Apologia, pt. 2

Continuing...

Behind all our thinking lies a great many things taken for granted about reality. It's fairly easy to make a list of them: simply ask, "What would have to be true in order for me to know ____?" The list gets fairly long pretty quickly.

I'm only going to focus on some of the big ones not only for brevity's sake, but also because without these the smaller issues don't matter.

As we've gone around and around...and around in this thread, facts, evidence, logic, and science keep coming up. Now, I am all for the use of these things. Without them, none of us could live our lives. But in even bringing up something like "logic" we've made a whole lot of assumptions about the world and how it works.

First, we've assumed the existence of non-material universal laws. Laws of logic, math, and science do not exist physically. You can't hold them in your hand, or place them under a microscope. They have no material form. Yet we believe that they really exist--we have discovered rather than invented them. Further, we believe that they are universal. They apply across the board, everywhere. And they would have to. Otherwise, we would have no way to communicate with one another or to understand our surroundings. So here are two assumptions: the existence of immaterial abstractions and that there is universality in the natural realm.

Besides the universe being, well, universal, we also assume it to be predictable, meaning that these universals will be true tomorrow in the same way that they are true today. We believe that the future will behave like the past. We take this for granted because there is no way to know the future; we can only predict it based upon our past experiences. But "tomorrow's another day." One just assumes with a large amount of certainty that it will behave like yesterday, because it always has.

We also assume the real existence of both universals and particulars. Besides the big categories (such as "humans") we believe in particular facts ("Scott"). Philosophers call this the "one and the many." We can meaningfully refer to "the universe" and at the same time meaningfully refer to particular facts contained within it. We take for granted the equal ultimacy of the one and many. If only the one were ultimate, then our distinctions would be meaningless. There would be no real facts. If only the many were ultimate, then we could not connect one fact to another in any meaningful way. There would be no real categories.

These fundamental assumptions on our part must be absolute in order for our reasoning to be anything other than arbitrary gibberish going on in our minds. If they are not concrete, then we do not know reality as it is, and if we do not know reality as it is, then there is nothing to debate. None of us can know anything about anything.