“But then there are also many people who would call me arrogant for being dismissive of René Descartes or dismissive of all of Christianity, which also has centuries of thought associated with it.”
Speak of the devil and he doth appear…
It’s never a real fight unless you’re being attacked from both sides!
Let me break down my critique of Descartes, then.
The ways in which people change over time, especially when the brain is damaged, and the findings of modern neuroscience and cognitive science are pretty much knockdown evidence against dualism.
Descartes was able to doubt his senses, but not able to properly doubt his own ability to use reason and logic. Insofar as you doubt your senses, you should similarly doubt your own capacity to reason; modern science tells us both of these things are processed by the brain and thus should be treated with a similar degree of skepticism.
As for the existence of God, it’s pretty obviously wrong as well; just about as obviously wrong as, say, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Russell’s teapot, or Scientology.
Our understanding of the physical world still can’t explain qualia, and just because we know the brain is involved in cognizance doesn’t mean it’s solely involved in cognizance.
Reason and logic are not sensations, so if one distrusts one’s senses it doesn’t immediately follow that one should distrust reason. Besides, belief in science is predicated on trust in one’s senses so your argument is circular.
Belief in a specific god is vastly different than the belief that there is a god of some sort. Also Russel’s teapot is useful as a counter to “but you can’t prove god doesn’t exist” arguments but not does nothing against arguments that X or Y provide evidence for the existence of a god, such as Aquinas’.
I think you are confusing belief or knowledge with certainty. I am highly confident that Descartes is wrong about these things, but that doesn’t mean that I am certain.
Agreed. But dualism likewise fails to explain qualia, and because it is no better in explanatory power it should be discarded on the basis of Occam’s razor.
If the mind is separate from the body, either there is some kind of causal interaction between the two and thus the mind should be able to be observed and detected by scientific means, or there is no such causal interaction and therefore philosophical zombies are a thing.
You’ve subtly moved the goalposts in your counter to me. My argument was not that you should necessarily distrust reason and logic (or mathematics), but rather that you should distrust your own ability to use them.
Does that necessarily follow from distrust of the senses? No. But even if you believe in dualism, why would you believe mind-stuff is able to reason properly? Why can’t it be like a buggy piece of code that sometimes gives incorrect answers?
As for circularity, I disagree here as well. I think that both reason and empiricism have a place, and that neither has primacy. When you view it in a probabilistic sense, it makes perfect sense to be skeptical of both your own senses and your own capacity for reason, and to seek to use each to independently verify the other.
If you are looking for some kind of license to trust yourself, I’m afraid that there is nothing that can give such a license to you. There is no way to ever really, truly know for sure that you are a sane person, and that your beliefs are reasonable. But you can still damned well try to move in that direction.
The capital-G God that Descartes and most other people refer to when they say the word “God” is quite different to the deistic gods people tend to offer arguments for; thus why I used the capitalized term in the first place.
As for arguments that purport to prove the existence of various kinds of gods, none of the ones I’ve heard hold water. If you really want to argue for any kind of god in this thread, feel free to provide evidence and I will respond to it.
I think that in many ways I’ve always been something of a situationist, although I guess I do believe in some exceptions along genetic lines, like the ones I posted above.
Either way, it’s all about the darkness that comes before. Forming more rational thinking patterns is a clear form of progress, but even in that regard I am merely lucky to have been intelligent enough to form them, and been exposed to an environment which was conducive to it.
Although I don’t really remember, there was a point in my life where I either was a Christian, or wanted to become one. The thought still upsets me, but at that point in time I was lucky enough to already be the type of person who really thinks about my beliefs, so I could never fully accept Christianity.
If I recall correctly, the main reasons I rejected it were that I could never quite buy the case that God was good despite his actions, nor the case that all humans are to some extent innately evil or “sinful”.