Yes, certainly. I hope you don’t think I disagree with any of your points.
Well, actually, if I was required to take issue with any of them, it would be with the importance of probability in deciding that the existence of God is not compelling. I don’t think probability has much to do with it, especially in that perhaps in a counterfactual reality there ought to be a high probability that he exists. But what is compelling is that once you are detached from the a priori belief he is present, you notice that he isn’t. For me, it isn’t so much a question of “existence” but failed promise.
So, it’s true that all the evidence I use is physical, but I don’t even know what it would mean for evidence to be non-physical. My brain is physical, evidence that can interact with my brain is physical, mental events that my brain experiences are physical. If I had some sort of soul [...] I would consider that the soul had to be physical, even if it is a different sort of physical stuff that anything else we know about.
It seems you might have forgotten, if you were ever familiar, with the pre-materialist understanding of the concept of ‘non-physical’. Personally, I’ve forgotten. It’s hard to hang on to a concept that is rendered inconsistent. I don’t think it was as coarse as ‘these thoughts make me happy, so they must be true’ or that feelings and ‘mental states’ are considered to be independent somehow of scientific analysis. Though maybe. Maybe it was the idea that a person could figure stuff out about the world by thinking in a certain way about what “ought” to be, where ‘ought’ is pulled from some Platonian ideal value system.
Yes … that you can sit in a chair and decide that circles exist, and would exist even if there didn’t happen to be any. That’s there another source of knowing.
Yes, certainly. I hope you don’t think I disagree with any of your points.
Well, actually, if I was required to take issue with any of them, it would be with the importance of probability in deciding that the existence of God is not compelling. I don’t think probability has much to do with it, especially in that perhaps in a counterfactual reality there ought to be a high probability that he exists. But what is compelling is that once you are detached from the a priori belief he is present, you notice that he isn’t. For me, it isn’t so much a question of “existence” but failed promise.
It seems you might have forgotten, if you were ever familiar, with the pre-materialist understanding of the concept of ‘non-physical’. Personally, I’ve forgotten. It’s hard to hang on to a concept that is rendered inconsistent. I don’t think it was as coarse as ‘these thoughts make me happy, so they must be true’ or that feelings and ‘mental states’ are considered to be independent somehow of scientific analysis. Though maybe. Maybe it was the idea that a person could figure stuff out about the world by thinking in a certain way about what “ought” to be, where ‘ought’ is pulled from some Platonian ideal value system.
Yes … that you can sit in a chair and decide that circles exist, and would exist even if there didn’t happen to be any. That’s there another source of knowing.