“Truth claims arrived at from pure reason, intuition (redundant, I know), and revelation are epiphenomena of a species-specific pathos; they are radically contingent, pure cacophony produced by methodological noise.”
Why is it that, decades after logical positivism has been killed by its own incoherence, we still have so many ignorami like JA and Derbyshire mindlessly advocating it?
A few fun facts:
A) If pure reason is not a guide to truth, which implies that reason is fundamentally flawed, then neither are empirically-derived beliefs filtered through our reason (ie science) a guide to truth.
B) Mathematics is an application of pure reason (ie, intuition). Mathematical truths are arrived at and confirmed/disconfirmed by reason. They are not contingent and subject to empirical proof/disproof. If pure reason is a “species-specific pathos”, then so is the entire field of math.
C) The claim that “Truth claims arrived at from pure reason” are all “pure cacophony” is itself a statement of pure reason (or lack thereof in this case). We can’t actually measure, touch, see, etc truth claims. We can only evaluate them using – you guessed it – our reason.
D) And for that matter, truth itself is only known by pure intuition. Truth is “invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument” – all the reasons that Derbyshire gave for supposing that God doesn’t exist. Perhaps Derbyshire would respond to this by saying that truth is just something we “thought up and found useful” as he did above. And then, completely oblivious to the irony, perhaps he would accuse someone else of being a “relativist”, as is his wont.
But, let’s not be too hard on these guys. If I were this bad at logical reasoning, I’d probably want to diminish it too.
