What Will Be Daniel Peterson's White Crow?

[Philo Sofee]

Please explain DCP, how the Laffertys aren't the "white crow" to your delusional witnesses, showing how unreliable witnesses to the fantastical can be.

Every time he is backed into a corner this surfaces.

Simply put, epistemic distance can be taken to mean as a distance in knowledge or awareness. In this religious hypothesis, the world would remain “religiously ambiguous”, that is, there is no conclusive evidence for or against the existence of God. People are left with a choice.

Agreed, but the Lafferty's seriously are the most powerful refutation of the Mormon use of the Holy Ghost to gain a testimony that is directly relevant today as we live and breath. It is simply damning, end of story, perfect proof that Mormonism as it teaches the members, actually don't have a clue about how the Holy Ghost teaches truth or testifies of it. The Lafferty's are miles ahead of all other witnesses combined as proof of the danger of the brainwash.

[Doctor Scratch]

Indeed--quite the opposite of the approach that the Mopologists usually take. And your contrasting of James with Amberts is instructive. While DCP, Midgley, and others want to act as if they "enjoy" the intellectual company of writers like William James, C.S. Lewis, and so on, the truth is that, at heart, they are a lot more like Amberts--which is to say, intellectual crackpots and charlatans. That's why it has always struck me as ironic and hypocritical that they have such loathing for Rodney Meldrum and Jonathan Neville and others like them: it's like they're looking in a mirror but they fail to recognize themselves.

The Mopologist disdain of Heartlanders is a perfect example of Freud's narcissism of petty differences, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't them taking a chance to relive the days when their opponents were the likes of James White and J.P. Holding.

I think that's a good point, though with White, Holding, et al., there wasn't the possibility of excommunication or apostasy, and the Mopologists have always been very sensitive about accusations that their behavior is causing people to leave the Church. Then again, they were pretty open about their desire to get John Dehlin kicked out of the Church, though he's quite a bit different from Meldrum & Co.

[bill4long]

Starting with (i) and (ii), it will be fairly hard to express materialism and naturalism as a single universal proposition. Even a cursory glance at the usual scholarly reference works will show that in reality, the terms represent clusters of propositions that are heavily qualified. To make matters even more complicated, there are different conceptions of materialism and naturalism that are mutually exclusive. This means there are different interpretations of materialism and naturalism that themselves represent clusters of various qualified propositions. How does one squeeze all of that into a single universal proposition?

And the introduction Quantum Physics doesn't make it any easier. Is the wave function real? (Depends on the interpretations. Copenhagen says yes, Multiworld says no) If yes, is the wave function "material?"

And is consciousness, the thing had is suppose to be having the NDE experience, "material?"

And so on.

It seems to me the term material has outlived its usefulness. There is one Reality, in all it's ontological glory.

Naturalism isn't much better, because one can always brazen it out to mean, nature is "whatever exists", the "root ontology", including whatever "God" may exist. "Supernatural" used to mean stuff like "ghosts", "spirits" and "fairies", and so forth. But this was before people had clear ideas about those things could be, ontologically, if they existed. There doesn't seem to be a meaningful demarcation these days between "nature" and "supernature." Even if our universe were a virtual reality that is generated by some unknown process, our virtual reality is still within the confines of a Single Ontology. There may be a lot of epiphenomenally dependent levels within the Single Ontology, but at the end of the day, It's All One. Enough of my ramblings.

[Physics Guy]

A single counter-example can disprove something, yes. My point is that a single account of a counter-example is not a counter-example. There are lots of ways by which someone can tell a believable story that isn't actually true.

This is a frequent issue in science. Dramatic experimental disproofs of basic theories have been reported, but often the experiment has turned out to have been wrong. Something was inadequately controlled or inaccurately measured and the reported results were just false. That can easily happen even in labs where everyone tried so hard and has such a good track record that the false result was quite believable. This is why reproducibility, rather than believability, is the standard in experimental science. And if the stakes are high, one wants to have the contradictory results reproduced with substantially different experimental methods, not just in different labs, in case a whole commonly accepted method turns out to have some previously unsuspected flaw.

(There was a famous case of a certain meta-stable superfluid phase of Helium-3, which was found in many experiments around the world to be far less stable than predicted theoretically. Eventually someone suggested repeating the experiments far enough underground to provide adequate shielding from cosmic rays. Bingo: observations in a lab set up deep in a mine matched the theory very well. Tony Leggett got a share of the Nobel prize in large part for the cosmic ray idea.)

Sometimes the experiment is quite correct but the error is in thinking that the observation contradicted the theory. People look more closely at exactly what the experiment really involves, and exactly what the theory really predicts for that case, and discover that there is no contradiction after all.

It's not a game, where it's a simple and immediate call as to whether the ball was over the plate or across the line. It's the real world, where lots of things can go wrong at any stage—including all the stages between the first believable account of a contradiction and confirming that the contradiction is really there.

[Dr Exiled]

Please explain DCP, how the Laffertys aren't the "white crow" to your delusional witnesses, showing how unreliable witnesses to the fantastical can be.

Every time he is backed into a corner this surfaces.

Simply put, epistemic distance can be taken to mean as a distance in knowledge or awareness. In this religious hypothesis, the world would remain “religiously ambiguous”, that is, there is no conclusive evidence for or against the existence of God. People are left with a choice.

I choose to believe nonsense? Anyway, a tie is the best that they can ever hope for given the utter lack of positive proof. That we cannot falsify opinion about the invisible, I guess, means that there is some status to the argument in support of the invisible? I dunno, seems like Pascale should wager on non-belief in this.

[Kishkumen]

And the introduction Quantum Physics doesn't make it any easier. Is the wave function real? (Depends on the interpretations. Copenhagen says yes, Multiworld says no) If yes, is the wave function "material?"

And is consciousness, the thing had is suppose to be having the NDE experience, "material?"

And so on.

It seems to me the term material has outlived its usefulness. There is one Reality, in all it's ontological glory.

Naturalism isn't much better, because one can always brazen it out to mean, nature is "whatever exists", the "root ontology", including whatever "God" may exist. "Supernatural" used to mean stuff like "ghosts", "spirits" and "fairies", and so forth. But this was before people had clear ideas about those things could be, ontologically, if they existed. There doesn't seem to be a meaningful demarcation these days between "nature" and "supernature." Even if our universe were a virtual reality that is generated by some unknown process, our virtual reality is still within the confines of a Single Ontology. There may be a lot of epiphenomenally dependent levels within the Single Ontology, but at the end of the day, It's All One. Enough of my ramblings.

Great stuff, B4L.

[Kishkumen]

The positive task of the philosopher is to fecundate his analytical skills with dreams, and to discipline his dreams with analysis. I cannot provide him with a manual of rules and regulations governing this activity. There are no rules and regulations for being reasonable, and certainly no rules and regulations for dreaming reasonable dreams. In philosophy, as perhaps in everything else, one communicates best his deepest dreams by enacting them.

The Limits of Analysis by Stanley Rosen, Yale University Press, 1980, p.260

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been on a bit of a Stanley Rosen kick and I’ve methodically been going through his studies on the Continental and Analytic traditions of philosophy. His writing is superb and because the man was exceedingly well read, Rosen can deftly make his way through difficult texts with such acumen and grace that I feel like I’m reading familiar philosophers for the first time again.

Thanks for starting this thread, Stak. So often your threads are an insight into a possible path of education we could go down with you, if we but took the time and had the resources. I appreciate you introducing me to new (to me) ideas.

[Rivendale]

Every time he is backed into a corner this surfaces.

I choose to believe nonsense? Anyway, a tie is the best that they can ever hope for given the utter lack of positive proof. That we cannot falsify opinion about the invisible, I guess, means that there is some status to the argument in support of the invisible? I dunno, seems like Pascale should wager on non-belief in this.

I don't believe a tie is possible at this point. The odds are not 50 50. For every claim that is set forth by the believer it rarely if ever passes critical analysis. Especially in Mormonism. The odds that Joseph practiced polygamy in order to build eternal dynasties are not 50/50. The odds that Joseph had plates that had an ancient language engraved on them are not 50/50. The only thing that is beyond odds making is personally revelation. An unmeasurable unverifiable phenomena but still could be true.