Tag: alinguism

Fun Troll: Science Doesn’t Exist

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized1 Comment

As I’ve described more than a few times, one of the big problems that modern atheists have is that they are hyper-reductionists. They will not admit that composite entities are real. If a human body is made of atoms, they will not admit that a human being is anything more than atoms. They will of course use the word “human being” in the same way that normal people do, but they will balk at any implication of the word which they don’t like. Consistency is not their strong point.

And indeed consistency is so little their strong point that they are never hyper-reductionists elsewhere. I once joked about proposing alinguism (that language doesn’t exist, only words do). It would be even more fun, I think, to troll atheists with the proposal that Science doesn’t exist. Scientists do, of course, but not science. One could go all the way, asking where it is, how much it weighs, etc. I think the most fun would be to ask for a peer-reviewed scientific paper which describes the repeatable experiment that shows that science exists.

There isn’t really a point in this, because (in my experience) atheists never recognize their reasoning applied to anything but what they apply it to. I am coming to believe that the reason for this is that their reasoning is not in fact an attempt to understand the world. If it were, they would be interested in trying to apply it to the world. Instead, it’s mostly an attempt to get out of applying their putative beliefs to the world. That’s because their beliefs are primarily cultural. Belief is part of what unites people, and most atheists’ beliefs are held in that way—as a form of tribal identification. You can see some people hold beliefs about the best football team in a similar sort of way. It’s not that they’ve really analyzed all of the football teams in the league(s?), but that loudly espousing one team as being the best has a unitive function amongst fans. You see a similar sort of thing in religious observance, where many people like the community more than they care about the actual religion. In a possibly ironic way, this applies as much to irreligion as to religion.

And in consequence, much of what the irreligious say is not an attempt to think, but an attempt to avoid thinking. Like with those who are religious for purely social reasons, it’s not an admirable thing for a human being to do.

Good Morning December 21, 2016

On By Christopher LansdownIn Rambles, Uncategorized2 Comments

Good morning on this the twenty first day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I ran into this description of knowledge on twitter:

Which, in case twitter ever goes away, said, in reponse to my saying that you can tell which actions are good and which evil, “by all the normal methods of discovering how the world works”:

You mean my senses filtering information to my brain, which reasons and makes choices based on past experience?

Unless I’m badly misreading the guy, he’s gone full Hume. As the saying goes, never go full Hume. Oddly, he’s also one of the people who argued with me about alinguism. If knowledge is “knowledge” by which we mean anticipation of future sense experience by way of past associations of sense experience (that’s not Hume’s definition word-for-word, but it’s close enough), then “language” would indeed not mean anything. To some degree this is just a testimony of how little atheists think about what they or anyone else says.

I think that I may do a video on alinguism, issuing a challenge to atheists to provide evidence of language to me. If I do, I’ll have a section where I anticipate the most common “evidence” of “language” so I can get those out of the way. I may even have a section at the end where I give the game away and explain that the problem is that atheists fall back on hyper-reductionism, where no composite entities are real; only the indivisible elements out of which they are made is real, and since language is not an indivisible element, this hyper-reductionism doesn’t permit believing in language. What makes this work is that composite entities have a different mode of being than indivisible entities, and consequently a different sort of reality. Because these different sorts of reality can be distinguished, one can be denied while the other is affirmed. This is appalling nonsense, of course, since as human beings they are composite entities and to deny the reality of composite entities is to deny their own reality. And yet they continue to exist.

Oh well. Atheists will frequently say that their believing in morality while being an atheist proves that morality is in no way dependent on God. I have no idea what to do with a person who is not in the habit of thinking about what he himself says. Fortunately, we can pray for him.

God bless you.

Good Evening December 20, 2016

On By Christopher LansdownIn Rambles, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Good evening on this the twentieth day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I don’t have much because today my oldest son was recovering from a minor outpatient surgery he had yesterday. It went well, and he’s doing quite well—up and active—but he gets upset very easily in an atypical way that suggests that all is not normal. Which I wouldn’t expect it to be, it’s just in the category of appearances can be deceiving since he seems to be doing so well.

Yesterday on twitter I declared myself an alinguist. That is, someone who lacks a belief that language exists. Words exist, of course, but they’re brute facts and “language” is just a fiction that bronze-age people used to explain words. And since I don’t believe in language but communicate just fine, communicating with words is obviously not evidence of language. But if anyone has such evidence, I’d be glad to hear it. After which I will summarily dismiss it as not evidence, of course, since there cannot be evidence that language exists, but being willing to listen marks me out as being very virtuous. And just to make things clear, linguists don’t believe in Klingon or Sindarin, I just don’t believe in their language either.

And so forth. Sometimes one needs the emotional release afforded by parody. It’s not like any atheists will actually get it, of course, but on the other hand you never know when you’ve tilled the ground so that someone else can plant the seed that will one day turn into the tree that will bear fruit. And the inspiring incident was some twitter atheists showing up out of nowhere and saying stupid things at me with all the self-assurance that goes along with an impressive incompetence at the basics of logical thinking. Which is not in itself a justification for making fun of them, but on the other hand making fun of them may be a bitter medicine which helps them. Some of them are so bad at thinking that the only response which seems at all honest is to point out that they’re far too bad at thinking to be attempting thinking on serious issues, and should go back to the beginning. That sounds harsh, but where it’s true—and the people I’m talking about are incompetent at secular thinking, not just thinking on religious matters—anything else would be doing them the disservice of allowing their false notion of competence to go unchecked. Such people won’t learn from me, of course—I often recommend courses in logic at local community colleges for that reason—but they weren’t going to do that anyway. If a man has a clear compound fracture in his leg, but for some reason challenges you to a 5k, the thing to do is not to politely humor him and slow up so he’s not too far behind. The thing to do is your best to get him to a hospital. Now imagine if both his legs had multiple compound fractures, and there was a gaping wound in his left arm, and you saw him struggling mightily to lift a gun to his head because (due to loss of blood) he thought it was a fly swatter. Now just replace all those things which the epistemological beliefs of the average twitatheist, and you’ve got an idea how badly off these people are. Sportsmanship is for healthy people. Who are playing sports.

God bless you.