Posted by:
tomriskas
(
)
Date: April 29, 2013 06:56PM
Dale,
Perhaps this isn't the appropriate thread to take this subject further, but I'll share this in reply in answer to your concern about "how 'real' will be considered thereafter."
Essentially, as I see it, your guide will be the context in which the words "real" or "reality" are used in the text.
E.g. the sentence "This is a real problem" uses the word "real" as a descriptive modifier of the word "problem". As such we know we're not dealing with "real" in the context of "reality." The text of the sentence provides the context in which to derive a sense of what the term "real" means, as it is used in this sentence.
However, the statement "God and Jesus Christ are real beings" presents an entirely different context for the word "real." From the text we take this sentence as an allegedly "true" proposition or statement of "fact" that could be re-constructed as the statement "It is true that God and Jesus Christ literally (really) exist as beings." The stated "fact" in this staement is the "that clause" "that God and Jesus Christ literally exist."
In the latter example the use of the word "real" is intended by the speaker or writer to convey that it is a Truth, independent of language or what we can prove or disprove, that God and Jesus Christ are real, i.e. that they are are, a priori, "factual realities."
It is this second use of the concept of reality, and corresponding use of the words "real" and "reality" that constitutes the "problem of reality" I point to in Chapter 1.
What Nielsen and other notable thinkers such as Quine, Putnam, Davidson, Rorty, Sellars, Goodman, etc argue, and what I as well have embraced as the basis of my a priori Atheism, is the anti-"Realist" view that opposes the "Meta-Physical Realism" embraced by those philosophers, theologians and religionists, including naturalist theologians and believers, who are still intellectually stuck in the Platonic, Cartesian and Kantian traditions, i.e those classic philosophical traditions which have been roundly discredited and dismissed as being incoherent given the advancements of science and the philosophy of science.
The anti-Realist position, which is, again, the one I embrace in the book in my analytical deconstruction of Mormonism, simply holds that "reality" is a social construct; a construct we as humans create through language on the basis of our observations of, and interactions with, the physical, materialist world and universe we inhabit as products of it.
This view does not deny that are many "real" (material, physical) objects and phenomena in the world and universe.
What it does reject as incoherent is the worldview or belief that the "reality" we construct with our use of language actually corresponds to the world and universe as they really are, or to any alleged "reality in them, or transcendent to them. While we can and do certainly have sensory experiences in connection with such objects and phenomena (e.g. you biting down on a rock), the truth remains that we cannot know anything about reality, or even about our experiences with what is real (i.e. exists) without the use of language.
In the end, all we can reasonably (and coherently) aspire to is the best, provisionally justified beliefs or knowledge about the world and universe we can get, given the fact of human fallibilism. Such provisional, justified knowledge is the only reality (not "Reality") we can know, and the only truth (not "Truth") we can get about the world and the universe.
For us to obtain such justified knowledge, the statements or assertions we make about what we consider to be real (or reality) must, a priori, be justifiable, at least in principle. For this to be so, they must be intelligible (literally understandable) and coherent (not self-contradictory) with specifiable truth-conditions that can, in principle at least, be confirmed or disconfirmed.
If this a priori condition cannot be met, in say the statement that "God exists," where the term 'God' as a referring expression requires a specific reference range of intelligible, coherent and factually meaningful primary, secondary and relational attributes unique to it, then such an assertion would be considered factually vacuous, and such an alleged existent ('God') would necessarily be deemed a factual non-reality.
This is how we determine whether or not alleged undefinable, meaning-transcendent, spatio-temporally and biologically transcendent and unverifiable existents (i.e. gods, spirits, intelligences) are "real" or not. It's all in the language, not in alleged language transcendent or ineffible experience.
Common sense should lead us to acknowledge that we cannot know anything true (i.e. justified) about what actually and specifically exists, including what we experience or think and believe exists, without language.
If this is so, and I think it is, then, as I write in my Foundational preface to the book, if there is a problem with Mormon or other forms of theistic 'God-talk' (and there is, to be sure!), then there is a serious problem indeed (and there is, to be sure!).
Hope this helps.
T