Familiar Fact or Fantastic Folly? On the Relativity of Strangeness (Part 1)

The notion of argument tends to have a bad connotation today, suggesting to many an image of red faced, outraged people with bulging eyes and flecks of spit flying from their snarling mouths. That is unfortunate since the verb "to argue" comes from a Latin root meaning "to make clear." And making your position clear to people you disagree with seems to me at least to be an eminently valuable exercise.

With that said, I now turn to one of the challenges of reasoning with my skeptical/atheistic readership. In short, many of them appear to be unable to see (or unwilling to concede) a point that I have stressed time and again: namely that the invocation of "strangeness" and the demand for explanation of something deemed strange is relative to one's background set of beliefs. To one person that which seems a fantastic folly is, to another, a familiar fact.

The problem is that the atheists that frequently post here complain about anything that is not a part of their worldview or experience set as strange, incredible folly, while laboring their level best to treat equivalently mysteries that they do accept as incontrovertible familiar facts. And I have been laboring to show that this is an inexcusable double standard.

One of my examples has been rational intuition and it has of late come up again. I have explained that rational intuition is not mere analytic knowledge. That is, it is not concerned simply with tautologies (the analysis of concepts). Rather, it provides a fundamentally mysterious insight into the nature of necessity. As such, those who accept rational intuition (as we all do) should seek an explanation of it before bleating for an explanation of sources of knowledge that they lack.

But the atheists are understandably not keen to admit this since recognizing the fantastic nature of how we intuit logical and mathematical necessity (which they accept) would call into question as arbitrary their rejection of other claims to knowledge (e.g. beliefs about God) as being intolerably fantastic.

As a result, they adopt a fallacious analysis of logical and mathematical truths as being analytic and thus tautological (an attempt to make it not so fantastic). For instance, AnAtheist.Net claims that 7+5=12 "is a conclusion that logically follows from the definitions of 7, +, and 5."

While AAN seems a bit confused here on the distinction between semantic and logical necessity, I will take him to be asserting that mathematical equations do not yield new knowledge but merely represent the analysis of concepts. In the same way that bachelor trivially means "unmarried male" so 7+5 trivially means 12.

But this is just wrong. One of the reasons that philosophers widely reject AAN's analytic analysis of mathematics is because 7+5 does not mean 12.

Consider if you understand the word "bachelor" then you know by definition that it means unmarried male. This is a matter of mere conceptual analysis.

But if you know 7+5 does it follow that you necessarily know this entails 12? Not at all. To make this clearer, consider a larger equation. We all understand the equation 585×876 but that understanding in and of itself does not entail the conclusion (512460). If mathematics were the mere unpacking of concepts it would be much easier than it is. But it is not the unpacking of concepts alone. It is also the discovery of new previously unknown truths, such that 585×876 equals 512460.

Incredibly, when we work out such equations, we can know with certainty that in all possible worlds 585×876 equals 512460. This is a new knowledge of necessity. But where does it come from? Not merely the analysis of socially constructed definitions. Rather, it comes from insight into the mathematical structure of reality which is as real as the physical structure of reality. (Read Fermat's Enigma for a fascinating analysis of such mathematical discovery. Indeed, I believe the mathematician to be an explorer of the abstract world as surely as Captain Cook explored the physical world.)

People who target beliefs about God as fantastical folly while never raising a critical eye to the mystery of rational intuition are thus being inexcusably arbitrary. As a result, they inadvertently demonstrate the relativity of strangeness.