--- Paul Trejo <petrejo@...> wrote:

> In response to this Fri30May03 post by Omar Lughod:
>
> > There is another informal fallacy called the
> > "straw-man argument". It puts forth an absurd
> > representation of an argument as an archetype for
> > all arguments.
>
> Yes, Omar, I know of that fallacy, and I also know
> that
> atheists use the straw-man argument continually when
>
> dealing with theology.

Are you aware that you have committed another informal
fallacy here. You have answered a criticism by
accusing your opponent of the same vice, rather than
answer for it!

No doubt, there are bad atheists. But the entire
point of my last email was to show that the prejudice
in a premise does not preclude its being true. One
must show the invalidity of the argument on its own
terms. it is only after the argument has been shown to
be invalid that one can reveal, as an etiological
aside, that it went wrong because the author was
prejudiced in a certain way. even if we assume, as you
do, that all atheists are deeply prejudiced against
God, that by itself does not preclude that they cannot
gain knowledge of religion. Consider the following
thought experiment that demonstrates this:

a large hole opens up into another world, and we want
to understand the religious practices of that world's
inhabitants. You have a choice: you can send in either
two believers to study them, or one believer and one
atheist. Which duo will you send if you have no other
options?


My own intution, and i would appreciate input from
others into this, is that the two would provide both a
corrective to each other's prejudices, and that the
atheist's particular prejudices may permit hir to
consider aspects (material, phenomonological, etc.,)
of their religious experience that the believer
couldnt appreciate. But more interesting, i think,
than these virtues of the second pair, is that it is
their very prejudices that would count as an objective
variable for us when we were considering their
conclusions: knowing that a person is an atheist
allows us to be suspicious of certain procedures in
hir analysis; rather than count as a negative, this is
in fact positive knowledge as far as we are concerned,
for we know how to better understand the data we are
given. For in a real sense, if they shared our own
prejudices (if we were believers interpreting the
first duo's results,) we would be more prone to miss
something that would otherwise be picked up if we were
atheists interpreting the same.

a prejudice does not make an argument, or analysis
automatically false: 1) to begin with, a prejudiced
premise can still be true; the fact of the prejudice
only reveals that the reasoner will probably be
ineffective in the long run, since most truths operate
outside the parameters of any limited framework (which
is what a prejudice is); a prejudice is a fact about
the reasoner, but whether it in fact affects the
validity of hir argument must be shown. in any case,
it cannot be shown on logical grounds, since there is
no logical argument from the definition of an atheist,
to congenital religious blindness. the first is an
analytic argument, the second requires empirical
verification, and such verification is not apriori. 2)
sometimes a prejudiced perspective gives you insights
that an unprejudiced perspective will not. For it
gives you an 'angle', that a wider perspective, the
presumed, "God's eye view" would not. one could indeed
argue that God cannot know anything because he has too
much perspective. to know a chair for example is to
belong to a world of pragmatic concerns, "to have a
world" as Heidegger would say. And what does God need
with a chair? It is in fact that chairness of the
chair that is lost with too much perspective. Kant's
real insight was to claim apriori knowledge for us,
only by reflecting on our finite difference from God.
Consider, in this respect, the real confessions about
the motivations and discoveries of scientists in the
field (see Watson's 'Double Helix').! their prejudices
are part and parcel of their discoveries.

>

Omar said:

> > To begin with, your exposition is ignoring
> arguments
> > that begin with the presumption of God's
> existence,
> > and lead us, by inference, to the falsity or
> absurdity
> > of that initial presumption. Such an
> argumentative
> > procedure is quite valid and well represented in
> the
> > philosophical literature, whatever the worth of
> the
> > particular arguments in question.
>
> Paul said: You are quite mistaken, Omar. I do not

presume that

> God exists -- and Hegel does not presume that God
> exists. Hegel has *proved* scientifically that God
> exists. He said so. If you had read more of his
> writings you would know that. His LECTURES ON
> THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION (1818-1831) greatly
> stress the critical necessity to *prove* that God
> exists. That is the difference between Religion and
> Philosophy -- Religion may *presume* that God
> exists, and Philosophy must *prove* that God exists.

Check again what 'Omar' said. i did not claim that
you presume that God exists; i claim that you are
failing to consider arguments that begin with the
premise of God's existence, and argue, to the
absurdity, or the falsity of the idea that that
existence. Such an argumentative procedure is quite
valid, and arguments against God often take this form.
My point is that you simply ignored arguments that in
fact presuppose that God exists, but on that basis are
led to the opposite conclusion.

Moreover, you claim that it is logically impossible,if
an atheist, to provide a scholarly analysis of
religion that is of any real value. Consider the
following summary of Nietzsche's view, which is built
on, among other things, philological analysis:

>

Nietzsche makes a genealogical examination,
specifically a psychological and philological one, of
the motivations for the religious impulse (I am
working here specifically from his 'Genealogy of
Morals'). Hypothesizing power as the determining
factor in all events, Nietzsche shows (through the
examination of language changes: the word 'bad'
initially meant 'common' or 'weak') how moral values
were transformed, with the rise of a religious
priesthood, to favor the meek, and to put the warrior
class on a moral defensive. Resentment characterizes
this class, since it remains, fundamentally, envious
of the health of the warrior: Nietzsche points among
other things to the relish the religious fathers took
in the postulated punishments of the wicked. It
generates a religion that makes a virtue of its own
impotence, and a vice of all the virtues originally
associated with the warrior: their guiltless, life
affirming, will to power. the will to power has been
transformed into a life denying will with the ultimate
product of an all consuming nihilism. [paradoxically,
religion makes a virtue of 'truthfulness' as a means
of gaining power over the warrior class, but that
truthfulness leads to the skepticism that puts the
belief in God in peril]. this nihilism collapses the
whole notion of value, but it also prepares us for the
postmodern capacity to experiment with our own lives,
since we have learned, through the process of
religious self denial, to shape and guide our values
experimentally. The uberman that Nietzsche
postulates, is an experimenter with life, and would be
the ultimate product of the nihilist's biological
logic.

Such an account cannot withstand much scrutiny by
todays standards of philological scholarship, but can
you deny its intuitively plausible insights? Do you
not consider the will to power, if not a
scientifically viable concept, still, a
phenomenologically plausible one? Do you not consider
such motivations when examining the behavior of
academic philosophers? it is such insights that would
lead first to Freud, and then to a whole slew of great
novelists, and literary critics who recognized in
Nietzche one of their own: that is, one who
understands, in a profoundly aesthetic manner, what it
is they give expression to through the devices of art.


Eric Erickson provides a very interesting neo Freudian
analysis of Luther's religious experiences, if you
would like to consider an interesting counter argument
to your claim that it is impossible to say anything
valuable about religion while remaining an atheist.

=====
Omar

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