Follow Up

Trey Givens was kind enough to respond to my last post on Environmentalism and Epistemology.

With regard to this quotation from my post:
Finally, it is not the case that religion is "more obviously false" than environmentalism. The Primacy of Existence is implicit in every concept, but explicit knowledge of the PoE is conceptually advanced. Once you have knowledge of the PoE, it is easy to dismiss religion (or the supernatural of any variety). The non-cognitive status for the arbitrary is a corollary of the PoE once you recognize that the purpose of reason is to identify reality. Environmentalism violates the PoE the same way that religion does, by asking you to suspend reason and grant cognitive status to arbitrary claims.
Trey writes:
I'm a person with only a nominal amount of information about environmental science and what I know about things that affect the weather doesn't exclude the environmentalists' claims from being plausible given the evidence offered.
What challenges their claim is the fact that the evidence they've offered has so frequently turned out to be false or misapplied to the question, but it is not the case that they don't attempt to offer some relevant information to the question.
This is very much unlike religionists' claims about the supernatural, which by its nature is beyond consideration, examination, and even definition.


I agree with Trey that within the context of his knowledge, religion is more obviously irrational than environmentalism. Trey has explicit knowledge of the Primacy of Existence, and so the mere fact that something is considered to be "supernatural" is enough of a reason for Trey to dismiss the claim. However, although the PoE is axiomatic, and axioms are by definition self-evident, explicit integrated knowledge of the PoE is not automatic. So, for many people, that something is supernatural is not reason enough unto itself to dismiss a claim. I don't think that most people have a clear idea even of what is meant by "supernatural." Many, I believe, simply think of it as "as of yet unexplained phenomena," which carries with it the implication that explanations are plausible. Such people would not say that God's existence is impossible, but neither would they characterize God as "the Magic Man in the Sky," the way that I do.

Trey further writes:
Certainly the environmentalists do want us to resort to faith when it comes to their claims, but they've at least been sneaky enough to obscure this fact by offering up facts and figures about this and that.

Religionists are doing exactly the same thing for the same reason. Their "intelligent design" theory is a pseudo-scientific veneer applied to supernaturalism. However irrational the theory, to the mind that thinks of "supernatural" as meaning simply "as of yet unexplained phenomena," there is nothing in intelligent design that is inherently contradictory. The reason that it is so clearly ridiculous to Trey and me is because we grasp the PoE.

So I contextually agree with Trey. If we are talking about how ridiculous one or the other will seem to somone on the surface, I think these rules apply:
In a layperson's context, neither environmentalism nor religion is necessarily be obviously invalid.
In Trey's context, since he grasp's the PoE, religion is obviously irrational, but environmentalism is not since it has the veneer of science.
In my context, since I grasp the PoE and have discovered that environmentalism isn't backed up by any science, both environmentalism and religion are equally ridiculous to me.

Epistemologically speaking, however, judged on their own merits, religion and environmentalism share the same underlying error in that neither is cognitively related to reality. That's what I meant when I said that one is not more ridiculous than the other.