In reading my last post I noticed I made a subtle but fatal error. I said that atheists and skeptics have an epistemological apparatus that can apprehend supernatural things. While I think this is true it is only acceptable—according to the state of philosophy as I know it—if the actor is a supernaturalist to begin with. So the acceptability of Hebrew/Middle-Eastern epistemology rests on the acceptance of the supernatural.
I’m of the mind that the existence of this apparatus is acceptable by skeptics as well, because it seems necessary to make any propositions about the supernatural at all, not just the properties of supernatural things that theists propose. To illustrate this, think of the apparatus like we do eyes. Atheists “see” darkness and call it such, theists “see” something illuminated in front of them and can form propositions about it*, but both actors need eyes and functioning vision to make these determinations, else “darkness” or “I see something” are incoherencies.
I’m not very formally educated in philosophy and I don’t know if this has been proposed at all. The idea needs a huge huge huge huge amount of exploration and frameworking in order to make it an acceptable proposition regardless of what religious framework we believe in.
So, someone should do that.
Photo by withassociates.
*Please ignore the unfair comparison between atheism/darkness and religious belief/enlightenment in this analogy.
2 Comments
Because my own brain isn’t willing to take it on at the moment, I’ll just say something silly like, aren’t you talking about the Third Eye? I did wonder about that statement from your last blog post, though I don’t think it’s a fatal error. If you’re talking in the realm of philosophy, you can accept it for the sake of argument, or ask that your readers accept it. If they don’t, they won’t accept a supernatural epistemology, anyway [that is, an epistemology that is informed by a supernatural force].
Something like the third eye, yeah. Every religion seems to have their own version of it. In Christianity it’s Aquinas and Calvin’s sensus divinatis. Even atheism/humanism have a general “human spirit” or an unseen evolutionary force that drives us to apprehend the world/ourselves, like maybe Nietzche’s “will to power”.
I was going to say that nihilists would categorically deny having any kind of sense like that, but how can they propose that everything is meaningless unless they can somehow detect that meaninglessness? Isn’t that meaningful in itself?
The closest I can think of is complete agnosticism, where we can’t say if we know or not-bringing the uncertainty down another level, in a way. But, like I said, even though it seems that the apparatus is everywhere, to convince some people it exists requires a lot more steps, because on its face it could be self-contradictory.