Given a few years, however, listening to the advice given by co-workers, and listening to problems encountered (and solved) by customers, I ‘learned’ how to answer common questions.  I had never put in a p-drain myself, but I learned how to answer most questions a customer would ask!  Even more humorous, I had a co-worker who had almost no hand-on experience with anything we sold – yet nonetheless, she too learned to answer the common questions (often word-for-word what her co-workers had said the day before!).

I think this kind of learning is fine for what it is, but in various discussions I have, I often feel that others are (and I’m guilty of) operating with ‘knowledge’ they’ve gained from eavesdropping in this or that conversation or forum.  ”Ohh, Aristotle was such and such…”, and “yeah, science has shown that…” or “Democracy was designed so that…”

This is the Wikipedia/Google-based knowledge that informs so many pool-of-ignorance building conversations.  People that know just a weeee little bit about a whole lot of things, pretending to be experts at it all.  ”I remember seeing somewhere that…”

We… (cough) I… need to learn to just say, “I have no idea about that, to be honest.  Let’s both read up on it and get back to one another in [not 2 minutes, but...] a few weeks.”  Now that would just require far too much patience.

I’ve been recently intrigued, however, by a talk on Epistemology by Mark Strom (audio here) where he claims that all human knowledge involves not only acts of love, but also faith and hope.  I find this really compelling.  Our knowledge of any activity, person, principle or thing involves faith, hope and love – in some form, and at some level.

Scientific knowledge, for an interesting example, involves all three.  The natural scientist must first have faith (Greek pistis, meaning ‘trust’) that his object of study, the natural world, will, under the exact same conditions, always behave exactly the same way in the present and future as we’ve observed it to in the past.  She also hopes that the hunch followed will be fruitful, that the experiment designed will be sufficient, and that the knowledge gained will be helpful and worthwhile. And finally, there is also love – the relational dynamism between a subject and object; in the case of science, between the observer and the observed, the cosmologist and the cosmos, the neurologist and the neurons.

Faith, hope and love (I thought for a few minutes today), then can be thought of as the ‘vehicles’ by which knowledge comes to us.  However, this, I decided, is too anthropocentric a metaphor.  Better to see them as ‘lights’ by which we are enabled to ‘see’ Truth.  But of course, this vision remains imperfect, blurry and ‘dim’…

Love never ends. Prophecies? They will be set aside. Tongues? They will cease. Knowledge? It will be set aside. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 13:8-13

And it occurs to me that founding the faith on personal testimony instead of ‘evidence’ (i.e. “a monument, a DNA finding, a more meticulous Hebrew census-taking, etc.”) is more fitting of a God who wishes to be known to any and all persons and not only to archaeologists, geneticists, and historians.

My claim is this: It seems to me that atheism is characterised by a circular ontology – both quantitatively and qualitatively.

First, Atheistic Quantitative Ontology is circular in that it is self-referential. The arrow of logical explanation does not point beyond reality to an other, but turns back onto itself.  Ultimate explanation rests in nature itself and not in any other entity.  Reality as a whole (whether we call it nature, the universe or the multiverse) doesn’t need anything ‘else’ besides itself to be completely, fully and finally ‘explained’, and reality is self-caused, self-originating and self-ordered.  Sagan transposed the Judeo-Christian meaning of the name YHWH into a naturalistic key with the assertion “The universe is all that there is, all there ever was, and all that there ever will be.”  Self-existent reality is also self-explanatory.  The lid of reality is closed. ²

Second, Atheistic Qualitative Ontology (a la Wielenberg) is circular and self-referential in that it claims that basic moral value is self-explanatory, or to use langauge more proper to the field of ethics, that it needs no foundation (!!!).  Here’s some relevant excerpts from his article:

Objective morality, on this view, has no foundation external to itself. (p77, emphasis mine)

I propose, then, that objective morality rests on a foundation composed of brute ethical facts. Such ethical facts are foundational in at least two senses. First, they are ontologically foundational. By this, I mean that they have no explanation outside of themselves; no further facts make them true. Second, they are epistemologically foundational. By this, I mean that they can be known to be true in a direct way; they need not be inferred from other things that we know. (p79)

…moral properties (such as goodness) supervene or depend upon non-moral properties. Thus, if a given entity is good, it is good in virtue of or because of certain non-moral properties of that entity. Pleasure, for instance, is good because of the qualitative feel that pleasure has. Persons are valuable, and possess certain rights, because of certain capacities they have—for instance, the capacity to experience pain, and to reason. (p80)

The last quotation is particularly revealing of this qualitative ontological circularity. Pleasure is said to be ‘good’ (the most basic or foundational of qualitative, ontological judgments!) simply because of ‘the qualitative feel’ it has.  In other words, pleasure is good because it is pleasurable.  The foundation for the qualitative value is the qualitative judgment itself.  He expands on this later in the article, laying out this “brute ethical fact”:

Necessarily, any being that can reason, suffer, experience happiness, tell the difference between right and wrong, choose between right and wrong, and set goals for itself has certain rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and certain obligations, including the duty to refrain from rape (in typical circumstances).

Not only are ‘right and wrong’ (which the said being is meant to distinguish between!) undefined (which is the entire point of the wider discussion), but he also fails to explain why or how entities with ‘the capacity to experience pain, and to reason’ come to have ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’.

In summary of what became a longer post than intended:

• Atheistic Quantitative Ontology asserts that reality “just is”
• Atheistic Qualitative Ontology asserts that certain things are “just good”

1. I should say before going further that not all atheists argue for ‘objective’ morality.  Many happily admit that it is subjective.  Here I’m only interacting with those atheists who, like Wielenberg, argue for objective morality.
2. Humble atheists will acknowledge that because proving a negative is impossible, they cannot absolutely rule out a G(g)od, but they confidently assert that reality is fully ‘explained’ (‘or at least can be in principle’ some will say) without recourse to any kind of G(g)od.