret out truth. You assume, see where the assumption leads you, and apply it back to something certain. But without taking up induction for real, the only certain fact you have you got deductively, and that's Locke: "I am thinking, therefore a thinking thing must exist." But making the assumption of induction won't get you a contradiction of that (or anything else, without more real knowledge) - so it goes nowhere.
I think there's an ugly forced choice between radical solipsism and accepting intuition for real.
You're right, I misspoke. I had a rational reason, just not one more rational than a wide variety of legitimate alternatives.
[edited for screwing up quote tree]