TLN said:
Agreed. In my aggravation over Irritating Ian I've overstated the matter.
It still has no ability to generate facts and therefore I find it of little use outside of interesting conversation.
I agree. Philosophy, by its very nature, is speculative. Ethics is its major role today. And even regarding morality, science impinges (or
should impinge) on ethics. The Mapping of the Mind will have important ramifications for crime and punishment. Genetic advances will, too. Medical ethics is a minefield where science, economics, and ethics commingle uneasily.
So, Philosophy has its place. That place is probably in the Religion and Philosophy Forum, mind you
Yet belief in an afterlife is so fundamental to Christian theology. And that belief, with others, entails paranormal or supernatural claims. When it comes to testing these claims, philosophy can provide no clear answers.
If Ian wishes to
speculate about paranormal claims like the existence of an immortal soul: that's philosophy. If he claims to have
evidence of such survival, however, then he has to enter the scientific arena. For Philosophy, especially Ian's immaterialism, has no clear, unequivocal mechanism to distinguish between reality and illusion. That is probably why Berkeley is so appealing to him as, I would guess, a conservative Anglican?? (Apologies to Ian if he is not)
The philosophy of Berkeley represents a highly developed and energetically defended statement of the position that reality consists wholly of minds, the divine Mind and the multiplicity of finite minds that includes all men. Whatever exists does so either because it is a mind or because it is dependent upon a mind; nothing material exists. Berkeley argued that the notion of the material should play no role in one's thinking, for its existence is unverifiable, its postulation unnecessary, and, at bottom, the very notion is self-contradictory. How does Berkeley view the status of tables and chairs, rocks, the Moon, and all of the other apparently material things that everyone accepts as existing? Berkeley agreed that they do indeed exist but only as collections of ideas that exist in the mind of God and that are often caused by God to exist in the minds of men as well.
There are well-known difficulties in Berkeley's view. His account of the nature of tables and other objects cannot be accepted as an account of the meanings of these terms because it is implausible to think that the concept of a divine Mind is somehow part of their meaning. Nor does it seem a plausible scientific theory about such objects because of its ad hoc character and its lack of predictive value. If the notion of God is dropped, however, the philosopher is left with the phenomenalistic theory that such objects are collections of appearances. But phenomenalism also has serious difficulties; in particular, it cannot in the end account for the difference between real objects and illusions because it cannot provide an account of the difference between circumstances in which perceptions are veridical and those in which they are not.
Britannica 2003 DVD
Metaphysical theories must be subject to the test of experience. That metaphysics aspires to give an account of the world as a whole means that each metaphysician claims that his fundamental insight illuminates
every department of life. There are many conflicting metaphysical theories: which one is
true? Science is mutable and seeks to correct any errors in a progressive fashion. Philosophy,however, was for so long ruled by a dogmatic Theology that it, too, became diffused with claims of inerrant truth. For most of the existence of philosophical thought, the thinkers were
constrained by religious beliefs whether they wanted to be or not. It was
mortally dangerous to expound philosophical positions that were deemed 'heretical' whether you were Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, or Thomas Moore. The period of the Enlightenment saw the first real challenges to god-based philosophy, although many were still persecuted for atheistic views. I think Deism was used by many as a convenient compromise. Let's be honest, it is
still not popular to be an atheist in much of the world. And it can still be a dangerous position to hold.
What I mean is, so much of the history of Western philosophy was 'biased' toward a theocentric universe because 'god' was
imposed on philosophers by the popular attitudes and beliefs of their time. If one is going to be tortured and burned at the stake for denying God and Satan, I reckon this would introduce a very considerable bias
away from a humanistic worldview!
So . . .
How does Ian differentiate between reality and hallucination, between fact and illusion? His metaphysics provides no mechanism to do so. Empiricism does, however provide a high degree of veridical
evidence. We're back to that old word again.
The trouble is that what Ian, Luci, Clancie, SG and others call 'evidence' is not what skeptics mean by the term.
Perhaps we should tighten up on the semantics and insist on the term 'scientific evidence'. Until then, believers will continue to claim anacdotal and circumstantial evidence for paranormal claims, and the skeptics will say: 'What evidence?', and round the rugged rock again the ragged rascals run (or sometimes they hide
) It's a BIG rock with plenty of nooks and crannies
malc
