I certainly was not bored David, Thank you for interviewing Peter Boghossian - I love his clarity and passion for his subject. Too many wooly thinkers these days; not only in the field of philosophy but even within the empirical sciences of physics and cosmology. There has been a striking shift towards pure supposition and postulation as opposed to critical thinking over the last few decades.
I think the main difference between the two articles of faith or convictions Pakman's getting at is that the ones that are more common - beliefs people have that aren't held for any moral or doctrinal conviction but rather secular or scientific understanding about the world we live in - are beliefs that people tend to be more open and honest about when they talk about them and that people are more willing to change given contradictory evidence.
Wow; David did a great job in this leg of the interview! It's rare that these kinds of questions are asked of atheists by other agnostics/atheists. Pakman is spot on here. I'm not religious - I apostasized from Christianity, in fact - but I think he's right that to actually *believe* that the conclusions of inductive arguments are true requires faith. Inductive arguments can never arrive at certainty. That's why deductive arguments are superior in the strength of their conclusions. But so much of life is navigated on the basis of inductive reasoning. Really, most premises of deductive arguments are, themselves, derived inductively! Funny that I don't see anyone else pointing this out. All I see in the comments is religion bashing. Again, I'm not religious and I think every single organized religion is false., but did you actually watch the interview?! This has the subtle effect of deprecating the arrogant certainty of much of secularism.
I'm a Christian, but I deeply agree with science. To me, science is human comprehension of the amazing universe God has created. My faith goes hand in hand with evidence.
@Theodore Thoth If you agree with the scientific method, then why don't you apply it to religion? IE what evidence is there there yoru religion is correct in any way?
+Khalkara To be honest, I can't. Faith is an irrational yet present belief I have. What I was referring to in my comment was how I don't think that scientific evidence for how/why the universe is what it is goes against my religion. I think the two can work together. For example, I support the Big Band theory, I just think that the "need for the universe to exist" is the presence of God.
+Theodore Thoth That is really weird. You say that your faith is an irrational belief that you have, but yet you try to make it rational. Otherwise you wouldn't care if the science goes against or supports your religion. Wouldn't literally any scientific theory support your religion? For example, if it turned out that the universe would be static like Einstein believed, wouldn't you also say "the static nature of the universe shows the need for God", just like Christians did before we discovered the Big Bang? If so, what values is there in religion?
Speaking as a graduate of PSU philosophy department, I can assure you that a good portion of Boghossian's rhetoric stems from his bitterness over being laughed at the department. His very persona and curriculum are built on a reactionary ideology against disciplines which challenge the spectrums of epistemology, catered to a mostly, white, young male who are very anxious about the shifts in the identity politics and their place in the future of our society. For example, in my last discussion with him, he was very upset about the inclusion of African American or feminist philosophies to the canon (He explicitly called them "bullshit" in a tweet, which is why I contacted him in the first place). I promise you, give him enough interview time and he will bring up the fact that people shun him. The problem is that he always brushes it off as the price of being the second coming of Voltaire. This silly pride, which his youtube fame feeds into, compels him to propose clumsy generalizations such "Religious people believe X and Y" and then go on to fight them in the public. In the end, his must face the fact that his rejection in the academia has more to do with his infatuation with the spectacle of fame, which leads him to publish a book like A Manuel for Creating Atheists - long after the New Athiest horse was beaten to death by the Big Four -, lacking the seriousness and vigour which tenure-ship is worthy of. If he wants to be allowed a level 400 class one day, I would begin by abandoning silly childish projects such as trolling journals. Unfortunately, this sideline mud-slinging that he and Sam have chosen as a vocation is too lucrative to be given up, so I'm not holding my breath for a change.
With regards to confidence levels, it would seem that my confidence level towards a proposition would need to be high in order to even qualify as knowledge. And, my confidence level would need to meet a certain threshold to even count as outright belief. With regards to knowledge, it's certainly not obvious that having a confidence level below 70%, for instance, is enough for knowledge. And it's not obvious that having a 51% confidence level, for example, is enough for outright belief....at least according to 21st-century epistemology. So, I could be 51% confident that it will remain tomorrow. Is that knowledge? Not only is it knowledge, but it's implausible to suggest that I have a belief either!
When it comes to the question of "pretending" I don't like to tar believers with that brush. I think that probably a majority of them are as I once was - they never questioned what they were taught. They were taught by people they trusted (usually parents) and accepted their beliefs as "knowledge". I know I did. Interestingly it was a Baptist fundamentalist that made me start questioning when I was a teen. I was raised Catholic and accept evolution and the big bang, and an old universe, etc. because that was what I had also been taught. But he pointed out that the Bible taught something different. So I had been taught both science and the Bible by trusted people and they seemed to conflict. And the best my family or priest could do was to claim all the obviously wrong things in the Bible that they had taught me were words from god were "metaphors". But no one could explain why the scientifically ridiculous notion of Noah's Flood was a metaphor, but the equally silly miracles of Moses, and the resurrection were not. But I was not pretending to know things I did not before, I really thought I knew them. But a fundamentalist, challenging my Catholic beliefs started me on the road to questioning the things I thought were true. What followed was a period where I know longer claimed to KNOW the things I used but I still believed them for a while. But a fundamentalist Christian and the Bible made me an atheist.
Some times I wish people would believe in each other as much as they believe in the santa in the sky. Some times I wonder what would happen if we thanked out neighbor for helping us instead of thanking god for their help.
I"ve got a question: "Is Scientific Atheism a Belief System?" If so, then let's apply Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to this belief system. He predicts that there will be blind spots, especially as the system grows more complex. Here are three: (1) The Big Bang, which cannot be proven; (2) Abiogenesis, the belief that life arose from non-living matter within a period of time acceptable to modern science (Douglas Axe's calculations clobber that one); (3) the Cambrian explosion, which according to the newest Chinese research, happened in a very short geological time.
_A Manual for Creating Atheists:_ *Step 1: Read **_any_** religious texts, i.e., bible.* You should have enough doubts after reading the very first page; any other pages should *confirm* atheism. *Step 2:* Tell your parents that if they keep feeding you that bullshit and forcing you to go to a church, you'll report them for *child abuse.*
Atheists are really the most serious about God...although using the word "belief" means simply that are stuck in the rational level and not past into the spiritual.
David, you are very wrong about gravity. We have extremely good reason to know (to the extent that we can claim knowledge) that it is universal. And even for someone not conversant with the physics of it, there is reason enough to consider their acceptance justified. The scientific method has demonstrated its amazing efficacy at sorting fact from fiction for over three centuries now - nothing else even comes close. So just the knowledge that this idea came through a proven, reliable source of information is good reason to accept that it is true with a high degree of confidence. As a reporter, you should understand this. If the New York Times writes an article and claims certain things as fact, and not rumors or reports or speculations, it is almost always fact. But if the Weekly World News or National Enquirer does this, you take it with a huge grain of salt. You might as well claim that accepting the results from your calculator is "faith" because it could have malfunctioned.
David, your comment on gravity shows a bit of ignorance, we can actually see the effect of gravity across the universe when we look a photos of galaxies. Go to Minute Physics and watch "Where Do Galaxies Come From?" We have evidence for how galaxies form from observation and understanding gravity. Asking a philosopher about cosmology does not further your argument asking about methodology outside his area of study.
No, we cant because the current size of the universe is much bigger than our viewable horizon. However we can look back in to the past, Just by looking at the picture we take of the very early universe and the laws hold true then as they do now. There is no such thing as absolute certainty we do however have confidence (statistical) until we have evidence to indicates otherwise. However there was a Mathematician who had a proof showing that the laws must hold true everywhere. Forgive me I for get her name or I would link it. I read it years ago and I am not enough of a mathematician to comment on it. But a proof is still not enough, as one physicist put it, "We can think what we want but the Universe does not care what we think". Only evidence and experiment can validate the idea, and until we have evidence to the contrary it holds up for now. If the laws of Physics did not hold true than the Universe would look different in different places and so far we have not found it. This excludes the model of a multiverse, the idea has not been tested and so is just a idea at this point. Where the different universes operate under different rules for multiple universes verses our singular one.
However much I love physics and that is a lot. We are getting away from my point. I kinda feel that you were a little unfair to your guest and ambushed him with that physics comment/question in relation to discussion of his book. Now I don't know if it was to shake him up and make the interview more dynamic, but seemed a bit unfair.
seofthwa - not so on many levels. More work has been done on cosmology by philosophers than cosmologists and your example on the nature of galaxies prove that the empirical (so called cosmologists) have a lot to catch up on to even get close to the work of the ancients.
Of course not and add to that - we cannot see the universe as it truly is because we have yet to see that what we see is inverted due to the fact that the universe has not expanded since the original inflation.
It's Hebrew 11:1 not Hebrew 1:11 and it's very clear if you study the language (Like I do.) what faith means. If someone wants to know more I'm here. BTW Not a Christian.
Oblivion Rapture - your right, but bird use drift and dive (dive uses gravity) to get that speed, which is considered as artificial help ( for the lack of a better word). And I just notice I put jaguars instead of cheetahs, so I edit my first comment.
FIRESOUL X "They" as in atheists? Atheism, typically, isn't a claim to know, definitively, that god does not exist. Rather, it's a disbelief that a god exists, based on a lack of evidence for a god existing. Even very "militant" atheists like Dawkins admit that they could be wrong, and that a god could exist. What Dawkins claims is that he doesn't believe in the existence of a god, because there's no evidence a god exists, rather than, because I see no evidence for the existence of god, I know that he does not exist. That's a serious difference. Dawkins, and others, have described this as a "soft atheism", and in Dawkins book, "The God Delusion", he goes into greater detail on the degrees of atheism. Now there is the extreme of hard or strong atheism, in which one does claim certainty that a god does not exist. This stance is criticized by many serious atheists, including Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, as it is clearly a rather absurd stance to take, and completely unscientific and irrational. For those atheists, yes, one could argue they're "pretending" to know that (a) god does not exist, but it's important to point out that this stance isn't the norm amongst people who claim to be atheists. Further, one could be (as Dawkins, Hitchens, and others have claimed to be), both atheists and agnostics. Dawkins is an atheist in the sense that he doesn't believe that a god exists, but an agnostic in the sense that he doesn't know whether or not a god exists. The only way that one can claim to not be an agnostic is if they claim certainty that a god does not exist, or that a god definitely does exist. I've spoken to both theists and deists (yes, they do still exist, and I claimed to be one for several years, myself) who claimed to also be agnostic. That is they believed that a god, or that a specific god (the god of their faith) exists, but they also admitted to the fact that they may be wrong, and therefore don't know for certain, and therefore are also agnostic to some degree. I actually have more respect, as far as what's intellectually defensible, for those who claim to be a theist/desist, but also agnostic, than I do for those who hold the hard atheist position. One being open to being wrong, and/or open to being proven wrong, in their beliefs, is, ultimately, much more honest than those who claim 100% certainty for beliefs. Even very militant atheists hold this position. Cheers 🍻✌🏼
Nikola Demitri After reading all that [hard to accurately describe it] ... I have one question to ask you: When you go to sleep at night, do you only dream of politically correct dreams -- so as not to offend anyone --- either IN your sleep, or afterward? You obviously have no idea of what a "gnostic atheist" or, better yet, a *firebrand atheist* is nor have no idea of why that hoax, the bible was written in the first place. You must have gone to a theology school.
Nikola Demitri And you are typically WRONG with using your convenience false concepts of atheism, you pretend to know the real meaning of the concepts.
I certainly was not bored David, Thank you for interviewing Peter Boghossian - I love his clarity and passion for his subject. Too many wooly thinkers these days; not only in the field of philosophy but even within the empirical sciences of physics and cosmology. There has been a striking shift towards pure supposition and postulation as opposed to critical thinking over the last few decades.
Two of my favorite people in the media. Never tire of watching and listening to both of them
I think the main difference between the two articles of faith or convictions Pakman's getting at is that the ones that are more common - beliefs people have that aren't held for any moral or doctrinal conviction but rather secular or scientific understanding about the world we live in - are beliefs that people tend to be more open and honest about when they talk about them and that people are more willing to change given contradictory evidence.
Wow; David did a great job in this leg of the interview! It's rare that these kinds of questions are asked of atheists by other agnostics/atheists. Pakman is spot on here. I'm not religious - I apostasized from Christianity, in fact - but I think he's right that to actually *believe* that the conclusions of inductive arguments are true requires faith. Inductive arguments can never arrive at certainty. That's why deductive arguments are superior in the strength of their conclusions. But so much of life is navigated on the basis of inductive reasoning. Really, most premises of deductive arguments are, themselves, derived inductively!
Funny that I don't see anyone else pointing this out. All I see in the comments is religion bashing. Again, I'm not religious and I think every single organized religion is false., but did you actually watch the interview?! This has the subtle effect of deprecating the arrogant certainty of much of secularism.
This was an excellent series. Thank you for this. Critical thinking is being lost in this country.
Agreed !!
I'm a Christian, but I deeply agree with science. To me, science is human comprehension of the amazing universe God has created. My faith goes hand in hand with evidence.
+Theodore Thoth
Where is the evidence that God created the universe?
@Theodore Thoth If you agree with the scientific method, then why don't you apply it to religion? IE what evidence is there there yoru religion is correct in any way?
+Khalkara To be honest, I can't. Faith is an irrational yet present belief I have. What I was referring to in my comment was how I don't think that scientific evidence for how/why the universe is what it is goes against my religion. I think the two can work together. For example, I support the Big Band theory, I just think that the "need for the universe to exist" is the presence of God.
+Theodore Thoth
That is really weird. You say that your faith is an irrational belief that you have, but yet you try to make it rational. Otherwise you wouldn't care if the science goes against or supports your religion. Wouldn't literally any scientific theory support your religion? For example, if it turned out that the universe would be static like Einstein believed, wouldn't you also say "the static nature of the universe shows the need for God", just like Christians did before we discovered the Big Bang? If so, what values is there in religion?
I fucking love Peter Boghossian
Me too - he is an intelligent man with a passion for his work
I like Bill Maher's definition of faith: The willful suspension of critical thinking.
Speaking as a graduate of PSU philosophy department, I can assure you that a good portion of Boghossian's rhetoric stems from his bitterness over being laughed at the department. His very persona and curriculum are built on a reactionary ideology against disciplines which challenge the spectrums of epistemology, catered to a mostly, white, young male who are very anxious about the shifts in the identity politics and their place in the future of our society. For example, in my last discussion with him, he was very upset about the inclusion of African American or feminist philosophies to the canon (He explicitly called them "bullshit" in a tweet, which is why I contacted him in the first place). I promise you, give him enough interview time and he will bring up the fact that people shun him. The problem is that he always brushes it off as the price of being the second coming of Voltaire. This silly pride, which his youtube fame feeds into, compels him to propose clumsy generalizations such "Religious people believe X and Y" and then go on to fight them in the public. In the end, his must face the fact that his rejection in the academia has more to do with his infatuation with the spectacle of fame, which leads him to publish a book like A Manuel for Creating Atheists - long after the New Athiest horse was beaten to death by the Big Four -, lacking the seriousness and vigour which tenure-ship is worthy of. If he wants to be allowed a level 400 class one day, I would begin by abandoning silly childish projects such as trolling journals. Unfortunately, this sideline mud-slinging that he and Sam have chosen as a vocation is too lucrative to be given up, so I'm not holding my breath for a change.
Excellent work on gravity! Definitely look up Lisa Randall on where gravity might come from.
With regards to confidence levels, it would seem that my confidence level towards a proposition would need to be high in order to even qualify as knowledge. And, my confidence level would need to meet a certain threshold to even count as outright belief.
With regards to knowledge, it's certainly not obvious that having a confidence level below 70%, for instance, is enough for knowledge. And it's not obvious that having a 51% confidence level, for example, is enough for outright belief....at least according to 21st-century epistemology.
So, I could be 51% confident that it will remain tomorrow. Is that knowledge? Not only is it knowledge, but it's implausible to suggest that I have a belief either!
When it comes to the question of "pretending" I don't like to tar believers with that brush. I think that probably a majority of them are as I once was - they never questioned what they were taught. They were taught by people they trusted (usually parents) and accepted their beliefs as "knowledge". I know I did. Interestingly it was a Baptist fundamentalist that made me start questioning when I was a teen. I was raised Catholic and accept evolution and the big bang, and an old universe, etc. because that was what I had also been taught. But he pointed out that the Bible taught something different. So I had been taught both science and the Bible by trusted people and they seemed to conflict. And the best my family or priest could do was to claim all the obviously wrong things in the Bible that they had taught me were words from god were "metaphors". But no one could explain why the scientifically ridiculous notion of Noah's Flood was a metaphor, but the equally silly miracles of Moses, and the resurrection were not. But I was not pretending to know things I did not before, I really thought I knew them. But a fundamentalist, challenging my Catholic beliefs started me on the road to questioning the things I thought were true. What followed was a period where I know longer claimed to KNOW the things I used but I still believed them for a while.
But a fundamentalist Christian and the Bible made me an atheist.
Religion is a little silly isn't it?
OLDSKOOL978 You don't need religion to believe that. Religion is very silly.
+Steakfries I think both Anti Theism and Religion can be pretty funny
Some times I wish people would believe in each other as much as they believe in the santa in the sky. Some times I wonder what would happen if we thanked out neighbor for helping us instead of thanking god for their help.
DManCAWMaster I'm agnostic.
+The last wild one That's not really a religious problem. That's a people problem. A lot of people take the people around them for granted
I"ve got a question: "Is Scientific Atheism a Belief System?" If so, then let's apply Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to this belief system. He predicts that there will be blind spots, especially as the system grows more complex. Here are three: (1) The Big Bang, which cannot be proven; (2) Abiogenesis, the belief that life arose from non-living matter within a period of time acceptable to modern science (Douglas Axe's calculations clobber that one); (3) the Cambrian explosion, which according to the newest Chinese research, happened in a very short geological time.
What is "scientific atheism"?
Here is the best definition: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Scientific_Atheism It is one of the founding principles of Marxist Communism.
This dude reminds me of a mix of John Belushi and John Cusack in his facial features, voice and mannerisms.
_A Manual for Creating Atheists:_
*Step 1: Read **_any_** religious texts, i.e., bible.* You should have enough doubts after reading the very first page; any other pages should *confirm* atheism.
*Step 2:* Tell your parents that if they keep feeding you that bullshit and forcing you to go to a church, you'll report them for *child abuse.*
Atheists are really the most serious about God...although using the word "belief" means simply that are stuck in the rational level and not past into the spiritual.
great interviee
David, you are very wrong about gravity. We have extremely good reason to know (to the extent that we can claim knowledge) that it is universal. And even for someone not conversant with the physics of it, there is reason enough to consider their acceptance justified. The scientific method has demonstrated its amazing efficacy at sorting fact from fiction for over three centuries now - nothing else even comes close. So just the knowledge that this idea came through a proven, reliable source of information is good reason to accept that it is true with a high degree of confidence. As a reporter, you should understand this. If the New York Times writes an article and claims certain things as fact, and not rumors or reports or speculations, it is almost always fact. But if the Weekly World News or National Enquirer does this, you take it with a huge grain of salt. You might as well claim that accepting the results from your calculator is "faith" because it could have malfunctioned.
Religion is silly.
David, your comment on gravity shows a bit of ignorance, we can actually see the effect of gravity across the universe when we look a photos of galaxies. Go to Minute Physics and watch "Where Do Galaxies Come From?" We have evidence for how galaxies form from observation and understanding gravity. Asking a philosopher about cosmology does not further your argument asking about methodology outside his area of study.
can we see across the entire universe?
No, we cant because the current size of the universe is much bigger than our viewable horizon. However we can look back in to the past, Just by looking at the picture we take of the very early universe and the laws hold true then as they do now. There is no such thing as absolute certainty we do however have confidence (statistical) until we have evidence to indicates otherwise.
However there was a Mathematician who had a proof showing that the laws must hold true everywhere. Forgive me I for get her name or I would link it. I read it years ago and I am not enough of a mathematician to comment on it. But a proof is still not enough, as one physicist put it, "We can think what we want but the Universe does not care what we think". Only evidence and experiment can validate the idea, and until we have evidence to the contrary it holds up for now.
If the laws of Physics did not hold true than the Universe would look different in different places and so far we have not found it. This excludes the model of a multiverse, the idea has not been tested and so is just a idea at this point. Where the different universes operate under different rules for multiple universes verses our singular one.
However much I love physics and that is a lot. We are getting away from my point. I kinda feel that you were a little unfair to your guest and ambushed him with that physics comment/question in relation to discussion of his book. Now I don't know if it was to shake him up and make the interview more dynamic, but seemed a bit unfair.
seofthwa - not so on many levels. More work has been done on cosmology by philosophers than cosmologists and your example on the nature of galaxies prove that the empirical (so called cosmologists) have a lot to catch up on to even get close to the work of the ancients.
Of course not and add to that - we cannot see the universe as it truly is because we have yet to see that what we see is inverted due to the fact that the universe has not expanded since the original inflation.
Anyone hear Robert Downy Jr in this guys voice? LOL
It's Hebrew 11:1 not Hebrew 1:11 and it's very clear if you study the language (Like I do.) what faith means. If someone wants to know more I'm here. BTW Not a Christian.
faith is for what is impossible for science
Nothing is impossible for 'true' science - sadly however - science today is becoming ever more esoteric and suppositional.
this video has just semantics, nothing concrete
Also if you say someone is delusional your making a positive claim that you need to back up
Cheetahs are the fastest animals on earth (about 70 mph), but not all cheetahs run at 70 mph.
Chris Perez not the fastest animal, the fastest mammal. Many birds fly faster than 70mph
Oblivion Rapture - your right, but bird use drift and dive (dive uses gravity) to get that speed, which is considered as artificial help ( for the lack of a better word). And I just notice I put jaguars instead of cheetahs, so I edit my first comment.
They pretend to know that God doesn't exist.
That is delusional.
FIRESOUL X "They" as in atheists? Atheism, typically, isn't a claim to know, definitively, that god does not exist. Rather, it's a disbelief that a god exists, based on a lack of evidence for a god existing.
Even very "militant" atheists like Dawkins admit that they could be wrong, and that a god could exist. What Dawkins claims is that he doesn't believe in the existence of a god, because there's no evidence a god exists, rather than, because I see no evidence for the existence of god, I know that he does not exist. That's a serious difference. Dawkins, and others, have described this as a "soft atheism", and in Dawkins book, "The God Delusion", he goes into greater detail on the degrees of atheism.
Now there is the extreme of hard or strong atheism, in which one does claim certainty that a god does not exist. This stance is criticized by many serious atheists, including Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, as it is clearly a rather absurd stance to take, and completely unscientific and irrational. For those atheists, yes, one could argue they're "pretending" to know that (a) god does not exist, but it's important to point out that this stance isn't the norm amongst people who claim to be atheists.
Further, one could be (as Dawkins, Hitchens, and others have claimed to be), both atheists and agnostics. Dawkins is an atheist in the sense that he doesn't believe that a god exists, but an agnostic in the sense that he doesn't know whether or not a god exists. The only way that one can claim to not be an agnostic is if they claim certainty that a god does not exist, or that a god definitely does exist. I've spoken to both theists and deists (yes, they do still exist, and I claimed to be one for several years, myself) who claimed to also be agnostic. That is they believed that a god, or that a specific god (the god of their faith) exists, but they also admitted to the fact that they may be wrong, and therefore don't know for certain, and therefore are also agnostic to some degree. I actually have more respect, as far as what's intellectually defensible, for those who claim to be a theist/desist, but also agnostic, than I do for those who hold the hard atheist position.
One being open to being wrong, and/or open to being proven wrong, in their beliefs, is, ultimately, much more honest than those who claim 100% certainty for beliefs. Even very militant atheists hold this position. Cheers 🍻✌🏼
Nikola Demitri
After reading all that [hard to accurately describe it] ... I have one question to ask you:
When you go to sleep at night, do you only dream of politically correct dreams -- so as not to offend anyone --- either IN your sleep, or afterward?
You obviously have no idea of what a "gnostic atheist" or, better yet, a *firebrand atheist* is nor have no idea of why that hoax, the bible was written in the first place. You must have gone to a theology school.
Nikola Demitri
And you are typically WRONG with using your convenience false concepts of atheism, you pretend to know the real meaning of the concepts.
Religious chuckleheads telling atheists what "atheism" means...
Living Myth
Irrational arrogants atheists pretending to know something. . . .
.