Flourishing versus Religious Epistemology
and the Problem of Objectivity
by
Eric Paul Nolte
The claim I heard today is that, had the Muslims in Gaza simply carved out a small piece of land and spent all the money they received on cultivating the land and engaging in peaceful trade (instead of blowing it all on terrorism) they would be among the wealthiest and most productive people on earth.
Now, the creation of wealth takes vastly more than merely a decision not to blow your neighbors to Kingdom come, but they have a little point here.
And isn't it funny ... so counter-intuitive! -- how firing crude rockets into city centers, and dressing one's precious children in bomb vests and sending them out to board city busses and blow up random civilians ... isn't is odd how these pious actions do not swell one's material coffers? Huh! Go figure!
Echoing Golda Meier's wisdom on the matter, obviously these Islamist lunatics hate Jews more than they love their own lives, or even the lives of their children. They do not want to live in peace, they want the Jews dead.
Contrary to the deplorable bias in the western press, the destruction in Gaza will not stop if the Jews lay down their arms.
If the Muslims were to lay down their arms, there would be peace. Period.
But if the Jews lay down their arms, there would be a mass slaughter of Jews. Instantly.
Peace will result only when the Muslims decide to live and let live, which anybody who has read the Quran must know is a policy contrary to Sharia law.
The degree to which a Muslim's beliefs are consistent with the Quran and the Hadith is the degree to which he is willing to kill the infidels.
This conclusion is not a baseless accusation of fanaticism, it is a matter of logic: if you believe that the Quran is the word of God who, in their view, is the very same God of Abraham worshiped by Jews and Christians; if you believe that the very essence of Goodness is submission to the will of God (and every Muslim knows that "Islam," the very word itself, means submission, submission to the will of God); if you believe these ideas, then God must be obeyed. So, when God, speaking on page after page in the Quran, commands Muslims to kill the infidels, then the Muslim is obviously acting against against God Himself ... if he does not comply with this injunction to kill the infidels.
The degree to which a Muslim does not take his holy text quite so seriously is the degree to which he may be willing to live and let live ... and this is exactly as it is with Christians, namely, that the Christian who does not comply with the Bible's injunctions to kill unbelievers and homosexuals does so contrary to his religious authorities.
These religious injunctions are claims to knowledge. Their adherents believe these tenets are true, meaning that these claims to truth are aligned with the facts of reality. They believe that the ideas are the revealed word of God and must be obeyed under threat of terrible penalties. How does one know these ideas are true? Because they're in The Book of Truth, whichever holy text the believers feel like they want to call their sacred text of truth.
I grant that the Sufis and most of the Muslims I have ever known seem to be perfectly willing to live in peace.
The Sufis' beliefs are also rooted in holy texts. They believe the words are true.
But the call to violence is indeed in the holy texts too, so how can the Sufis simply deny that these calls to kill infidels are to be disobeyed? They have, ah, yes, auxiliary holy books, or maybe more liberal, poetic interpretations of the texts. How do they know these are true? Faith. What's wrong with that?
* * *
What's wrong with faith? Everybody has faith in various things, no?
There is a deadly equivocation going on here because of the wide variation in meaning of the word faith.
Here is one denotation of faith: when you say you have faith in your orthopedist to slice open your leg, saw off the ball of your femur, scrape out the socket of your pelvis, and replace the whole ruined mess with a nice, new hip made of titanium and ceramics, what do you mean by faith? You mean to say that you have confidence in a system of which you have at least enough knowledge and experience to conclude that it is trustworthy. You most likely do not understand every detail of the process, but this lack of comprehensive knowledge is not the same thing as a mystical belief without logical support.
By contrast, when someone says he believes in Orks, or gods, or unicorns, everybody knows these beliefs are rooted in faith. But this denotation of faith is a fundamentally different kind of belief than one's confidence in a surgeon. Here, faith denotes a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence. This is what religious faith means.
One deep source of trouble here is that the word faith has so many meanings: the idea of belief itself, trust, confidence, alliance, obligation, and so forth. There are so many other important concepts too which, like faith, each have a myriad of denotations, and this blur of confusion makes it difficult for us to understand each other clearly. Too often we do not talk with each other clearly. We talk at each other, or past each other, while gazing out uncomprehendingly, or glowering at each other.
The reason that faith is such an important concept here is because faith claims to be a path to knowledge. So what? Why does this matter? Because knowledge is what makes a properly human survival and flourishing possible. Knowledge, the kind of comprehensive knowledge that allows human beings to achieve lives that are at a more exalted level than the Hobbesian level of life as brutish, nasty, and short, is not something we are born with. There are instincts, to be sure, but there is no comprehensive, innate knowledge that is sufficient to guide human action. This kind of life-serving knowledge must be discovered, accumulated, protected, and treasured.
The means by which such life-serving knowledge is discovered is reason, observation, and logic applied to the evidence of experience. Knowledge thus acquired and defended is part of a rational epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and acquisition of true knowledge.
Faith, religious faith, belief in the truth of a proposition without proof or evidence, has no place in a rational epistemology. I'll go further than this: I say religious faith is a big obstacle to the acquisition of true knowledge. Why?
Faith is an obstacle to knowledge because belief in things without proof is nothing more than feeling, emotion. And what's wrong with this?
Well, what are feelings? Feelings are automatic, psychosomatic manifestations of the ideas we already hold to be true or false, right or wrong.
Our emotions well up in response to our encounters with life situations, and function like the warning lights of an airplane's flight deck, automatically illuminating to draw the pilot's attention to any potentially life-threatening changes in parameters such as the temperatures and pressures of the machine's vital systems. The warning lights draw our attention and confirm our already existing beliefs, such as that an engine's high oil temperature and low oil pressure signify an impending failure. Such warning lights do not provide us with instruction that allows us to acquire knowledge of a subject that is new to us.
In the same way, emotions draw our attention to something on the basis of things we already believe.
These beliefs may be correct or insane, but the emotion as such cannot examine or revisit the subject for deeper or fresh examination.
We can allow ourselves to believe anything we like, but believing doesn't make it true. We can believe that the proper function of a gas turbine engine requires operation within certain limits of temperatures and pressures. We may believe that we can fly by telekinesis, levitating like transcendental meditators in the Siddhis program claim to be able to do. We may believe that truth can be found only by reading the revealed word of God as found in some holy book. We can believe that logic is the method by which we can begin to unravel truth from nonsense.
So when our feelings about anything are aroused in the course of a day, they reveal nothing more than what we already believe.
Feelings therefore can never be a door into a room of new knowledge. Faith is a feeling. Faith is therefore not an alternative epistemological tactic for the discovery of what is true or right. Far from it!--faith is a roadblock to new knowledge, especially if we believe that faith truly gives us such new knowledge! It's like saying you believe that a heavy steel shoulder vest is a life preserver, and so you jump overboard, expecting the vest to float and save your life!
* * *
One can't blame Islam for all the violence in the middle east. The calls to violence are also in the Bible, and history's oceans of blood spilled in the name of God is evidence for the truth of this claim. And Christianity is no better than Islam, as measured by the depth of the ocean of blood spilled in its name. But today there is a huge difference between the two.
The main difference between Islam and Christianity in this respect is that the Christians underwent a bloody reformation about 500 years ago, followed a century later by the Thirty Years War, during all of which something like a third of the population of Europe was murdered by Protestants fighting Catholics, good Christians all, killing men, women, and children, all in the name of God.
Thoughtful Christians, looking at the resulting slaughterhouse of Europe, decided to stop treating a difference of opinion as an unforgivable sin that needs to be punished by death.
No such reformation has yet shaken Islam to a point like the one that gave Europe its secular enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Of course, there was a bloody transformation in Islam, many centuries ago, in which the forces of Al Ghazali murdered the moderates like Ibn Rashd, thereby destroying, or least arresting, most of the amazing, mindful and scholarly Islamic achievements up to that point, and it was this blood-soaked ascendency of Al Ghazali's forces that has rendered Islam intellectually stuck in the 12th century CE.
So here is the crucial point to remember about Islam today:
There is no way that a culture of peace, productivity, and rational personal unfolding and flourishing will ever emerge in a culture that celebrates above all else self-renunciation and personal submission to the will of authorities, and, moreover, reviles above all else the spirit of inquiry, the critical mind, and the pursuit of personal flourishing. In this light, particularly given its huge number of worshipers, Islam may be the most profoundly destructive force on the planet today, and a dead end like no other...
... except perhaps for the destructive and asinine claims of those who assert that anthropogenic global climate change is the worst threat in the world today.
* * *
So here we shore up at a misanthropic, geo-centric, earth-worshipping environmentalism as another profoundly destructive religious epistemology. I call it religious because, while the discipline dresses itself in the robes of science, so many of its adherents are as credulous and naive as holy rollers at an Appalachian faith healing: they believe because they want it to be true. They may also be blinded because they allow their understandable awe and astonishment at the beauty of the earth to guide their politics, ignorant of the most basic concepts of economics, and heedless of any knowledge of good science.
I also call it religious because there are radical environmentalist leaders who have captured something like this religious crusading spirit of self-renunciation and submission to authorities who are purveying something the believers feel is beautiful and right. But the "science" of these radical leaders, in fact, is about as "settled" as that of the religious naifs who believe that religious Creationism is a "science" equivalent to the real science of evolution.
There is today a frightening assertion by leftist bullies that no one deserves so much as to be heard whose opinion on climate change disagrees with the alleged "97%" of scientists who believe that global warming is caused by man and must be controlled by, essentially, handing over to government regulators the control of most industrial activity. It is propaganda to say that 97% of scientists believe that man is the source of climate change, and government the solution, but even if it were true, it would not be the most important point here.
The absurd claim of leftists here is that consensus is the basis of science. What!? When was consensus ever the basis of scientific progress? Moreover, it is frightening to hear the tyrannical politics of those who claim that dissenters must be shouted down and forbidden to speak up!
The major paradigms of science proceed not by consensus but by a process in which tiny minorities appear with theories that are widely dismissed at first. The peer review process rightly attempts to find any grounds by which to dismiss the new ideas as false! This is the essence of Karl Popper's radical contribution to the philosophy of science, which is his response to the widely accepted belief that the problem of induction renders us unable to validate the truth of any proposition with 100 percent certainty. Popper argued that if we are unable to validate the truth of a proposition, we can achieve a measure of confidence in a claim to truth by attempting to falsify that idea. If we try our best to disprove a claim to truth, and fail to falsify it, this lends a measure of support to the likelihood that this proposition may be true.
In genuine science, it is crucially important to hear the dissenters, not to shout them down, and exclude them merely because they assert unpopular ideas.
You don't have to go back as far as Copernicus or Galileo to see that consensus is not the basis for good science. For example, in geology, plate tectonics was widely dismissed as recently as the 1950s, but is today seen as the most important concept in geology.
Anyone who claims that climate science is, or can be "settled" today is not likely to have so much as an elementary grasp of the nature of science itself.
There are many others who do have a grasp of the science, but are like Jacques Chirac, the former president of France, who simply have another agenda altogether, and therefore ignore what they know about science.
Addressing the terminal Kyoto conference a few years ago (at the Hague, I think it was) Chirac told the assembled worthies that the theory of anthropogenic global warming represented the very best hope that he and his like-minded friends have ever enjoyed for the possibility of instituting global governance for the purpose of achieving social justice.
This goal of social justice is a political agenda; it is not climate science at all.
Now look at some of these scientists from NASA and NOAA, James Hansen, Michael Mann, or Bill McKibben of 350.org, and the whole pack of fudging, data-altering liers at the University of East Anglia. These folks are mostly all card-carrying scientists, of course, but they appear to have been corrupted by something like a religion of misanthropic earth worship.
Incidentally, these folks are by no means the worst of the lot. Think of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, founder of deep ecology, inspiration to eco-terrorists, EarthFirst! and other loonies. Nevertheless, it is these folks and their like-minded followers who have captured the purse strings of academic science.
Think about the fact that it is now the misanthropes, this pack of human-hating environmentalist ideologues, who are now largely in control over who gets grant money to pursue which projects in science!
This is a development that I find not much less frightening than the situation with Trofim Lysenko in the former Soviet Union.
You may remember Lysenko as Stalin's science minister, who from the 1920s instituted a policy that resulted in the murderous suppression of both the evolutionary theory accepted in the west, and the Mendelian inheritance theory as well. This insanity went on for a quarter century after Lysenko's ideas were discredited by any knowledgeable observer outside the USSR. Lysenko and friends were evidently motivated by a social and political agenda that cared not at all about the actual science of the matter, so long as they could achieve their goals of social justice.
The corruption of an aspect of science for a political agenda ... can't happen here, can it? It's here now, comrades.
* * *
One of the key problems here, in all these cases taken from religion and pseudo-science, is the willingness of people to believe that knowledge itself is a matter that can be discovered by feelings independent of mind, or be "revealed" by a holy text in a way that trumps the light of observation, reason, and logic applied to the evidence of experience.
In the end, faith means simply believing what a person wants to believe. Where faith is said to be an alternative means of knowledge, where faith is said to a shortcut to knowledge, knowledge itself has been short-circuited (as Ayn Rand eloquently framed the matter.)
Trying to hold a conversation with those whose beliefs are rooted in faith is as effective as trying to persuade a hungry tiger not to eat you. You can't talk with the tiger. You can kill the tiger, or maybe escape from it, but you can't negotiate a deal to spare yourself, much less to make a trade of value-for-value to mutual advantage ... not with a dumb beast ... and not with a faithful ideologue who is deaf and blind to anything he does not already believe. He has lost his hearing in the echo chamber of confirmation bias.
* * *
Another crazy epistemology stacked against human flourishing is found in the sort of postmodern academic mainstream.
It is like is like trying to walk across quicksand when one tries to carry on a conversation with somebody who has a postmodern, cultural relativist and skeptic bent, and thereby believes that knowledge is entirely a product of arbitrary social convention dictated by the accident of one's birth into a particular tribe, race, class, and gender. These skeptics can never be pinned down to agree that any idea can ever be objective, or real, or genuinely outside the mind. You can't get anywhere with them, not because they are correct, but because they have rendered themselves deaf, blind, and I dare say stupid to any grounds on which one might hope to carry on a discussion.
Now, I have sorted my way through all these conundrums of knowledge, and many more besides, with the help of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I am persuaded that this is the best work on the problems of knowledge anywhere in the history of philosophy. In my view, Rand's work establishes the most comprehensive and rational discussion of the subject of knowledge and how to understand what is true or false. Her essay on "Faith and Force" highlights these matters of faith, of the hopelessness of faith as a claim to true knowledge, and especially for why the use of force becomes inevitable when rational discussion is rejected or impossible, as I mention in the passage above, on dealing with a tiger.
Alright, this whole sorry business of arguing with the postmodern skeptic is hopeless ... unless, as a first, humble starting point, you can draw a person's attention to some directly perceptible facts of reality, available to any of us at a glance, and agree that these facts are what they are, independent of the mind that grasps them, and see that the mind does not invent these percepts, it perceives them!
I am getting to intellectual bedrock here. This is the area of the axiomatic, the place where one can only point at those concepts that pertain to the most fundamental matters.
And there is a real doozy of problem which, as far as I am aware, no other philosophical stream has adequately addressed: namely the problem of validating some crucially important ideas that seem to defy proof as a result of the roadblock of circular reasoning. Let me defer this point for a moment.
Now, consider the dizzy problem that wells up when the skeptic tells you that we cannot know that anything is true. He then launches into an attack on all knowledge as consisting of arbitrary cultural conventions according to the ideas accepted by the various warring tribes of the world, and therefore everything is subjective, and even if it weren't, you, yourself, would never be in a position to know anything about anything as objectively true.
Whoa!--you might say. One thing at a time! And if you slow it down, here you can see that when the skeptic claims that we can't know anything is true, he is counting on the fact that he can indeed make a claim which he believes is true! He is implicitly counting on the validity of the concept of truth in order to make a claim that the idea of truth itself is invalid. Therefore his statement is contradictory, self-refuting bushwa. Ayn Rand calls this the fallacy of the stolen concept.
Similarly, when the skeptic claims that you cannot rightly know anything about the facts of reality, he is implicitly counting on his own ability to make a right assessment about the facts of reality. He is also counting on your sharing the language and the concepts by which you can understand him. Moreover, he is counting on your ability rightly to grasp these facts of reality, and even to agree with him!
The skeptic's cousin, down the hall in the physics department, will tell you that physics is incapable of studying the underlying stuff of reality because these facts are unavailable to human sense perception, and so the only thing left for physics to study is to put together mathematical descriptions of the appearances of reality. But he is thereby telling you, in effect, that there can be a speech without a speaker, and a dance without a dancer. Think about that!
There can never be a speech without one who speaks. There can never be a dance without a dancer. Every entity is what it is, and can only act in accordance with its nature. Things have different natures. Due to air resistance and inertia, a whiffle ball the same size as a baseball will not be driven as far as the baseball when it is struck by a baseball bat with same force and angle of deflection.
The skeptic could know that he himself exists because he could directly perceive himself. If he doesn't exist, who or what is claiming that there is nothing existing that can speak and dance? This is action without an actor. This is abstract existence in the absence of anything that actually exists. This is insanity!
As you can see, fundamentally, the skeptic refuses to be pinned down on the matter of existence as an embodied concept.
So you look the skeptic in the eye and you ask him, "Do you hear me? Do you see me here? Are you here now, do you experience yourself as being present and accounted for at this moment?"
''Sure!" he'll doubtlessly chirp.
"So," you continue, "unless you are in a coma, you are necessarily aware that you exist and that you know it. This idea is axiomatic and self-evident."
If he denies this point, the conversation is hopeless, he is hopeless, and you are wasting you time as surely as if you were trying to teach a schnauzer to sing a song of Schubert!
But you should know that now we have come to the bedrock of knowledge, and if the skeptic is intellectually honest and hangs in there, we also have the basis for further discussion.
You should really read Rand on this matter, but I can summarize it, on roller skates:
With respect to knowledge of anything, we begin with the ultimate nature of the universe.
What?--you demand incredulously. Who can know anything about the ultimate nature of the universe? I'm not sure that I really learned the ultimately best way to tie my shoes! So how can I know anything so ultimate?
Wait! Consider that, even though we cannot know everything about the universe, we can see some patterns that have held true for everything we have thus far grasped. It's pretty abstract, it's an inductive generalization, it proceeds in the face of the problem of induction and the problem of universals, but forget about these doubts for a moment and just listen:
Whatever the universe is, whatever its elements, it is what it is, independent of human consciousness. Consciousness grasps existence through sense perception. We can say, of whatever it is, it is so. Existence, whatever it may be, is what it is, not what we may wish, fear, or deny it is. What is, is, as Parmenides put it. Existence exists, as we get this idea by way of Aristotle and the radical expansion of it by Ayn Rand.
This is amazing material! This idea of the axioms of awareness is something that cuts through the insanity of postmodern skepticism and of all the faith-based claims to knowledge, and does so with the natural ease of leading children to their own birthday parties.
Ah, but the birthday parties offered here are to be held at the house of an atheist objectivist, and are offered to the children of religious conservatives and postmodern skeptics. Hmm. Don't think they're all likely to come.
Nevertheless, for anybody with ears to hear and a mind to think, I believe these foundational ideas are correct and easy to grasp, except that we are, most of us, tainted by backgrounds that are hostile, if not outrightly deaf to these ideas.
Nevertheless, let us proceed. In the marketplace of ideas, truth stands the best chance of winning over the false ideas, because truth has life-serving value, and the false does not. The false ultimately makes it impossible to steer correctly, and therefore tends to lead us into a ditch by the side of the road of life. Slavery was a vile evil, it was practiced everywhere in the world, and it came to an end because, apart from its appalling evil, it was rendered economically obsolete and utterly eclipsed by competition with free labor. It not only with reference to slavery that the truth will set us free!
Now here it is, short and sweet: a few axioms or axiomatic corollaries: existence, identity, consciousness, the primacy of existence, causality, and free will.
1. Existence.
Existence exists. Reality exists. Reality is what it is, whatever it is.
2. Identity:
A thing is what it is.
A is A. This is the Law of Identity
A thing cannot cannot be both A and non-A
at the same time and in the same respect.
This is the law of non-contradiction.
A thing must be either A or non-A.
This is the law of the excluded middle.
3. Consciousness
Awareness of reality through sense perception
There is something out there in the world of which I am aware.
4. Causality
The universe is made of entities. Every existent has a specific nature. Every existent is its nature. Entities can only act in accordance with their nature. Causality is the law of identity applied to action.
In addition to the axioms, we can point to at least two important corollaries:
Reality exists independent of one's own consciousness. This can be thought of as the primacy of existence, and the powerful antidote to Rene Descartes, who, searching for a basis for acquiring certain and unassailable knowledge, concluded, Cogito, ergo sum, meaning, "I think, therefore I am."
(By the way, Rand countered Descartes in a neat bow tie when she wrote, "I am, therefore I'll think." Reason is the tool of human survival, so, recognizing that one is requires one's commitment to think about how to survive.)
Descartes' is a perspective on the primacy of consciousness as the starting point for establishing the reliability or certainty of any knowledge. It is as if the mind creates reality, a perspective that was shortly to be taken up after Descartes with a vengeance by Immanuel Kant. Rand, building on Aristotle's earlier work, updates Aristotle and makes a strong case for the primacy of existence and the dependent role of consciousness in relation to the existence it perceives.
Finally, there is the axiomatic concept of free will: I can choose. And indeed, as a human being, you must choose. What can you choose? You can choose to think. You choose where to direct your attention. The choice to think or not is the essence of free will and the essence of being human.
Before I leave the matter, I should point out that the denial of free will by the determinists is as self-refuting as it is absurd. The determinist who argues against free will is making a case against the human ability to make choices. Yet he is implicitly counting on your ability to choose to listen to him, to choose to sort through the issues he presents, and then to choose to agree with him, or not! Absurd!
I could well move on from here, but the thoughtful reader, as I mentioned above, may be troubled by this matter of validating the axioms.
* * *
Validation of axioms as the key to avoiding the fallacy of circular reasoning:
Anyone who has studied logic will know that proof is a key concept here, as we wrestle with establishing the truth of these axioms of awareness, and we can see that, at first blush, it may appear to be impossible to avoid the fallacy of circular reasoning.
The fallacy of circular reasoning is also known by its Latin name, circulus in demonstrando, meaning to demonstrate a point by means of a circle, and is also sometimes known as "begging the question." It takes the logical form:
A is true because of B.
B is true because of A.
If this does not seem obviously ridiculous at first glance, try to flesh it out with particulars.
Consider what happens when we say, "Communism is bad because communism is bad."
We who condemn mass murder and tyranny may feel a twinge of approval for this statement, because we know from history that whenever socialism has gotten its hands on all the levers of power, it achieves not its intended heaven on earth, but a slaughterhouse hell on earth, but this statement about communism is nevertheless expressed in a form that is completely circular and fallacious.
When we say, "Freedom is good because freedom is good," we have committed exactly the same logical fallacy as in our condemnation of communism.
This idea may appeal to our liberal sentiments that cherish freedom and condemn tyranny, but the statement proves nothing. It repeats the claim itself as an argument for the truth of the claim it makes.
The essence of the matter is that we need to find a spot on which to stand so that we can evaluate a statement from a different perspective than the thing asserted. We need independent evidence.
When we get down to the very most fundamental statements one can make about the nature of existence, it all begins to look very circular, a little murky, and encouraging to the gloating skeptic.
You can't prove the epistemological primary of existence. An attempt to do so would be to employ the fallacy of circularity.
So now what?
Rand observes that, "an axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest."
And more: "Since axiomatic concepts refer to facts of reality and are not a matter of 'faith' or of man's arbitrary choice, there is a way to ascertain whether a given concept is axiomatic or not: one ascertains it by observing the fact that an axiomatic concept cannot be escaped, that it is implicit in all knowledge, that it has to be accepted and used even in the process of any attempt to deny it."
As Rand says, we perceive and grasp these axioms directly, so they are self-evident.
So, this idea of existence is axiomatic and is therefore validated by its self-evidence.
Notice this subtle but crucial point: an axiomatic idea cannot be proven, logically, because this case is so fundamental that a proof would require circular reasoning: in an effort to achieve proof, one would be appealing to the very concept that is to be proved.
Circular reasoning is incoherent and establishes nothing as true.
The axioms of awareness avoid this circularity because they are established not by proof per se, but by the validation of direct experience. You know they are true because you have only to open your eyes and experience this self-evidence.
Before studying Rand, I never came across this crucial point anywhere in my reading of the history of ideas: that formal proof is not the only means for establishing the truth of a statement (but, of course, like any student of philosophy, I came across a tsunami of writing on the idea that nobody can know anything at all apart from the subjective burbling of one's own mind, or of the collective delusions shared by human nature, and so forth.)
So here I learned that validation and proof are not synonymous, not at all the same concept.
Proof draws a conclusion about things already known by means of the laws of logic, logic being the process of non-contradictory identification. Proof treats an idea by means of statements or propositions in an argument.
Validation establishes relations between ideas and the facts of reality.
So proof is a subset of the concept of validation, but validation is not necessarily formal proof.
We establish the truth of the axioms by direct perception, not by a formal proof. We know they are true by pointing ostensively at the thing in question, and we grasp the thing by direct experience.
Ostensive definition applies to the small subset of concepts which cannot be defined and communicated by means of other concepts, namely, to sensations and these basic axioms of awareness. We draw the child's attention ostensively to various objects and thereby demonstrate the concept of "red," or whatever. The same applies to the concept of existence.
The axioms are validated by direct, self-evident experience.
In the end, objectivity is possible. We are not mired, blindly and hopelessly, in our subjective experience or by the ideas we get from our birth tribe.
The mind wrestles with perceptual judgment (such as with the puzzlements of optical illusions), but what we perceive is objectively real and out there, in the universe, independent of our minds, and we acquire knowledge of these things by the algorithms or procedures for establishing objectivity.
Objectivity begins with a recognition that reality exists separate from any individual's consciousness, and proceeds with the recognition that knowledge entails a correct grasp of the facts of reality, established by reason in accordance with the laws of logic.
* * *
Now, here is the reason that human flourishing is at odds with claims to knowledge that are rooted in faith, or faith-based epistemologies:
We are not born knowing what life demands of us. Our instincts are woefully inadequate as a guide to success at survival and flourishing. As humans, we have to discover the knowledge required for us to act efficaciously in the world.
One's personal flourishing depends on a correct knowledge of what to do in order to achieve our goals. Our success further depends on our individual effort, intelligence, and the expectation that we can personally benefit from our own work.
Peace in and among the lands depends on the freedom of all to trade with each other to mutual advantage, and to do so voluntarily, in a division of labor economy. All these features require individuals' rights to be protected, and this whole network of enterprise depends on our acquiring the knowledge to make it work in accordance with the true nature of the things involved.
This knowledge, on which every aspect of this network of enterprise depends, requires one's personal contact with reality in a way that is verifiable and communicable with other individuals. True knowledge must be based in observation and logic.
Any claims to knowledge that cannot be shown to be consistent with observable fact, or established by theory rooted ultimately in observation and logic, and tested against the context of everything else we have come to know as true, is ... bushwa, hogwash, nonsense... or at best a claim in need of revision.
Faith, meaning claims to knowledge without evidence or proof, and the mere desire for something to be true, lead to something worse than the mere absence of a base for knowledge--these religious-like epistemologies lead to a rationalization for the imposition of subjective political force. In a word: tyranny. Faith-based claims to knowledge, when they clash between people, lead us to the situation we encounter when we meet a tiger in a jungle clearing: we can't talk about our differences, so ideas justified by faith lead to inarticulate argument and violence, and this explains the seemingly irresistible tendency of faith-based leaders to veer towards tyranny.
Human flourishing is hardly possible without objective knowledge of what life demands of us. There are difficulties in establishing such objective knowledge, but these difficulties are not solved by the cognitive short circuits which are religious epistemology, the tenets of faith, or environmentalist Lysenkoism. These difficulties are solved by a rational epistemology.
Shalom, and bless us all, who would be mindful, respectful of everyone's rights, and champions of the unfolding of our talents for the purpose of our achieving peaceful, flourishing lives and happiness.
E P N
