“a belief” or “one’s belief” works perfectly well for me.
The person who is considering the belief should be critically assessing the basis for that belief. I am assessing their ability to objectively look at what is driving their beliefs.
Sure, why don’t we examine belief in Creationism. That is, God created the Earth, and made specific choices about the design of plants and animals. A person with such a belief would presumably rely on data. Here is a “data” point, an argument made in support of creationism, it’s a short video. I apologize in advance if your IQ suffers as a result of watching it.
Would you suggest that this man’s observations count as data supporting a belief in creationism? He obviously thinks it’s very clever to point out the positive characteristics of the banana as proof of God’s work, but is missing out on two things. First, there are thousands of other fruits out there which bear no resemblance to a banana and have none of the advantages he mentions, second much of the banana’s design was selected for by Man, there are other types of bananas without such advantages that we don’t bother to farm.
To restate my claim: Data that is irrelevant, invalid and/or wrongly interpreted is not an acceptable basis for justifying your belief.
Yes, because it it less likely that all of a “mountain” of evidence is wrong than it is likely that a molehill of evidence is all wrong.
That the majority of humanity is insane; outright delusional. Because that’s what religion is - a delusion. Not just being wrong, but a denial of reality. It’s just an aggressive and politically powerful form of insanity, so most people pretend that believing in and talking to invisible people is perfectly reasonable as long as the invisible person is labeled a god, even though the way religious people act would be (and is) labeled crazy if it was aimed towards, say, fairies or aliens.
Because it IS evidence. Those religious accounts, which are mutually & logically contradictory as well as unsupported, and claim to violate physical law, and have a history of being relentlessly wrong aren’t evidence, they are in fact evidence that religion isn’t true. That in fact the vast majority of religious beliefs cannot be true. That “evidence” just demonstrates that the vast majority of religions must be false, and there’s no reason to think that any of them are true.
If your everyday experience is breeding dogs or other animal husbandry, or gardening, it’s easily confirmed by everyday experience. For thousands of years now we’ve deliberately induced modification through descent and untold numbers of people have firmly believed in it and achieved it. Believing that natural selection does not also alter descendants is basically making the logic error “nothing happens when I’m not around, because I am the universe.” If Farmer Bob culls his white calves and gets fewer every generation, he’s an idiot for thinking that wolves culling white calves (possibly because they’re easier to spot) is NOT changing the breed.
Yeah, I saw that a few years ago. Maybe I’m still suffering the deleterious effects!
Yes, I think it is self-evident that his observations support a belief in creationism. There are lots of claims that support that belief. (Although few as silly as this one.)
But that’s not the point. The point is whether the support from that data (along with support from other data) is sufficient to offset an alternative explanation. The banana argument is insufficient, not because it is silly. (Is it a self-parody?). It is insufficient because it fails to take into account the two missing points that you identified, and I’m pretty sure that the “banana man” doesn’t have a counterargument to those points.
In other words:
Someone presents an argument.
Someone else either accepts the argument or rejects it.
It the two participants want to debate the issue, it’s up to them. If only one of them wants to participate, the other one is under no obiligation to participate. There can be some negative consequences to not participating but there can be some offsetting benefits.
I don’t think that I am agreeing with you on this:
And I think it’s because I definitely don’t agree with this:
I object to your use of the word “should” and I am questioning your reasons for “assessing their ability”. If you have a problem with something that someone says or does then do whatever you think you need to do to deal with the problem. But how are *you *justifying your beliefs about what someone “should” do and how are *you *justifying the actions that you take in response to the expression of someone’s beliefs?
BTW, I’m not really expecting detailed answers to those questions. Just food for thought.
Seems more like an argument in favor of Intelligent Design. :dubious:
It seems that you’ve missed a key point about evolution: It doesn’t have a direction or a purpose.
And, better to avoid calling Farmer Bob an idiot. Plant and animal domestication has been around for millennia, but it wasn’t until about 150 years that natural selection was introduced. Not all farmers who preceeded that introduction were idiots and yet not one of them came up with the idea. (Well, actually, there was a guy in Central Africa about 4,000 years ago who first came up with the idea but he got killed trying to get an elephant out of a tree. First recipient of the Darwin award. We didn’t hear anything about it until years later …)
You’re wrong. Just because I didn’t discuss direction doesn’t mean I missed it, it means I didn’t want to type the entire body of scientific thought, so I stuck to one point. And natural selection wasn’t introduced suddenly 150 years ago; that’s just when it was discussed…maybe it was simply when someone bothered to write down all his thoughts, unlike me.
And whether Farmer Bob is an idiot depends on whether he thinks only he affects animals and plants. We’d have to wait for him to weigh in before we decide.
I kind of hate the watchmaker argument. Watches are every bit as evolved as they are designed. It’s not like some dude looked at a sundial, had an a-ha moment, and built a Patek Philippe right out of the gate. Even Harrison had four vastly different ultimate chronometers. Watchmakers build on the work that their predecessors had done, tinkering with improvements.
Watchmaking is an excellent example of evolution, IMO.
Airplanes, too. An F-22 Raptor is more than a slight improvement over the machine that Orville and Wilbur built.
It’s not really evolution, though. An F-22 is stuffed with things that were largely developed outside the field of aviation, like semiconductors, composite structural materials and glass, and so on.
Living creatures don’t evolve new bits because other creatures have them, but the F-22 has thrust vectoring because the MiG-29 did.
Well no, it’s not REALLY evolution. Changes were made out of design decisions, not random mutations. But the idea of “Try everything, keep what works” is pretty strongly there.
If I get divorced and send a Child Support check of $0.00, can I say I send support? Point is, support isn’t about sending a check, it’s the value of the money. Support for a belief isn’t just a collection of words, it’s the value of the idea that the words convey. I agree with you conceptually that if you have alternate explanations, you compare the relative value of the arguments.
However, I don’t like the idea that inherently valueless arguments get accorded respect in a discussion. They are a waste of time, and do nothing to advance our society, in fact they hold us back. See Vaccines & Autism for proof of that
I’ll also point out the following:
“You cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.”
Come up with a counterargument for Support #1 (the banana), they can dream up #2#3 and #4 in an instant because they don’t actually have to back themselves up with experiments or logic, but their opponent does.
Actually I think I do understand your posts. It’s just that there’s not much content in them. You seem to feel that you’re saying something if you ask questions.
Personally, I always thought the other Greeks should have called Socrates on his bullshit.
I can tell you that semiconductors evolve also, in this sense at least. It is all natural selection and descent with modifications. Each subsequent generation (children) are somewhat different from their parents, and compete with other designs for prominence. And, just like evolution, non-optimal accidents get incorporated in the genome and propagated to subsequent generations. This was very evident in the Intel x86 instruction set for quite a long time, and in DLLs in Windows.
Value depends on what someone perceives the value to be. Collectibles is a good example. How much is a 5 cent stamp worth, or a $1 bill, or a baseball card, or an autograph, or a painting or … you get it, right? The two guys in the video thought their argument had value, and I’m sure that other people thought it had value. I don’t think it has value but then I don’t collect Pez dispensers either.
Then don’t spend time on them, and do something that advances our society. Seriously, what else do you want me to say?
That point can apply to anyone, including you and me.
Sorry, I don’t know what you are addressing here. I guess you just want me to say: Damn those creationists! :eek:
Well, of course, you’re entitled to your opinions.
So, you’re going to walk away thinking that I know nothing about science and I’m going to think that you know nothing about the philosophical underpinnings of science. (My questions to you about the philosophy of science were not Socratic, but you still chose to ignore them.)
Anyway, good luck on your endeavors, scientific or otherwise.
I haven’t read through the thread, so I apologize if this has been covered, but if not, something to consider:
It would be extreeeeeemely difficult to create a biological system that did not evolve. I would say it’s almost bordering on impossible. When you combine self-replicating life forms with a control system based on the type of stuff we are made of, you get an imperfect system that will naturally change over time.
So, I guess if we lived in a world in which evolution did not happen*, and we were still made of the same type of stuff, then that could be an argument for a very powerful entity correcting the processes at every step to make sure there is no evolution.
Clearly in this world we do live in, there is zero doubt that organisms evolve, the facts are in plain sight and don’t require any interpretation, each organism is different than it’s parents
Since when does God have everything to do with the theory of evolution? The absence of A and the presence of B does not mean that if B were to disappear, A would appear. It’s not a see-saw.
Has any philosophical point ever been proven to be factually correct? Philosophy is about opinions and it’s useful in discussing issue that are based on opinions.
But science is completely about what can be stated with objective facts. So the tools of philosophy do not apply to it (and vice versa).
Trying to apply philosophy to science is like trying to mathematically prove a violin concerto.
