Couple of days ago I saw a post about on atheist community about a quote saying atheist can’t base their morals on anything.
I commented that if religion didn’t accept some premises like god, they wouldn’t either. Some said I am wrong and downvoted me. So I decided to post here about to what extent can I be skeptical about premises, to see where I am mistaken (or commenters).
Before that post, for a while I had an idea that even the analytical truth/necessary truth (whatever you name it) like “a is equal to a” are premises which can not be proven (since they are the basics of our logic, which will we be in use to prove claims) even though they seem us to be true by intuition. They just have to be accepted to be able to further think about other things.
So my question is since we can question the correctness of basics of our logic and cant find an answer, we can not justify or learn anything. Also, there lays the problem of do we really understand the same thing from the same concepts, and does language limit us?
If I am mistaken, which is highly probable, please correct me and don’t judge. I am not much of a philosophy reader.
I would really appreciate it if you could share some resources (video, article, book, anything…) about limits of our understanding, logic, language and related topics.
Thanks in advance…
I don’t understand how not believing in some random unrelated topic might not let me do some specific thing. Like not believing Mickey Mouse is real somehow stopping me from being able to cook.
I can base my morals on anything i find right not to say there are social norms and laws that regulate what is normal and not. Trust in religion is completely unrelated to the morals.
Forget about the religion part, it is just how i ended up post this.
So first things first, I am not saying take something random as premise, what i am saying is you can take a related premise like god to base your actions(praise, not lying etc.). And someone else can question that premise, which is god.
From here i want to question something else, premises that are more foundational like analytical truths. For example: A is B B is C C is A
Here I just want to ask a one simple question: How?
What does “A is equivalent to B” mean here. That’s what I say. Me, myself couldn’t find an answer to this question. It is just obvious, intuitional but I just can’t answer “How?”.
I think youd want to look at the “regress problem of justification” and solutions to it. I am reading Michael Huemer’s Knowledge, Reality and Virtue and I haven’t gotten to it yet but it covers the topic. Its an intro book Im enjoying so far.
Also analytic truths arent the same as necessary truths. Analytic truths are true by virtue of the meaning of their words (e.g “all bachelors are single”), there is no need to prove them.
Using god’s commands as grounding for justifying morals doesnt work because there is a modified version of euthyphyro’s dilemma that shows the issue: you can just ask what justification god has for giving particular moral commands. If he has some justification, we are not using god as the grounding. If he doesnt, it is arbitrary, makes the moral commands void of moral authority and renders god imperfect.
I know “regress problem of justification” but checking it out again on stanford encyclopedia really widen my view, but still clueless whats the answer since there is also a conflict about the topic among academia.
Thanks for book recommendation, it touches on many topics, but I certainly will check out.
Analytic truths are true by virtue of the meaning of their words
Expressing this like seem to me as “They are true because we say so”. It is supported with how we define it, so there is no external claim to support it, so how can we be sure they are correct.
Without wishing to lay down the law, I think “Euthyphro dilemma” is easy to answer, depending on your definition of god. My definition being: God is the creator of everything. There was nothing before it. It can alter or destroy everything, also it can create anything. So pious things defined by god. It didn’t love something and defined it as “good”, it willed everything to happen and named things “good”.
Socrates says:
Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?
Pious didn’t exist before god, so “it is pious because god willed”.
And may I ask why does god need justification; assuming god(my definition) exists, reasoning, logic and other things can not exist without its will, so they were not there when god was. Doesn’t that make god free from logicality?
I hope it is not annoying to answer a clueless like me, thanks for help.
The point of Euthyphro’s dilemma isn’t just to state the two options and have us to choose what we like, of course. The point is that if you choose to answer with God creating moral facts, you face issues that lead many to reject the choice. I think it’s better if I linked you to something short instead of explaining the issues with it myself, page 131-135 of Nicholas Everitt’s book (free to read): https://archive.org/details/NicholasEverittTheNonExistenceOfGod/page/n145/mode/2up
What I shared wasn’t the normal Euthyphro’s dilemma, it was a modified version I found in an ethics book. I’m not sure how to state it better.
I have read it but I have still a question in mind. Okay god doesn’t provide moral reasons to act the way it wants so what? It is god, it says us to do something and if we don’t it punishes, if we do it rewards.
This is a different way to look at the situation we are in but it doesn’t change anything about the situation. If one believes in god, one should still have to act the way god says. That does just mean they don’t do what they do for moral reasons, they do what they do for the sake of award given by god.
Thanks for the resource
You’ve touched on plenty different subjects, but it is actually amazing that — as we are all different and our whole living experience is pretty much only personal — there can be a situation that people with similar life experiences, education, beliefs and backgrounds can end up in totally different places — with a totally different morality and/or worldviews.
Religion is a very specific subject, similar to politics — those things are going very deep and can become interwoven with ones personality even, at this point person becomes very defensive about anything different than what they already know. This is one of many our weaknesses that can be easily abused by let’s say cults.
One of the great starting points in many fields, like science or philosophy is “I am probably wrong about many things — because I am unable to know everything, let’s see what I don’t know and put it to the test”
Obviously: this is only a comment on the internet — it is a giant oversimplification.
I appreciate your effort to answer, but I couldn’t find the relevance of this with my question.
Religion part is just how I ended up posting this. My question is:
One of the great starting points in many fields, like science or philosophy is “I am probably wrong about many things — because I am unable to know everything, let’s see what I don’t know and put it to the test”
Can I do this to analytical truths because when I do, I couldn’t find any claim to support them. I am clueless about, does our logic and reasoning correct?
I thought your question was
So my question is since we can question the correctness of basics of our logic and cant find an answer, we can not justify or learn anything. Also, there lays the problem of do we really understand the same thing from the same concepts, and does language limit us?
not
Can I do this to analytical truths because when I do, I couldn’t find any claim to support them. I am clueless about, does our logic and reasoning correct?
— so for the first one, we might and often don’t understand the same thing from the same concepts, language often might be a limiting factor too.
That’s why many fields, like in mathematics, physics or chemistry are using their own notation to simplify those concepts, then when you learn the rules of the notation there is this underlying premise that anyone with the same knowledge of those rules will read the written concept in the same way… H₂O or 2²=4
— for the second, there are nice Quine’s criticisms in which he argues that the analytic–synthetic distinction is untenable.
Summary (from wiki) of the argument: the notion of an analytic proposition requires a notion of synonymy, but establishing synonymy inevitably leads to matters of fact – synthetic propositions. Thus, there is no non-circular (and so no tenable) way to ground the notion of analytic propositions.
Sorry about the confusion. I just have a lot in my mind about our capacity of understanding, so I just messed up a bit with asking right questions.
I will do further research on mutual perception of concepts.
And I will certainly be going to check out “Quine’s criticism” since it seems to suit my mindset and I like it just by doing preliminary research.
Thanks