is evil essential or realist?

[Metacrock]

I wasn't really thinking of that second sense.

OK, I guess I got triggered on your use of the word reduction. Still, reduction does have a well established technical meaning and I think the word you're aiming at is impoverishment.

yes but it fits a sort of generic sense.

[Metacrock]

I wasn't really thinking of that second sense.

OK, I guess I got triggered on your use of the word reduction. Still, reduction does have a well established technical meaning and I think the word you're aiming at is impoverishment.

yes but it fits a sort of generic sense.

[Jim B.]

I wasn't really thinking of that second sense.

OK, I guess I got triggered on your use of the word reduction. Still, reduction does have a well established technical meaning and I think the word you're aiming at is impoverishment.

Here's the wiki article, admittedly not the most authoritative source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

It reads that under one expression of reductionism, religion can be deemed to be 'nothing but' an evolutionary adaptation, which is what I was saying that the ep guy was claiming. It has no necessary relation to physics. This is John Searle's definition:

(T)he basic intuition that underlies the concept seems to be the concept that certain kinds of things are nothing but other sorts of things. Rductionism, then, leads to a peculiar form of the identity relation that we might as well call the "nothing-but" relation: in general, A's can be reduced to B's iff A's are nothing but B's.

He then goes on to outline various kinds of reductionism: ontological, property/otological, theoretical, logical or definitional, and causal.

What's the technical meaning you refer to?

[Magritte]

I wasn't really thinking of that second sense.

OK, I guess I got triggered on your use of the word reduction. Still, reduction does have a well established technical meaning and I think the word you're aiming at is impoverishment.

Here's the wiki article, admittedly not the most authoritative source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

It reads that under one expression of reductionism, religion can be deemed to be 'nothing but' an evolutionary adaptation, which is what I was saying that the ep guy was claiming. It has no necessary relation to physics. This is John Searle's definition:

(T)he basic intuition that underlies the concept seems to be the concept that certain kinds of things are nothing but other sorts of things. Rductionism, then, leads to a peculiar form of the identity relation that we might as well call the "nothing-but" relation: in general, A's can be reduced to B's iff A's are nothing but B's.

He then goes on to outline various kinds of reductionism: ontological, property/otological, theoretical, logical or definitional, and causal.

What's the technical meaning you refer to?

I'm thinking of the idea that everything can be successively reduced to a "lower level" one until you bottom out at physics. This diagram from a recent article at Scientia Salon captures it:



But I agree, you don't need to go all the way "down the stack" for something to qualify as reduction. Certainly, saying religion is "nothing but" an evolutionary adaptation would qualify.

However as a secular humanist, when I say I don't think there's a God, I'm not saying that religion is nothing but ev psych, or neuroscience, or whatever. I'm saying that there's nothing that corresponds to the conception of God.

[Jim B.]

Got ya! I never thought of you that way anyway. A lot of theists assume that all atheists are reductionists and that they subscribe to some form of scientism. You're clearly an exception to this picture.

When you say that there's nothing that corresponds to the conception of God, I'm wondering which conception you mean.

[Metacrock]

Got ya! I never thought of you that way anyway. A lot of theists assume that all atheists are reductionists and that they subscribe to some form of scientism. You're clearly an exception to this picture.

When you say that there's nothing that corresponds to the conception of God, I'm wondering which conception you mean.

idn't see him that way either. I did at one time but he has proven otherwise. yet answers to certain questions coulde imly6 such positions even if the adherents don't realize.

[Magritte]

Got ya! I never thought of you that way anyway. A lot of theists assume that all atheists are reductionists and that they subscribe to some form of scientism. You're clearly an exception to this picture.

When you say that there's nothing that corresponds to the conception of God, I'm wondering which conception you mean.

Yahweh (and derivatives) is what I have in mind.

[Magritte]

yet answers to certain questions coulde imly6 such positions even if the adherents don't realize.

Meta, I hope you don't think I'm putting you on the spot by asking you to expand on that. Which answers to which questions imply reductionism?

[Jim B.]

Yahweh (and derivatives) is what I have in mind.

Why would that be "the" conception of God?

[Magritte]

Yahweh (and derivatives) is what I have in mind.

Why would that be "the" conception of God?

It's the one that's faced the most critical inquiry and defense. It's the one that's relevant on this board, I think. If you want to ask, "is there some vaguely defined perhaps even yet-to-be-conceived entity to which we might apply the label God", I think the proper response to that is ignosticism. I don't think ignosticism necessarily applies to Yahweh-and-derivatives because He's usually sufficiently well defined to discuss - though there can be an awful lot of backpedaling and evasiveness.

(note that when I refer to ignosticism, I just mean the stance that "there's nothing to talk about here" and not anything more specific)