All Episodes
Previous Next
March 23, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:23
1313 Methodology and Difference

Philosophy, religion and conclusions...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well, Steph.
It is the 23rd, I think, Monday of March 2009, and I've been working on a project to do with the older podcasts, and it's so strange to see and hear that, you know, late 2005, early 2006, it really is an amazing thing to hear that this is three and a bit years old, this conversation.
As a whole, I guess, that's really quite amazing.
And I guess I've been...
It was, I think, May of 07 that I quit the software gig to do this full-time.
And it's really remarkable to think that it's been a year and three quarters or whatever since then.
And it is a wonderful thing and exciting and humbling and a thing which I'm always grateful for.
To think, well, you know, we did this for a year and a half, and then I was able to make the leap with your kind generosity to represent full-time.
And thank you so much.
I know I say it a lot, but I never feel I can say it enough.
I just never feel that...
I never feel I say it enough that how grateful I am to have the opportunity, the privilege, the honor to represent philosophy with your support.
And, you know, of course, donators and subscribers, thank you so much.
And this I don't say enough, and I want to sort of point it out here that I'm aware, of course, that a lot of people support the philosophy that we talk about here in non-monetary ways.
In... Keeping me in body butter and edible thongs.
All of that kind of good stuff.
By the way, sour keys, not my flavor.
But thanks to the donator.
But the people who go and post about FDR or hand books out or talk to people about philosophy and say, here's a good resource, a blog and so on, I mean, thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
I say it's non-monetary, but of course it isn't.
It is specifically monetary, the support that you're throwing my way.
I used to have to spend up to $2,000 a month on advertising, which was quite exciting when I was making about $3 more than that.
So, I really do appreciate that.
I've had to scale back on advertising a lot, partly because of the free books that was, I guess, a policy that I started April of last year, I think, and also as a result of the donation of time and energy that people who maybe can't give or don't want to give money but are giving Time in other ways.
And I really do appreciate that so much.
It sounds perhaps corny, but it's absolutely true.
Every day, I think of the support and trust and backing of you, of everybody in this conversation, and particularly those who've contributed financially and in other ways.
I think about how I can best represent philosophy.
Not myself, not FDA, but philosophy and Given that you're throwing some bucks my way to help make the world a better place, I really do think about that every day.
As I sit down, it's like, okay, how can I make the people who've given me such trust as happy as possible?
And I'm sure I don't always do it perfectly.
And I'm sure I often don't do it even imperfectly, but that is always the goal.
And I hope that you would agree that as a whole, it's working out.
And if it's not for you, always please tell me.
What I can do that's better, because that really is the goal.
So, I wanted to talk a little bit about something that shot up on the board over the last day or two, and it's an interesting question.
It's a really, really interesting question.
As you may or may not know, I kind of got my start in the libertarian community at lewrockwell.com.
And my archives, I believe, have since been erased from Lou Rockwell's site.
But nonetheless, I remain very grateful to have been given the opportunity to start publishing at Lou Rockwell's site.
And I guess the relationship went awry.
I can't remember exactly when. But it was a while back, and I just stopped getting responses to articles, submissions, and sent a couple of emails asking...
If anything was the matter, and I never heard anything back, and nobody's obligated to write me back or anything, so I just figured that either some of the controversy around FDR, although this was long before the media stuff, some of the controversy around FDR or my atheist stance was a problem.
I don't know, and it doesn't really matter, but I've always been very pleased to have had that opportunity, and it is a site that has some Excellent articles about economics, and economics in particular, and some good alternate history views.
So somebody posted at FDR a video of Lou Rockwell giving a speech.
I didn't get a chance to see it, but they said, Lou Rockwell speak, and he's a good speaker and a good writer, in my opinion, and not that I'm any exquisite judge of these things, but it is a pleasure.
I don't think of anything that I've seen or read of his that I'm like, well, a couple of things.
The Ron Paul thing, obviously, is not to the taste of your average bedrock anarchist, but...
Certainly his articles have been, to me, passionate and well-written and good for what that's worth, right?
And, you know, no hostility.
We obviously have disagreements such as they are on religion and the value of political action, but you certainly have to admire, in my opinion, I know that he gave up his...
Tax-free status, charitable status is tax-free status to support the wrong poll campaign because you can't be a political advocacy and claim to be a charity.
So, you know, talk about, to use a yoga pretzel analogy, putting your nuts where your mouth is, right?
That is, you know, throwing your eggs in a significantly shaky basket.
And that can't have been an easy decision.
And I'm sure that there's been some fallout since.
And You know, I guess you got to admire people, at least in my opinion, who do follow through on their values.
I mean, if you disagree with the values, whatever, right?
But there is that kind of go-get-em stuff that I know can't be easy.
And of course, I mean, in my own way, I've done that, right?
Quit the job. I quit my career and do this crazy job for a living.
So, you know, kudos to...
And, you know, obviously there's a lot of good political and economic information that's out there and, you know, I got my start and so on.
So, you know, no hostility.
Obviously, there's disagreements and significant disagreements about both form and content in terms of freeing the world.
But, of course, it's not a philosophical site, right?
I mean, so it's a different kind of beast, right?
I mean, it's political, economic smattering of history.
And, you know, there's some essayists and so on who talk about personal stuff, but it's not a philosophical site.
It is econ history politics.
That's what they do over there.
So, it's not...
It doesn't have the same breadth and depth of methodology that a philosophical site does, right?
Because, I mean... That's what FDR is.
Whether you agree with it or not, it definitely is from first principles.
Whether you like it or not, we have to follow reason and evidence to its conclusions, and we don't have the luxury of excluding particular areas or fields from the rigors and demands of reason and evidence.
That is the difference between what I'm doing and what they're doing, right?
I mean, they'll do the reason and evidence thing for economics, and to a large degree, though, I would say not to a consistent degree, to politics, and then not so much, right?
Because the religion is, you know, where reason and evidence are directly, you know, broken, squashed, torn, and feathered, and so it doesn't have that same consistency.
I don't agree with that, of course, right?
Because I'm a philosopher and not a political activist or an economist.
And so that aspect of things, I think, is the fundamental difference.
I don't have the luxury, so to speak, of excluding certain fields of inquiry from the reason and evidence first principles things, because philosophy is not a river that goes around rocks, right?
It is... It has to be consistent from top to bottom, back to front.
This doesn't mean that I'm perfectly consistent.
I mean, I aim for it and it's a value that I strive for and I hope that I'm always able to be called on it, but the methodology must be consistent.
The extent and the content and the process of reasoning must be consistent across all fields of inquiry.
You can't be a biologist and exclude the emu from any biological considerations.
And in the same way, You can't be a philosopher and exclude religion from the requirements for empiricism, reason, and evidence.
Sorry, we continue to get the gym, so you get to hear me hoist around my girlyweights.
Actually, that is an insult to girls.
And there, I mean, there are, of course, a not insignificant coterie of people in the libertarian movement who consider my openness to talking about the non-aggression principle in the family as discreditable or disreputable towards libertarianism.
As a whole, in other words, we should talk about the non-aggression principle in realms that we can't conceivably affect, right?
Like the state and the Fed and foreign policy and Iraq and so on, right?
So we should talk about the non-aggression principle in realms that we can't conceivably have any effect on whatsoever, at least.
Trackable, tangible, immediate effect.
But we should studiously avoid the non-aggression principle in realms where we actually can have some effect in terms of enlightening people to the evils of violence that they may have suffered in their own lives.
So we should only, only, only ever look at maps and we should never actually get in boats.
We should only study Kung Fu by reading books.
We should never actually spar.
I mean, that's my perspective.
I prefer to...
Put my rubber on the road, so to speak.
I prefer to act in such a way that the values can be implemented rather than blogged about or just talked about.
And, of course, those who are into political action would say that there is, you know, that...
Their goals and approaches will bring freedom and so on.
And that's certainly true, but that's what they would argue, but it's not proven.
In fact, quite the opposite is proven, in my opinion.
Actually, that's not an opinion, that's a fact, that hundreds of years of libertarian efforts we've got ended up with a huge state, whereas...
When I have talked to someone about the evils of violence in personal relationships, which certainly conforms with the non-aggression principle, particularly against children, of course, and the reality of voluntarism, which is, of course, reframed by nutty people as me busting families and so on, which is nonsense, right?
Simply reminding people that relations are voluntary is not giving them any orders, but only facts, basic facts.
And facts which, you know, freedom of association is fundamental to libertarianism, but you can only talk about it in terms of, I don't know, the press or something, or unions, not your actual relations in your life.
So, there are those.
Who consider the actual implementation of ideals that we all believe in, the evil of aggression, of violence, and the reality and virtue of volunteerism, who take these, you know, when I take these lofty abstract principles and, on the request of listeners, help them apply them to their own personal lives, So that they can actually change their lives for the better, whether that means improving their relations or taking a break from abusive or destructive relations.
It's not up to me and not up to them.
Fundamentally, it's up to the people in their lives.
When I take these values out of the clouds and put them into action in people's lives, there is shock, horror, and mad consternation, which I understand.
It's tough to live Thank you.
It's relatively easy to blog about the Fed, right?
It's really tough to take these principles and put them into your own lives and how people apply voluntarism and the opposition to violence and abuse in their own lives.
To actually do it, right?
Easy to talk about it. Easy to think you're good at kung fu when you're watching a kung fu movie.
Hard to get into the ring and trade some wax, right?
And I understand that, but that's sort of where I'm coming from.
But to me, of course, the ironic thing.
And it is ironic, and it is almost funny.
Although, of course, there are aspects of it that aren't funny.
But it's almost funny that...
For me to help people to...
I mean, I don't call up listeners and say, hey, tell me about your relationships, right?
But when people have these kinds of challenges, when I help people actually live the values that we all claim to believe in, it is considered enormously discreditable, right, to libertarianism as a whole,
right? Yet, to have enormously prominent libertarians believe in Jewish zombies rising from the dead, virgin births, talking snakes,
and dust women made out of the rib of a man, that is not considered to be discreditable to The intellectual rigor and value of libertarianism.
You see the contradiction that I am talking about here.
The contradiction is that for me to say, yes, voluntarism and the non-aggression principle are very important values to live by, not just to blog at, but to live by.
And then people do actually put these things into practice.
And this is shock, horror, oh my god, people are actually doing it.
No, no, no, let's get back to blogging.
Let's get back to writing books about fiat currency and the constitution, right?
And that is... So, actually taking the values and putting them into practice is considered to be enormously disreputable to libertarianism.
But on the other hand, having enormously prominent public...
The most prominent and public libertarian figures believe in invisible sky ghosts, right?
And magical resurrections and...
And so on, talking snakes and this sort of stuff, that is not considered to be disreputable to libertarianism, right?
That is considered to be just, you know, a different and alternate viewpoint.
And that, of course, is quite remarkable to me as a philosopher, right?
I mean, as a libertarian, I could sort of understand it, but I'm not fundamentally a libertarian.
I'm a philosopher, I think, that...
A stateless society is a logical application of philosophical principles, and many of the things that libertarians talk about to me are valid applications of philosophical principles, but I'm not into conclusions.
I mean, no philosopher or, I think, intellectually honest thinker is into conclusions, right?
Because conclusions only flow from methodology, right?
From reason and evidence. And to be into conclusions is to put the cart before the horse, right?
We follow reason and evidence, often reluctantly.
I mean, wouldn't it be a fun world if you could, you know, fly pegasus, ride unicorns, and if people did come back to life and you could live forever on a cloud after you died with those you love?
I mean, what a delicious and wonderful fairy tale come true that would be.
I mean, I'd love to live forever and spend eternity talking philosophy with Socrates and my wife, right?
Not necessarily in that order.
It would be a wonderful thing, right?
And it would be a great deal of fun.
But the reason and evidence doesn't go there.
It goes to quite the opposite place, right?
So, reluctantly, right?
I mean, it's a shame, but, you know, sun-baked Bedouin fairy tale books of nonsense are not a sound basis for coming up with a set of facts about the world and its inhabitants.
So, for me, saying non-aggression and voluntarism apply to all spheres of life from the state to the family is something that is considered to be, oh my god, what a disaster.
We're not supposed to do it.
We're only supposed to talk about it.
We're only supposed to, quote, apply these principles in realms where we cannot possibly act on them, but we're never ever supposed to take these principles and actually apply them to our own life where we can act upon them.
And all that, I mean, all that really communicates.
It's that most libertarians don't believe in their principles, right?
Clearly, if you say, X is a great virtue, so I'm going to write a lot about X, and then someone says, you know what, I'm going to do X, and you consider that to be entirely disreputable, and terrible, and awful, and rail against them, and call them all sorts of bad names, all you're saying is that you don't believe in X, right?
Because we judge people not by what they blog, but...
Who they be. It's what you do, not what you say.
Actions speak louder than words, right?
It's what you do, not what you say, that counts, right?
So if you're into the non-aggression principle and voluntarism, which logically and I believe morally we should be, then for people to put these values into practice should be wonderful,
right? It's like if you believe that a certain pill cures cancer, and you get cancer, and you refuse to take that pill, you're just saying, well, after selling it to others for many years, all you're really saying is that you don't believe the pill cures.
In fact, you believe the pill will make you sick, right?
And so to me, there is this strangeness.
I'm still puzzling through it.
I don't have a clear handle on it.
The obvious conclusions are just too abysmal for me to jump to, so I'm still trying to puzzle through it and come up with a kind of interpretation.
But in the meantime, it seems very hard for me to accept that it's a sustainable and believable thesis that...
Consistent application of libertarian principles in the sphere of life that we can actually do something about, which is our own life, our own relationships, that that is very bad for libertarianism, but a blanket rejection of evolution by Ron Paul and his supporters, those who have not called him to task on this, right, that a man trained in science, a doctor, is rejecting evolution, that that is not discreditable to libertarianism.
That, to me, remains an incomprehensible thesis, that I'm doing damage to libertarianism by helping people to live values we all share in their own lives, to reject violence and promote voluntarism, that that is disreputable to libertarianism, but...
Talking snakes and God breathing life into plasticine animals is not.
And a rejection of the absolutely credible and universally accepted theory that has been established in over 250,000 scholarly peer-reviewed journals that evolution is not true.
That doesn't discredit libertarianism nearly as much as a guy who says we should live our values.
Not just talk about them, right?
So, that having been said, I'd like to go a little bit further about what flared up on the board at Free Domain Radio, because I think it's interesting, and I think it does have a lot of stuff to talk about and to think about in terms of the relationship that people have with those who...
Those who have similar conclusions, but not a similar methodology.
And it's a real challenge to figure out, and obviously I don't think there are any particularly easy answers, which is not to say that the question is not worth exploring.
It's usually worth exploring more so even under those circumstances.
And there are, if I'm running through this in my head reasonably well, there are four possibilities when it comes to methodology and conclusions. there are four possibilities when it comes to methodology and I mean three, really, but we'll talk about four to sort of make it clearer to begin with.
The first is that you share methodology and conclusions.
The second is that you share methodology, but not conclusions.
The third is that you do not share methodology, but you do share conclusions.
And the fourth is that you share neither methodology nor conclusions.
Now, the first two, I think, are somewhat illusory.
And what I mean by that is that if you share the methodology, the conclusions should be pretty much the same.
Right? Like, you don't take science, apply it to the question of the origin of the species, and come up with, you know, Zeus used to fire a breathing dragon, and the species adapted to environments through survival of the fittest evolutionary mechanisms.
Or, you know, that's probably not a great summation of the theory of evolution, but just so you...
You're not going to use science to come up with human beings, you know, were snapped into existence by an invisible sky ghost in the Garden of Eden until they were tempted by a talking snake.
Science isn't going to lead you there, right?
And there may be some differences in conclusions, right?
I mean, there's lots of Disagreement about certain aspects of quantum theory and superstring theory remains somewhat challenging for a lot of people to sort of get behind or to prove, you know, the number of dimensions it requires just seems kind of absurd and so on, right? But my knowledge of science is not nearly good enough to talk about this but any level of competence, so let's just say that there definitely are disagreements.
So there are those who share a methodology but do not share...
The same conclusions. But that is almost never the case when there is sufficient information.
Everybody who accepts the scientific method accepts the heliocentric model of the solar system, that the Earth goes around the Sun, the Sun goes around the Milky Way, and the Milky Way...
Orbit's Bounty or Mars or some other candy bar.
So when people have sufficient information and a sufficient methodology, they will arrive at the same conclusions.
No scientist or anybody who accepts science and thinks that the world is banana-shaped, right?
So when you have sufficient information and the same methodology, You will arrive at the same conclusion.
So, for instance, to take another example, sorry to beat the concept of death, but I want to get this out of the way.
If two mathematicians who are given the same equations and the same variables will work out the same results, You give two mathematicians 5 by 7, and they will come up with 35, both of them, right?
Now, if you say 5 by x, they won't be able to come up with anything other than 5x, right?
An algebraic shorthand. So, I think that aspect is important.
There is disagreement. When you share the same methodology, there is disagreement about conclusions, but only when there's insufficient information.
And while there is disagreement about conclusions, There is still no fundamental disagreement about methodology, so we don't know what happened right before the Big Bang or during the very early parts of the Big Bang.
We also... We don't know what is happening down at the subatomic, subquark level, but we do know that the answer is not to be found in the Bible, right?
We do know, like those who accept science, do know that the answer is not going to be found by praying Tahira, right?
So, when there's agreement on methodology...
Then there's really no disagreement on conclusions.
Now, that having been said, that really is only in the realm of objective science and reason, empiricism.
So, for instance, there are lots of people who have a methodology, a sad number of people, who have a methodology for, quote, discovering truth that goes something along the lines of, let's pray.
It's written in a book somewhere, some ancient text.
And those people have the same, quote, methodology, but of course I would argue that that's not a methodology at all.
And so if the methodology is, I'm going to consult my inner sky ghost for the answer, since there is no external god, people are just asking themselves, that isn't really a methodology.
It's not a methodology to say, the answer will be found in my dream tonight.
And your dream too, right?
They have different dreams. It's not really a methodology.
So those people don't come up with any conclusions that are particularly similar.
And of course the only way you end up with organized madness in this way is through the institutionalization and the propaganda of children, right?
I.e., religion.
So, where there is agreement in rational and empirical methodology, then you get agreement in conclusions, unless there's significantly insufficient information.
Then you get interpretations that all attempt to explain the facts to varying degrees of success and preference, and there remains a sort of chaos aspect to it until one theory emerges that is better able to explain or predict the facts.
So that's agreement and methodology, disagreement and conclusions, agreement and methodology, agreement and conclusions.
Now, when people disagree in methodology, they may still agree in conclusions, right?
So, if we take the word kill to mean murder, one of the Ten Commandments, other than not coveting your neighbor's wife's ass or something, is that...
Thou shalt not kill, and that is a conclusion.
And UPB and lots of other ethical approaches, methodologies, and theories, in fact, just about all of them, would say, thou shalt not kill, right?
Or in the UPB formula, any ethical theory that advocates killing is logically inconsistent and therefore wrong.
So, whether you frame it as thou shalt not kill, and kill is to find us the initiation of force which resulted in the death of another, Not in initiation, meaning not in self-defense.
Then, yeah, UPB and lots of other ethical theories and the Bible all come up with, Thou shalt not kill.
But in the absence of methodology, there frankly can't be any real agreement in conclusions.
In the absence of a consistent methodology, there can't really be any consistency in conclusions.
Right, so if you imagine, you know, an airplane, its hangar cracks, and a box full of dots falls out of the sky, and somebody has left in a junk heap a...
A dart board, right? And one of the darts falling down from the plane, one of the darts lands bullseye on the dart board, and we say, wow, that pilot's really good at darts, right?
That wouldn't make any sense, right?
Because he's not really good at darts because it's accidental where the dart landed.
And so when we have a conclusion, you know, somebody who puts, you know, from a decent distance, who puts a dart into a bullseye is really good at darts.
Well, the pilot has made perhaps the longest dart throw in history and has hit a bullseye, but we would not say that the pilot is good at darts because it's accidental, right?
It doesn't have any meaningful content.
And so, an assertion such as, thou shalt not kill, has no philosophical content whatsoever.
Now, the fact that I might agree with that conclusion doesn't mean that I agree with...
A statement written down is true because it is a statement written down.
Or a statement written down is true because an invisible being that can never be detected told me so.
Or something like that, right?
So, I don't have any agreement with the statement, thou shalt not kill.
Because it has no truth content to it.
It is a mere assertion.
And any truth value which it contains could only be brought by some external source, right?
Some philosophical source, right?
So, if Darwin's grandfather said, hey, I believe in evolution because God tells me it's correct, well, that would not be any kind of proof for evolution, right? Because there would be no truth content in such a statement.
It would merely be a statement, you know, like the wind blows the sand dunes into the shape of E equals mc squared.
You don't sort of chase down the wind and give it a PhD in physics, right?
So, where there's not the same...
Methodology, there really can't be any agreements and conclusions, because when the methodology is God says so, that's not a methodology at all.
Or the Pope says so if you're a Catholic, right?
That's not a methodology at all.
But merely a statement.
And as a statement, it has no truth content, even if it happens to sort of accidentally conform with the truth that would come out of a valid truth content, right?
The million monkeys typing do not equal Shakespeare, right?
So, it's important that where there is no agreement in methodology, there really can be no agreement in conclusions.
And this is not to sort of return to where we started.
This is not to say that the conclusions that religious people come to about certain aspects of economics are invalid because they are Christians, right?
I mean, that to me would not be reasonable.
So, a gentleman on the board, when I was saying that my problem with libertarian Christians is not their libertarianism, fundamentally, but the superstition, right?
The religiosity. Because, you know, talking snakes and sky ghosts and Jewish zombies and so on, it just seems like too silly to...
You know, there's nothing that's, in a way, and I know some people think this about me, right?
But there's nothing worse for a rigorous discipline than for a crazy person to really like it.
And again, I'm not saying all Christians are crazy, right?
But I mean, to say I reject evolution and believe in talking snakes and I'm a libertarian, for most people, they don't think, hey, you know, two out of three irrationalities, but the third one's really great, right?
People just say, well... This guy believes a lot of crazy stuff, right?
Talking snakes, no evolution, and libertarianism, right?
Bad money drives out good, and irrational beliefs drive out irrational beliefs in most people's minds, right?
But for those...
Libertarians who are religious and who, you know, come to valid conclusions about, you know, fiat money is bad, the government shouldn't control the money supply, initiation of force is wrong.
And they have used philosophical principles, right, reason and evidence, in order to Establish.
To reason, prove, establish, and support these conclusions, then those conclusions, to my way of thinking, and I think reasonably so, are valid conclusions, because the methodology has been Has been valid, right?
I mean, if somebody says, we shouldn't have fiat money because Exodus 12.7 rails against it, well, that's not a valid methodology, right?
But if somebody says, well, we shouldn't have fiat money because it relies on the initiation of force and It says counterfeiting is both a virtue and a vice.
It's a virtue if the state does it and vice if private citizens do it.
There is no such thing as the state.
We have opposing rules. It's irrational.
But, you know, those kinds of arguments, then that's great, right?
But that's because they're not bringing, you know, gods, ghosts, and gremlins into the equation, right?
So, somebody on the board was complaining, like when I said, well, I have a problem with the superstition of religious people.
I Somebody on the board was saying, well, but you quoted from Thomas Wood's book Meltdown in a recent video and recommended the book to people, and that to me is...
it's not relevant.
I mean, it's not relevant because...
You know, my dentist can be a good dentist even if he's a statist.
He's just not a good philosopher if he's a statist.
And I think that, at least I would hope, that Christian libertarians would not consider themselves philosophers any more than I would consider myself a dentist, right? I mean, they are theists and libertarians, not philosophers, in my opinion.
A little bit more than my opinion, right?
Because you can't have a big fundamental metaphysics, epistemological opposition within your mind where you have to make reasoned arguments according to evidence in the realm of economics and politics, but in the realm of existence and consciousness, you can have...
I believe that goes entirely against reason and evidence, such as, you know, consciousness without matter and, you know, eternity without having come into existence and all that kind of stuff, all the stuff, the square circle stuff that is deities, right?
Because you don't...
I mean, you don't have that luxury when you're a philosopher.
You can have that luxury of being cluster gangly frack wrong in particular areas like theology and right in areas such as fiat currency.
And if you're not a philosopher, you can get away with it, right?
But if you are a philosopher...
Then you don't have the luxury of allowing yourself to believe nonsense.
So, a mathematician who believes in God, but does not use any theology to support his mathematical arguments, but instead uses logic, is great.
You know? Because God doesn't come into it, therefore...
It's not, it doesn't automatically enter into the realm of magic, right?
I mean, would you really hire an engineer who said, oh, I don't know if this, I know this bridge will stand up because God told me, but won't show you any math and in fact wants to build it out of soap bubbles?
Don't worry, God assured me this is going to stay up, right?
Well, you'd say, no, I kind of need to see the math there, buddy, right?
And it's the same thing, right?
So if somebody shows you the math and has built a great, designed a great bridge and Tensile strength and all that works out beautifully.
He's using the right materials. And the fact that he's going to pray to God for the bridge to stay up doesn't really mean anything.
So, to the degree with which people are willing to show their reason and evidence for their arguments, fantastic.
And the question of God doesn't enter into it.
Now, unfortunately, or I would say fortunately, fundamentally, As a philosopher, I don't have access to magic spells, right?
I don't have access to the two great magic spells of mainstream libertarianism, right?
The magic spell book called The Constitution and the magic spell book called The Bible.
I don't have access. To those things.
So I can't say, well, this is virtuous or right or ethical or good or true because God says so.
Or, while it's really hard to figure out how to prove rights and property and how to get things enforced without the magic spell called, let's get back to the spellbook tome of the Constitution.
I don't have these magic pieces of paper to wave around.
As conclusions to really difficult problems.
Now, with all due humility, I hope, I will say that I did wave a magic spellbook around, although there's much less magic in it, a magic spellbook around for quite some time called Objectivism.
And objectivism, I think, is a lot closer to the truth, and I have no particular quibbles at all with objectivism in terms of metaphysics and epistemology.
It's really only in ethics and, of course, in politics that I differ from the great goddess Rand, and I don't mean that even.
Slightly satirically, the woman was a goddess to me.
Anyway, it's too masculine, the Christian religion.
I prefer worshipping the horse Russian chiclets.
So, I had this magic spell book, and it turned out to me that it was not satisfactory, and so I began to Work on a theory of ethics that I hope transcends magic to miracles.
We'll see. It seems to be holding up all right, but we'll see how that goes.
But I just can't do it.
I simply can't do it and call myself a philosopher.
There is no corner of reserved magic.
Here a miracle occurs and out pops the truth.
There are no miracles in philosophy.
There's no magic in philosophy.
There is nothing that you can assume in philosophy.
And there's no pockets of personal, biased, bigoted preference that you can hang on to in opposition to reason and evidence.
I mean, the moment you do that, you're not a philosopher anymore.
You're just some guy with some opinions, right?
I mean, if you don't do science, you're not a scientist.
If you go submit a paper to a biological society and a society of biologists and say, well, I want to talk about the classification of orcs as revealed to me by Sauron and Morgoth, the lord god of the Silmarillion, they're going to say, thanks, but that's not really what we do, right?
So, the moment you stop doing science, you're not a scientist.
The moment you stop doing reason and evidence, you're not a philosopher.
I mean, you can be an economist and work with supply and demand and sales law and all these other kinds of wonderful things.
But the moment you bring God into economics, it's no longer economics.
It's just nonsense. It's magic.
And the moment you bring God into ethics and politics and science, it all just gets swamped down by a bunch of nonsense.
So, to me, recent evidence, recent arguments, is all that counts.
It's all that counts. And if people show their work, and it's got reason and evidence, then great.
That's a valid approach, and that's great.
That's a philosophical approach.
But the moment they abandon that, two things happen, right?
In every realm that they abandon it in, it just becomes an opinion.
It doesn't matter whether it was written in ancient Hebrew 5,000 years ago, it just becomes an old, rather throat-goggling-spoken opinion.
And the second thing that I get about somebody who veers off from reason and evidence to bias or a bigoted opinion in one way or another and doesn't notice the difference is that reason and evidence is not a consistent value for them, right? And that's an important thing for me to know about someone, right?
Someone says, well, here's, you know, my recent argument and evidence for Proposition A, and then Proposition B is true because God told me, then all I know is that they don't have reason and evidence as a consistent value.
That for them, reason and evidence and the revelation of an imaginary sky friend, some, you know, ghost above the cumulus, that they're both equally valid.
In other words, they have an incredibly contradictory approach to truth.
And don't seem to be particularly aware of the complete opposition and scalding difference between these two things, or these two, quote, approaches.
Right, one of which is an approach, the other is just a bigoted assertion.
This is because God acts, right?
Now, when somebody has these two opposing approaches,...approaches in his mind and doesn't really seem to notice the difference between them, then that's a real problem, in my opinion. Because they have these two opposing opinions, or these two opposing methodologies, or one which is a methodology, and one which is not a methodology at all.
And then making no attempt to resolve this contradiction.
So we've got reason and evidence plus God says so, which is the complete opposite of reason and evidence, since God is the complete opposite of reason and evidence.
So, on one hand, reason and evidence.
On the other hand, God said so. And if somebody doesn't notice this contradiction, it just means to me that I have to be really careful around what this person says, because they don't have a consistent methodology for dealing with something like the truth.
I mean, if you don't have that, you have to be really careful, right?
I mean, I might be friends with some guy, or I might hang with some guy who occasionally, that's not a great way of putting it, but let's just say you didn't have a moral problem with this, and you had some friend who just occasionally hauled off and punched someone.
I mean, it's not like maybe once every two months he just hauled off and punched someone.
And let's say you had no problem with this.
Well, he still wouldn't be a very, you know, yeah, most of the time he's not punching people, but still would be not a very relaxing person to be around, right?
And it's the same thing when people could be rational a whole bunch of times, and then they get to this place where it's like, and God says so, so they hold off and punch reason and evidence in the face, and not noticed it.
Well, yeah, okay, you're probably pretty safe, and a lot of the time they're not doing that, but still, they're not quite as relaxing as somebody who doesn't.
Punch reason and evidence in the face, even irregularly.
So that's sort of my perspective.
I will absolutely take the expertise of people who leave God out of particular arguments, and that to me is great.
I have no particular issue.
Now, the moment they bring God in and don't seem to notice...
Then they are, like, exactly the same to me as people who say, well, I don't know what the ethics of this are, but I want something done.
And so, well, that's part of the law.
Well, that's just magic, right? That's just using the magic of books and guns to get things done rather than reasoning from first principles.
I don't trust those particular people, right, to be very reliable.
And I always have to keep my eyes peeled for when the crazy comes in.
And I, of course, prefer to spend my time around people with whom the crazy doesn't really come in.
So that's my particular perspective on it.
I hope that that's helpful or at least somewhat interesting to you.
▲
Export Selection