Of future sensory experience. Do my expectations of what I WILL sense correlate with what I DO sense? If so, then the framework I used to produce those expectations can be considered provisionally valid.
I believe that George Washington was the first President of the United States. That belief sets up a wide variety of expectations of future experiences I will have. For example, if I pull out my wallet I expect to see Washington’s face on the dollar bill. If someone else’s face is on the dollar, and every place I look for evidence of Washington I find evidence of someone else instead … then eventually I’ll begin to question the framework of beliefs that produced those expectations. Maybe my belief that George Washington was the first President of the United States was actually a mistake, or prank, or a delusion.
But “truth” never enters into this process. I don’t believe that George Washington was the first President because that fact is TRUE, but because such a belief correlates with past experience and makes accurate predictions of future experience.
Actually quite simple. By the Peano Axioms 2 is S(S(0)) where S(0) is 1 and the successor function S can be written as +1. 2 is 1+1 because in a sense that is the definition of 2. If only God were so easy to define.
If by proof you mean legal proof these are easy to do. If by proof you mean mathematical or logical proof, then you are misusing the term.
Assertion made for which there is no evidence are probably not true.
We can thank Fox News for demonstrating that what newsreaders say can have very little relationship to what is factual. Crooked salesmen - perhaps a teeny bit more. Ministers - even less.
Another example of what ruined by Theory of Knowledge class - a couple of guys whose only remark was “you can’t prooooove it.” Sophmoric in both senses.
That’s not even true. What reviewers do is to check for plausibility, consistency and logic. It is not the reviewer’s job to try to discredit a paper. If the investigator says she implemented a program, say, and the results look plausible and the algorithm description looks reasonable, you do not check to see of there is code in the program to spit out the “right” results. Most people smart enough to cheat plausibly are smart enough not to have to, though there are exceptions.
We prove the results of science in a more subtle way. Though I’m closer to understanding semiconductors than most people here, modern circuit theory was developed long after I went to school, and I can hardly claim to be able to “prove” it in your distorted definition of the word. However the success we have in fabricating processors is proof enough. Ditto for nearly everything else. Hell, I don’t think I can prove that the code I wrote myself works in any meaningful sense, but it does work.
The proof of science is in testable predictions. Religions make none, or those that are made are falsified (like dates for the end of the world, like statements of history in the Bible.) That’s the difference between them.
Deism is unique in that it makes no testable predictions by definition.
Firstly, what **Novelty Bubble **said was “We are not then discussing existence in any meaningful sense”. You then “translated” that into an allegation that NB had said “[God’s] existence can not be discussed in any meaningful sense”.
And then you accuse **NB **of dishonesty.
**NB **is saying it is not existence in a meaningful sense, and you strawmanned **NB **by accusing him/her of saying that such existence cannot be discussed in a meaningful sense. There is a subtle but important difference.
Further, you then go on to an argument from authority (“no philosopher or logician etc…”) and its pissweak even by the standards of an argument from authority since you are appealing to an unnamed, uncited alleged consensus, rather than anyone or anything in particular.
It’s just sad is what it is: **Blake **you would never put up with this shit if someone pulled it on you in a debate concerning, say, anthropology. You would turn your usual sarcasm and scorn upon such pathetic and underhanded technique.
I think that little back and forth shows how tricky it can be to clarify even the simplest of points on this subject.
I also think it shows the automatic defensiveness (of both theists and non-theists) to having religious claims dismissed. It somehow seems wrong and rude, even when in any other area (politics, sport, art, music) any similar ad-hoc claim would be subject to the same dismissiveness and no-one would bat an eyelid.
Religious claims are different apparently, it is expected they are due respect just because they are religious.
Sorry, can’t oblige. If it is unsubstantiated (or poorly defined) it gets equal attention from me (i.e. none) no matter what the topic. I’ll nod and smile and say “that’s interesting” in order to grease the cogs of social interaction but I won’t take you seriously. Not until you decide to have your unsubstantiated and ill-define concepts materially affect me, then I’ll get very serious indeed.
And that’s the basis of my atheism as well. It isn’t scientific in that it is not the result of methodical, rational enquiry. It is just my childhood default that has yet to be persuaded otherwise.
A nit I must pick: we cannot choose to believe anything at all, belief is outside our control, that is the nature of it. The very most you could ever deliberately choose is to speak and behave as though you believe or do not believe in anything at all, be it God, leprechauns, or alien anal probes.
Which is why it amazes me when proselytizers ask me about my fears of suffering for failing to believe; if the God they believe exists really does, then there isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that their God understands perfectly well what they do not, that i am not capable of choosing to believe in Him, and it would therefore be completely perverse for him to hold me accountable for something I cannot control.
So if He does anyway, then He is an Asshole, and I am completely fine with not believing in Him: my unbelieving value system is clearly superior to His, He is obviously a petty narcissist who has absolute no basis upon which to hold Himself out to me as the authority on how live a moral life, but thanks anyway.
And I cannot adequately describe for you the delicious gobsmacked expressions I’ve enjoyed for years patiently and politely explaining this to Witnesses and missionaries. Priceless.
This becomes a kind of semantic issue. Because there are wildly varying strains of religious belief. Some people believe the Yowee/Christ stuff because it is de rigeur, basically just easier than not believing. Sometimes, the nominal believers can be convinced to disbelieve that (or whatever) stuff, at which point one might say they have made a decision about (or “chosen”) what to believe. As you get into the ranks of the more deeply indoctrinated, convincing them to not believe what they believe tends to become a more and more pointless exercise (in the 70s, we had these persons of questionable character called “deprogrammers” who specialized in breaking religious conditioning).
On the other hand, we have a fair abundance of threads on the subject of “free will” which might call into question the nature of making choices. I know the Xtian religions rely pretty heavily on “free will”, because if you cannot freely choose to believe or not believe in their thingy, the hell-for-infidels concept falls apart completely.
It isn’t “kind of” a semantic issue, it’s absolutely a semantic issue, and “semantic issues” are crucial to logic, argument, and well-developed critical thinking.
Semantics is the study of what words mean, and how can that not be important in trying to communicate with each other about anything, but especially things like religion and politics?
A perfect definition offered from Urban Dictionary:
So you made your statement and then went on to make no effort to demonstrate how my point was not valid. Instead, you just tossed the word “belief” around without any reference or acknowledgment of my point at all:
I’m sorry? I have no idea what this means. How can one belief be easier than another? All belief (assuming that it is sincere, because of course if it is not sincere, then it does not qualify as belief at all, it is just a lie you are telling to other people) is easy! Belief just is or isn’t, there’s no effort.
Semantics indeed: “convinced to disbelieve”?
I grant that it is difficult to discuss the nature of belief while avoiding the word belief itself, but it is necessary in order to be clear. To believe is to have a genuine opinion that a thing is true. To not believe is to genuinely not have the opinion that a thing is true.
A (sincere) Christian is convinced that the story of all-powerful being who created everything implanting Jesus in a virgin to grow up, perform miracles, experience suffering as a surrogate for every member of the human race and then be resurrected from death is a true story. (Or whatever version of Christianity they believe is true, I know there is much squabble about the details)
More of the same: it’s not a choice to believe or not believe. It is not a choice to hold an opinion sincerely. Your sincerely held opinions are what they are…
I have sincere, deeply held convictions that the following things are all absolutely true:
[ul]
[li]Men have walked on the moon. [/li][li]The Holocaust happened.[/li][li]Life on earth evolved from simpler to more complex forms, and all animals are connected.[/li][li]Human beings are animals.[/li][/ul]
I am convinced that all these things are true because of the evidence for their truth that I have been shown, and my logical assessment of that evidence. That is one of the most powerful ways my mind arrives at certainties about what is true. It isn’t the exclusive way, however. But my convictions and opinions about the truth of anything tend to be only as strongly held as the evidence and logic that back them up.
Other people arrive at their strong and sincerely held opinions and convictions about what is true based on other things.
It comes down to how individuals arrive at their sincere opinions about truth; atheists, especially the vocal ones, tend to be the kinds of people who require very specific kinds of very strong evidence before they find they are sincerely convinced that a thing is true. Theists tend to be the kinds of people who can hold strong convictions about the truth of something based on their emotional responses. (That’s not a diss, I think emotional responses can be very accurate and important indicators of whether something is true; just not to the exclusion of all else.)
I repeat: the sincere opinion that something is true or not isn’t a choice. If my own life and the lives of everyone I ever loved hung in the balance, I still would not be able to “choose” to have the sincere opinion that the moonwalk was a hoax. If I was offered powerful evidence that made sense to me, my mind would take it in and might get there as a direct result, but that isn’t choice, it’s a natural result of new information causing my mind to sincerely see things differently, which isn’t a choice.
Bullshit. We are supposedly an intelligent species with free will, we choose the level of evidence we need to believe in things.
Some people accept the words of the guy in the robes standing on the altar, quoting words from a 1500+ year old book written by persons unknown, relaying stories about events that may or may not have happened, involving people who may or may not have existed, as absolute truth. Not only do they want to believe that, they want our country’s public policies to be based on their absolute truth.
Frankly, my son who literally believes that a Jolly Fat Man and a Walking Rabbit break into our house at various times of the year to leave him gifts has more evidentiary support than Christians do of their version of reality. When he wakes up, there’s actually stuff for him in the living room, and the two people who generally give him the Straight Dope on how the world works tell him who did it.
These people choose to have no evidence supporting their beliefs.
Religion actually is different than any other area; it’s not just another set of interests and conversational talking points that don’t really have anything to do with a person’s survival and psychological well being. Religion arises from very primal aspects of our species and the very fact that it sits at the heart of nearly all the pain and suffering of human beings is the evidence. Sports does not routinely drive people to blow themselves up for the team. Art does not have the stain of centuries of wars being fought in its name. Music isn’t the culprit when families find themselves torn apart forever.
I’ve been reading reviews of what sounds like a fascinating book by Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates that addresses this directly:
Most reviews are focusing on the morality gave birth to religion aspect and skip the other part: ok, but why? Which this answers:
On a **species **level, whether you personally respect it or not, religion is a big fucking deal that absolutely does demand different treatment than our preference for Mozart or Justin Bieber.
Which leads me to this comment:
Well you damn well better start, given that religion is taken about as seriously as anything else human beings care about, just barely being edged out by (and yet still frequently beating!) food and sex, and is therefore going to continue to be the driving force behind the most serious behavior people exhibit.
A respectable attempt, but a fail. Read my last post. Human beings are innately superstitious.
Plus, you really aren’t offering a good argument, you’re just continuing to say what YOU believe: that others are choosing what they believe. Well, okay, I’m listening. If what you say is true, then you should be able to demonstrate it by choosing to believe something you haven’t already chosen to believe prior to this. How about… the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was the result of a controlled demolition? There’s lots of evidence convincing a bunch of people of this, so show us how you can just choose, willfully and consciously, to make your mind sincerely accept this as truth.
Good luck with that.
People can make choices about their behavior, so yes, they can absolutely make the deliberate and meaningful choice to make it a practice to take in lots of information. To read, investigate, listen, test, etc. But that is choosing to behave differently, and it may indeed lead to a change in their genuine beliefs, but it isn’t guaranteed to do so and it still isn’t choosing to believe. Because you can’t.
Why do people choose to believe in Jesus but not Santa Claus?
Children stop believing in Santa when they find out that he is fictional. This is normal human behavior, things that are fictional are not literally true. If, after it is explained that it is impossible for Santa to visit millions of children in one night, that flying reindeer do not exist, and that there is no Workshop at the North Pole, your child still literally believes in Santa, you’d think the child was broken.
But, you point out that the world was not created in 6 days, we evolved from earlier types of hominids, it’s impossible for the whole earth to be flooded by a rainstorm, and you can’t fit all the land animals on one boat, and we handwave away the fact that the whole underpinning of the concept of God is fictional.
We accept out politicians literally believing in the 6 day Creation, referencing it in actual legislation, quoting OT verses to support their positions as though it’s the actual word of the actual God who created us all in His Image, when we’d have them committed to a mental institution if they introduced an anti-leprechaun bill.
You’re continuing to simply assume what you’re trying to prove. People don’t choose to believe in Jesus and not Santa Claus. Rather, they just do (or don’t as the case may be) believe in Jesus and not Santa Claus.
That’s exactly the point. “Broken” implies lack of choice here–the kid’s not choosing to believe, he just keeps believing it.
I wasn’t going to post in this thread again but I can’t let you get away with what you’ve done here.
If you can comprehend de Waal’s work well enough to offer an informed opinion then you can damn well manage get through a full paragraph of mine.
Please don’t selectively quote me in that way. I fully acknowledge the seriousness of actions arising from religion and yet you saw fit to cut that part. Poor form.
Here’s my full quote. Note the boldened text that you missed out in order to have a dig.
Why do you keep asserting that people choose to believe things but continue to offer exactly no evidence, no reasoning, and no demonstration that people choose their beliefs? Is it because no matter what reasoning is put in front of you, your belief that people choose their beliefs just won’t go away? Is it just stuck there, no matter what? Isn’t it funny how that works?
I’d venture to say that children do not observe other people maintaining a sincere belief in Santa Clause, so this undermines theirs. Which is not the case with religion, quite the opposite. As we’ve covered, we are a very social species, and the majority of people are anything but independent thinkers following the beat of their own drummer. It is not an insult, it is a fact. We are built that way. We believe in our family, our friends, our team, our city, state, country, planet. We learn from our group what to wear, eat, play, listen to, laugh at, care about and think. And most of us grow up observing our groups believing in God, so God must be true.
Secondly, religion is enormously comforting for many people who are terrified of life ending. (Which is logically foolish, of course, but logic doesn’t really enter into most people’s emotional processing about their own death) So there is a bias towards the belief for those who hold it that makes it much easier to ignore logical arguments, and that’s hardly something exclusive to religious belief.
I would also venture that many otherwise intelligent, educated, reasoning people who claim that they believe in things like the biblical stories of Christ are not really totally convinced at all, I’m certain they have doubts and lots of them. But they don’t want to feed those doubts by freely admitting to them and in fact they often will be the people who argue most stridently for the truth of their beliefs because of course they want their beliefs to be true, they want to continue to have that comfort in their lives and all that information and argument assaulting them and adding to their doubts is painful, frightening, and wholly unwanted.
And finally, I offer the example of my mother, who was born in 1923. She went to Catholic school from age 4 onward (she could actually converse in Latin) in a town made up of Catholics by Catholic parents born in Ireland, a country made up of devout Catholics. My mother was a very intelligent, free-thinking, wise woman whose parents died before she was 13, and when she decided to keep the baby she had out of wedlock at 17 instead of going away to “visit an aunt” like all the other girls did, and not apologize for it, her scholarship to Georgetown evaporated, as did her association with the church and Christianity.
She had four daughters and I am endlessly grateful that we were spared any sort of indoctrination at all, either for or against. On of the most marvelous gifts my parents gave me was the gift of teaching me that it was up to me get the information, evaluate it in the most rigorous way I could, and decide for myself, that truth about anything was never proven by how many people agreed to agree about it.
When we were all grown, in the late 70’s, she became interested in Science of Mind and ultimately went on to become an ordained minister in the Church of Religious Science, which is in no respect whatsoever a Christian church:
Science of Mind was the ancestor of the New Age.
And here’s the reason I’ve told you all this about my mother as an example:
My mother had told me when I was very young about the Jesuit maxim “Give me a child until his 7th birthday and I care not who has him thereafter.” and it really stuck with me, it’s part of the knowledge that makes me so deeply grateful for the way I was raised to think for myself about everything right out the gate.
Almost 70 years after she last set foot inside the Catholic church, years during which she lived a life that in no way whatsoever included any hint of the hardcore old school religion that framed her home, her family, and her entire education, my mother was dying…and the** only **thing she wanted, and wanted very badly, was a priest to take her confession and perform the last rites.
So yeah, all the logic in the world is vapor when held up against the power of religion that has been drilled into someone from the day they were born, and if I ever doubted it my mother’s terrified need to return to the bosom of the church when her mortality was bearing down on her swept it away forever.
So really, you gotta try to stop being so harsh on people, ya know? As individuals, I mean… because I’m right there that religion has been and continues to be the single most horrendous cause of the majority what’s fucked in the world, no question. But I don’t think it’s right or necessary to judge, belittle or dismiss all the individual human monkeys just doing what evolution shaped them to do.
Incidentally, regarding the Catholic Church - I’ve always had much more respect for them in terms of the theology - Catholics accept evolution as true, because the Church respects science and knowledge, and recognizes the perversity, in light of what know, of clinging to the belief that that the Earth was formed a few thousand years ago in the course of a week, etc.
And they can accept the truth of evolution because they understand what I try to tell Christians who have to stick their fingers in their ears and sing if the subject comes up: to accept the fact of evolution does not require a believer to abandon their belief in a creator at all! It just requires them, if they want to respect being the brilliant apes that their Creator designed them to be, to accept that evidently the Creator accomplished the creation via the mechanism of evolution, what’s the big deal?
Accepting the obvious fact that the bible is a book written by human beings during a very different time and is therefore guaranteed to be flawed in the details does not mean you must abandon God. It means you have to grow your belief up a little, that’s all. The way fundamentalists believe is the way children believe and it’s irritating as fuck to see otherwise perfectly reasonable people cling to ignorance out of fear when it’s not necessary.
Because parents and others in the community keep on telling them that Jesus is real long after they see the evidence that Santa is not. What if each parent kept up the Santa belief?
I can assure that Jewish kids who aren’t under this pressure don’t believe in Jesus. I certainly didn’t, even when I believed in God.
I think I agree with your main point (and say furthermore that it’s a good one as presented). I was just saying that there’s a fairly wide divide between biblical literalism and, say, British Anglicanism.
I disagree with the OP. Atheism is highly scientific, insofar as the scientific method embraces parsimony, hypothesis testing and the provisional nature of their edifice of knowledge. Believe what can be established: the rest is speculation or conjecture at best. Similarly, a belief in the germ theory of disease in 1700 would be non-scientific, as sufficient evidence for it had not been collected - heck the idea hadn’t even been presented.
Much of medicine is non-scientific, insofar as treatment protocols haven’t yet been subjected to double blind testing. Think about icing wounds or the way medical practice varies by region of the country or even a single state.
The point being is that while the scientific method is, well, methodical, it isn’t the only useful epistemology in common use. Nor is it all encompassing: certain decisions must be implemented in medicine, psychiatry or business without the sort of established knowledge that is demanded in a peer-reviewed paper.
“But, whoa, MfM. Sure, the scientific method is only a small (though important) aspect of human endeavor, but Jack Chick is still risible, right?”
Sure. I was making a narrow point. There are more epistemologies on the table than the scientific method and woo.
But the scientific method is merely a formalized version of the everyday epistemology we use to go about our affairs. I lift up my foot to step onto the next square of the sidewalk. Is it POSSIBLE that the next square is merely a well-disguised pit trap that will plunge me down onto deadly spikes? Yes, certainly that’s POSSIBLE, but unlikely. My prior evidence of sidewalks gives me confidence that that my theory that the next square is solid concrete is well-justified. I provisionally believe the sidewalk ahead is solid and I proceed with my walk according to that hypothesis. If any any point I discover contradictory data (“My word, I almost fell in a concealed pit trap!”) then I’ll revise my “sidewalk hypothesis” to include this new data and adjust my behavior. (“I’d better be careful walking around here!”)
The scientific method is merely this naive process formalized, with the steps explicitly spelled out and the hypotheses and evidence placed under close logical scrutiny. (“I will poke every square with a stick three times before I step forward.”) But it’s not some entirely different way of arriving at information about the world. Empiricism is empiricism, whether it is the naive, unconscious version we practice from moment-to-moment in our daily lives, or the rigorous, meticulous version that science embodies.
The question is: Are there really ANY other viable epistemologies? Is there any other justified way of forming knowledge about the world besides some form of empiricism?
Does “taking the word of others” count? If a tribal elder says, “Don’t eat those berries, they’ll make you sick,” and I accept this, is that really an empirical approach, or merely an appeal to authority?
“Education” is a means by which we cause people to become informed, without them doing the real work of finding out. It’s not quite the same as empiricism…because it can convey false information nearly as easily as truth.