I think the same rule applies to essential as well as inessential properties.
You should believe them in proportion to the evidence you have for them. Belief that there exists an all-powerful being is justified insofar as there is evidence for it, and believing that that being is male is justified insofar as there is evidence for that.
You should drop every part of the belief, essential or inessential, for which you do not have sufficient evidence.
As for “summing up” all the essential things in a “maximally great being,” to conclude that such a being exists requires that you have good reason to believe that each PART of that concept is true, the power, and the knowledge, and the morality and so on.
You can believe that some object fails to possess some property for reasons other than a lack of evidence. For example, I believe there are no integers greater than three but less than two. This is not merely because I’ve never encountered such a number, but because the integers are defined such that I can believe with unfailing certainty that I never will. Anything that might be both greater than three and less than two is by definition not an integer.
Similarly, any conception of God worth taking seriously to begin with is not simply any arbitrary vector in the space of all possible properties. The orientation of the “god vector” along any given axis should satisfy at the very least some aesthetic criterion—and if possible some logical one—which accords with a rank ordering of all positions by some definition of “greatness”. Without a metric of greatness by which to specify the location, or range of locations, of a conceptual vector along dimensions of interest, there is no concept whatever left to be analyzed.
If it is given that such a metric is a necessary element in a obtaining a robust, non-arbitrary conception of God, it follows that the same rules emphatically do not apply to both essential and inessential properties. Some properties can be rejected out hand merely because they violate the rank-ordering necessary to identify the concept in question.
Moreover—essential properties may not be asserted to not belong to at least one object without simultaneously denying the existence of that object (since any object satisfying the spanning set of some concept’s defining properties is an instantiation of it), whereas inessential properties may be regarded as either applying to the object or not without compelling us to adopt any particular propositional attitude towards its existence.
The idea of conceiving gods according to aesthetic properties and so on...I’m not entirely clear on WHAT specifically is supposed to be better about this, and I don’t think I see how doing so will change the likelihood of the actual existence of any such being.
Maybe some specifics will help us out here. Suppose you have reason to believe some very powerful being exists, say, Australia disappears tomorrow.
This justifies believing in some very powerful thing or set of things, maybe beings maybe not. If we then found additional reason to think it was probably a being or set of beings, that would still leave open the question of, say, the honesty of the beings, or their lovingkindness, their patience, etc.
Each of these qualities, if proven, would still leave open all the others. To argue that all are true, you have to establish each of them.
I’m not entirely clear on WHAT specifically is supposed to be better about this
You don’t see any advantage in compressing sectors of possible-property-space into algorithmically decompressible representations? I suppose the unspoken assumption on my part has been that reality is itself in some sense non-arbitrary, and that organizing the candidate elements of your ontology by unifying principles would allay the unnecessary multiplication of entities.
With respect to the topic at hand: you can posit the existence of any kind of omnipotent being you like. God might be an all-powerful Mushroom. Everything in the universe may, in some deep sense, be a Mushroom. Mushrooms are thus the most Godly object in reality. This jars my intuition about what reality might plausibly be like a lot more than the idea that God is “love”, or a “universal mind”, or so on. Now the first question that comes to mind is why? Is there any logical or scientific reason to believe that reality at a level that is completely hidden from observation forever, is more likely not to be a really just a Mushroom?
There are at least two ways to respond to these questions. One of them is to say—alright, yes, to say that God is a fungus seems perverse. If we’re going to speculate on metaphysics, let’s search for some set of principles according to which we make our metaphysical suppositions, and investigate what they imply. That way we at least might have a chance at further insight into the nature of reality.
The other thing you might do is to placidly accept that the universe may be arbitrary and perverse, and that no matter how bizarre a conception of God you may posit, there’s no reason to prefer a conception that jars the intuition less. If nothing else, this seems to block the way of inquiry.
Now this so far doesn’t have anything to do with how you find out what actually exists. It’s more a defense of employing good taste (the definition of which I leave open) when speculating on what could exist.
I don’t think I see how doing so will change the likelihood of the actual existence of any such being
It’s not supposed to. It’s more an explanation of why the “God could be dishonest and you don’t have any reason to believe he isn’t” line of attack fails to account for the fact that there are reasons that people take some ideas seriously and others not, despite a lack of accessible evidence on the issue.
Each of these qualities, if proven, would still leave open all the others.
That is correct. What I’m trying to get across is that there’s a set of qualities which offer a conception of God that would be worth hoping is true; and that the ability to make Australia, or the universe, vanish on act of will is not sufficient to win the appellation of ‘God’.
Ah, certainly. I may have misunderstood the intended scope of your points.
I said I didn’t see PRECISELY what was good about this thing, but I can see how it might be nice in some ways I hadn’t bothered to think about before. Aesthetics, yes, that’s nice. Compressible for easy communication? That’s nice, too :)
Consistent with human intuition, well, that has some benefits, too, perhaps.
It still seems to me that none of these nice things make any such beings any more likely to exist, but if I understand now, you don’t disagree with that, either.
Sure, there are certain conceptions of God I would be happy to discover were real, and others I wouldn’t, and a whole spectrum between and beyond that.
I think the same rule applies to essential as well as inessential properties.
You should believe them in proportion to the evidence you have for them. Belief that there exists an all-powerful being is justified insofar as there is evidence for it, and believing that that being is male is justified insofar as there is evidence for that.
You should drop every part of the belief, essential or inessential, for which you do not have sufficient evidence.
As for “summing up” all the essential things in a “maximally great being,” to conclude that such a being exists requires that you have good reason to believe that each PART of that concept is true, the power, and the knowledge, and the morality and so on.
You can believe that some object fails to possess some property for reasons other than a lack of evidence. For example, I believe there are no integers greater than three but less than two. This is not merely because I’ve never encountered such a number, but because the integers are defined such that I can believe with unfailing certainty that I never will. Anything that might be both greater than three and less than two is by definition not an integer.
Similarly, any conception of God worth taking seriously to begin with is not simply any arbitrary vector in the space of all possible properties. The orientation of the “god vector” along any given axis should satisfy at the very least some aesthetic criterion—and if possible some logical one—which accords with a rank ordering of all positions by some definition of “greatness”. Without a metric of greatness by which to specify the location, or range of locations, of a conceptual vector along dimensions of interest, there is no concept whatever left to be analyzed.
If it is given that such a metric is a necessary element in a obtaining a robust, non-arbitrary conception of God, it follows that the same rules emphatically do not apply to both essential and inessential properties. Some properties can be rejected out hand merely because they violate the rank-ordering necessary to identify the concept in question.
Moreover—essential properties may not be asserted to not belong to at least one object without simultaneously denying the existence of that object (since any object satisfying the spanning set of some concept’s defining properties is an instantiation of it), whereas inessential properties may be regarded as either applying to the object or not without compelling us to adopt any particular propositional attitude towards its existence.
The idea of conceiving gods according to aesthetic properties and so on...I’m not entirely clear on WHAT specifically is supposed to be better about this, and I don’t think I see how doing so will change the likelihood of the actual existence of any such being.
Maybe some specifics will help us out here. Suppose you have reason to believe some very powerful being exists, say, Australia disappears tomorrow.
This justifies believing in some very powerful thing or set of things, maybe beings maybe not. If we then found additional reason to think it was probably a being or set of beings, that would still leave open the question of, say, the honesty of the beings, or their lovingkindness, their patience, etc.
Each of these qualities, if proven, would still leave open all the others. To argue that all are true, you have to establish each of them.
You don’t see any advantage in compressing sectors of possible-property-space into algorithmically decompressible representations? I suppose the unspoken assumption on my part has been that reality is itself in some sense non-arbitrary, and that organizing the candidate elements of your ontology by unifying principles would allay the unnecessary multiplication of entities.
With respect to the topic at hand: you can posit the existence of any kind of omnipotent being you like. God might be an all-powerful Mushroom. Everything in the universe may, in some deep sense, be a Mushroom. Mushrooms are thus the most Godly object in reality. This jars my intuition about what reality might plausibly be like a lot more than the idea that God is “love”, or a “universal mind”, or so on. Now the first question that comes to mind is why? Is there any logical or scientific reason to believe that reality at a level that is completely hidden from observation forever, is more likely not to be a really just a Mushroom?
There are at least two ways to respond to these questions. One of them is to say—alright, yes, to say that God is a fungus seems perverse. If we’re going to speculate on metaphysics, let’s search for some set of principles according to which we make our metaphysical suppositions, and investigate what they imply. That way we at least might have a chance at further insight into the nature of reality.
The other thing you might do is to placidly accept that the universe may be arbitrary and perverse, and that no matter how bizarre a conception of God you may posit, there’s no reason to prefer a conception that jars the intuition less. If nothing else, this seems to block the way of inquiry.
Now this so far doesn’t have anything to do with how you find out what actually exists. It’s more a defense of employing good taste (the definition of which I leave open) when speculating on what could exist.
It’s not supposed to. It’s more an explanation of why the “God could be dishonest and you don’t have any reason to believe he isn’t” line of attack fails to account for the fact that there are reasons that people take some ideas seriously and others not, despite a lack of accessible evidence on the issue.
That is correct. What I’m trying to get across is that there’s a set of qualities which offer a conception of God that would be worth hoping is true; and that the ability to make Australia, or the universe, vanish on act of will is not sufficient to win the appellation of ‘God’.
Ah, certainly. I may have misunderstood the intended scope of your points.
I said I didn’t see PRECISELY what was good about this thing, but I can see how it might be nice in some ways I hadn’t bothered to think about before. Aesthetics, yes, that’s nice. Compressible for easy communication? That’s nice, too :)
Consistent with human intuition, well, that has some benefits, too, perhaps.
It still seems to me that none of these nice things make any such beings any more likely to exist, but if I understand now, you don’t disagree with that, either.
Sure, there are certain conceptions of God I would be happy to discover were real, and others I wouldn’t, and a whole spectrum between and beyond that.