The paradox of faith

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Well, as has been pointed out, I may be misunderstanding you, but: the symbol “~” is given some definition within any given logical system’s definition. By many such logical systems, the statement you challenge is defined to be true by that logical system’s definition of “~”, and thus cannot be wrong. Some people have proposed alternate logical systems with different definitions of “~”, which don’t support the statement you challenged - and in those alternate systems, the statement is indeed false. But that doesn’t change the fact that in the original system the statement is true.
[/QUOTE]

This is not my area of expertise, but to give a concrete example, intuitionistic logic rejects some of the assumptions or definitions of Aristotelian logic, chiefly the law of the excluded middle (A v ~A). From this rejection, other seeming oddities follow. For example, in Aristotelian logic, ~~A –> A, but in intuitionistic logic ~(~~A –> A). It’s just a different set of axioms; non-Aristotelian logics just like non-Euclidian geometries. Which set of (logical or geometric) axioms applies to the real world? That, we must investigate empirically.

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
There was a very interesting article in the New York Times within the last year (I think) in which a computer science guy argued that if we were exceptionally self-motivated constructs within an exceptionally robust computer simulation, there would be absolutely no way for us to detect that, and all our studies of our simulation would reveal fundamentally flawed results (what we perceived to be a rock, for example, would actually be ones and zeroes on a hard drive). He went on to speculate, not entirely pulling the number out of his ass, that there’s about a 1 in 4 chance that we are such constructs.
[/QUOTE]

Probably Nick Bostrom and his simulation argument.

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
Using that distinction, I guess my faith would fall more under your moral philosophy than religion term. All of my beliefs are provisional, including my beliefs based on faith.

On convincing others, I think it’s quite obvious that many people are convinced of their religion without scientific documentation. That simply means their faith is not science.
[/QUOTE]

Sure. Most people believe in their religion because their parents or peers do, and often because they’ve been sent to religious indoctrination ^H^H^H instruction when young.

The crucial distinction between moral philosophy and much of religion is that moral philosophers hardly ever torture anyone to get them to join their movement, and seldom kill those in other movements. Not many philosophers favor laws inhibiting the freedoms of people based on what Kant wrote, while lots of religious people do based on what is in the Bible. Not all, by any means. Religious people who believe provisionally won’t, and religious people who think that the commandments of their god apply only to them won’t either.

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=begbert2]

Then it’s a false analogy to equate the use thereof, because nobody uses religion as a contained system. They always apply it to reality. With math and science, you have to confirm via external observations that the axioms match your reality or system before you can use them there - the axioms are therefore not accepted unproven. With religion you just buy the claims without proof, period.

The religious analogue to unapplied abstract systems like math and logic are religions that you do not believe in. Like the religion of the elves in Lord of the Rings maybe. If you analyze the religion without attempting to apply it to reality, keeping it purely abstract like we do with math, then you don’t have to prove the axioms - but the minute you do try to apply the religion to reality, to claim that it’s actually real and true, then you have to justify your axioms again. Like science, which does not have a bootstrap problem like religion does, which is why it’s reasonable to use science to describe reality and not religion.

[/QUOTE]

In some cases, like the axiom of omnibenevolence, you can compare the result to reality, coming up with the problem of evil. In others, such as the axiom of a deity being both omnipotent and omniscient, you can show a contradiction without reference to reality - this this is more like math.

[begbert2]

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
Probably Nick Bostrom and his simulation argument.
[/QUOTE]
Hmm, I tend to be suspicious of any argument that that parallels: “The vast, vast majority of all living things are single-celled bacteria. Therefore it is statistically safe (probabalistically speaking) to assume that any randomly selected living thing is a single-cell bacteria. Therefore, every person on this message board is probably a single-celled bacteria.”

[Der_Trihs]

[QUOTE=cosmosdan ]
The idea that we experience God spiritually, the inner person, in a subjective manner, rather than as an external being is pretty widespread.
[/QUOTE]
But virtually everyone considers it a subjective experience of an objectively real being. Again, not like an emotion. You are simply wriggling, trying to redefine God according to his critics, until God becomes something it’s own followers would never call God.

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
No, the justification for religion is based on personal, subjective experience. You may not base any beliefs on that kind of experience, but many people do.
[/quote]
That’s not a justification. The fact that all they have are contradictory personal experiences ( those that aren’t lying ) is part of what makes their beliefs unjustified.

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
I know for a fact that there are no laws of physics that even address the issue of whether or not God exists, let alone provide evidence against.
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Of course there are. The laws of physics don’t allow for an entity with the powers of God. The uncertainty principle and the speed of light limit both rule out omniscience, or anything remotely close to it, for example.

And if you strip away all his abilites so he fits the laws of physics, he’s not the “God” people are speaking of.

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
But those unfalsifiable claims and questions unanswerable with evidence still exist. So people come up with their own solutions, based on their own experiences. That is the essence of faith–belief with evidence to answer important questions that science can’t tackle.
[/quote]
No, faith is just madness. It’s making up answers out of nothing, or buying into answers from people who’ve done that, and ignoring any and all contradictory evidence.

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
Their answers are subjective; if they’re objective, the questions would’ve been answered by science.
[/quote]
No, they are subjective “answers” about objective things. In non-religious areas, this is called a “lie” or a “delusion”.

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
But the laws of nature do not address the soul. Any persistence of the soul, or God’s interaction with, does not violate nature, since nature doesn’t cover that.
[/quote]
Yes, it does cover that; it says there isn’t one.

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
The similarly between mathematics, science, and religion is that their starting points cannot be justified within their own frameworks.
[/QUOTE]
Mathematics and science don’t need that justification. Mathematics is arbitrary, and science works; religion claims to be objectively true and doesn’t work. Religion, whenever it actually speaks on something that can be checked, virtually always fails. It’s worse than random guesses. There’s no justification for taking it seriously; it has nothing to back it up, is inconsistent, and has a history of being wildly wrong. Religion is faith in the sense of denying reality.

[Telemark]

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Yes, it does cover that; it says there isn’t one.
[/QUOTE]

Would you care to point out where science excludes the possibility of the supernatural?

[begbert2]

[QUOTE=Telemark]
Would you care to point out where science excludes the possibility of the supernatural?
[/QUOTE]
I dunno about Der Trihs (who tends to go somewhat further than I do in his assertions) but I’d say that the specific possibility that human behaivor is controlled or strongly influenced by some sort of undamageable, eternal, noncoporeal soul is strongly argued against by the observable effects of changes on one’s brain chemistry (or physical brain structure) on one’s personality and behavior. That is, one would not expect a soul to get drunk just because a little chemical alcohol is sloshing around the physical grey matter.

[Bryan_Ekers]

[QUOTE=Telemark]
Would you care to point out where science excludes the possibility of the supernatural?
[/QUOTE]

If he can’t, what does that prove? Besides, suppose you define Concept A as supernatural and Concept B as supernatural - can you then sort out which, if either, is true?

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Hmm, I tend to be suspicious of any argument that that parallels: “The vast, vast majority of all living things are single-celled bacteria. Therefore it is statistically safe (probabalistically speaking) to assume that any randomly selected living thing is a single-cell bacteria. Therefore, every person on this message board is probably a single-celled bacteria.”
[/QUOTE]

Keep a civil tongue, or I’ll whip you with my flagella.

I heard Ed Fredkin talk about the universe as a simulation in 1973. This is nothing new, though I haven’t heard the odds before. I’m suspicious of them also - I didn’t read the paper, but if my skimming was accurate, instead of 1 in 4, if every posthuman kid is playing Sim Universe, the odds of our being a simulation might be 99.999%. If, that is, there is any reason for anyone to do this detailed a simulation in the first place.

[Bryan_Ekers]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
If, that is, there is any reason for anyone to do this detailed a simulation in the first place.
[/QUOTE]

I 'unno, so they can cast our bits into a hard drive of fire when we question the wisdom of the simulation?

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
I 'unno, so they can cast our bits into a hard drive of fire when we question the wisdom of the simulation?
[/QUOTE]

Oh, so that’s where our bits go. What a relief - I’ve been worried about /dev/null filling up for years.

[Pleonast]

[QUOTE=begbert2]
The use of logic isn’t an assumption. The internal correctness of logic is true by definition. You observe reality to tell you what system’s premises model the reality or system you’re talking about.
[/quote]
Logic (i.e., the rules of inference) isn’t an assumption? Where did it come from? It didn’t come from mathematics.

Then it’s a false analogy to equate the use thereof, because nobody uses religion as a contained system. They always apply it to reality. With math and science, you have to confirm via external observations that the axioms match your reality or system before you can use them there - the axioms are therefore not accepted unproven. With religion you just buy the claims without proof, period.

Once you start trying to match mathematics up to the world, you’re doing science, not math. You may justify your axioms or logic because of your observations, and that’s exactly the point I was trying to make–axioms and logic are the starting point of mathematics and cannot be justified within it.

“Making up stupid crap based on overinterpreting inner experiences doesn’t answer the question any better than reading answers out of your alphabet soup.” - Assuming that there’s any way to subjectively compare answers to big questions, which I think there is, this is falsifiable. Also, since it’s explicitly comparing two completely unjustified ways of reaching conclusions, there seems to be reason to believe it is true. Unless you can prove that applying unjustified interpretation to internal experinces is better or worse than applying unjustified interpretation to the letter arrangements in alphabet soup?

I don’t see how it’s possible to objectively compare subjective statements about untestable claims. That’s why your statement is a value judgement.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
That’s not a justification. The fact that all they have are contradictory personal experiences ( those that aren’t lying ) is part of what makes their beliefs unjustified.
[/quote]
What do you mean by “justified”? If you mean something like “supportable with objective evidence”, then you’re merely restating that religion is based on faith. No one here is disagreeing.

Of course there are. The laws of physics don’t allow for an entity with the powers of God. The uncertainty principle and the speed of light limit both rule out omniscience, or anything remotely close to it, for example.

The uncertainty principle and the speed of light concern the acquisition and transmission of information, not the existence of information. And that assumes God is within our spacetime.

And if you strip away all his abilites so he fits the laws of physics, he’s not the “God” people are speaking of.
No, faith is just madness. It’s making up answers out of nothing, or buying into answers from people who’ve done that, and ignoring any and all contradictory evidence.

You’re arguing against positions no one here espouses.

Yes, it does cover that; it says there isn’t one.

Really? Which laws of nature address whether or not souls exist? The laws of physics certainly don’t.

religion claims to be objectively true and doesn’t work. Religion, whenever it actually speaks on something that can be checked, virtually always fails.

Again, you’re arguing against positions no one here has claimed.

[cosmosdan]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
True, but the ideal scientist will be actively looking for evidence to falsify as well as support his hypothesis. That’s the critical difference between science and religion. No matter how much a scientist, or company, has invested in a new drug, they do placebo trials to falsify the hypothesis that the drug cures better than people can cure themselves. No matter how many millions of bucks get invested in development, the drug gets tossed if it doesn’t pass (with help from the FDA.) The equivalent would be Ken Hamm looking honestly at evidence for evolution and closing down his museum. Some religionists may decide they are wrong, but religions never do.
[/QUOTE]

I wonder if that’s true. I see a gradual shift in beliefs. Didn’t the Mormon church start ordaining black priesthood members in recent years? The church I used to belong to went through some major changes a few years back and began ordaining women. I heard a priesthood member say from the pulpit that a gay church member had asked for help and years later he believed he was saved and still gay, indicating a shift in beliefs about homosexuality. Churches in the south supported slavery and then segregation in the past. Over time, with access to information and with challenges to traditional beliefs, the face of religion is slowly changing. Because of the clearer lines drawn by science dealing with the objective I think the changes are slower in coming but they are IMO inevitable.

I don’t know the meaning of truth in John. I observe that in Christianity, at least, truth is defined as the basic creed, and does not begin from scratch.

Most people, believers or not, would have a concept that the truth is a reality that remains constant for all of us, even if we don’t acknowledge it, wouldn’t they? Atheists believe that no god exists and that is the truth for every human. Believers the opposite. Right? People may have a different of what the truth is ultimately, but most people believe the truth is what remains constant when all illusions and mistaken concepts fall away. Don’t they?
Nobody’s concept of truth starts from scratch.

Russell tried to derive all of mathematics from basic axioms. It would be interesting to do the same for religion, distinguishing that which is hypothesized but which is unfalsifiable from that which has evidence in support of it from that which has evidence against it. Historical evidence would have to be evaluated using the best principles of historical research. I predict that many religions would be extremely disturbed by this project.

No doubt, but I’d love to see it. IMO that’s where mythology is vulnerable in a modern age where facts are easily accessible. Beliefs about the Bible, the flood, creation, and other dogma that the facts show to be untrue would bring the focus of religion back to the more relevant aspects. Unfortunately there are some issues that are unlikely, unnecessary, and still unfalsifiable. Those will be hard to shake , but the first step is to approach the ones we have facts about.

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

[QUOTE=Pleonast]
Logic (i.e., the rules of inference) isn’t an assumption? Where did it come from? It didn’t come from mathematics.Once you start trying to match mathematics up to the world, you’re doing science, not math. You may justify your axioms or logic because of your observations, and that’s exactly the point I was trying to make–axioms and logic are the starting point of mathematics and cannot be justified within it.
[/QUOTE]

Speaking for myself and not begbert2–axioms of logic cannot be justified because they are in a sense arbitrary. They are stipulated. Asking for a justification of a particular logical rule, whether in Aristotelian logic, multi-valued logic, or whatever, is like asking for a justification for using the word ‘cow’ to refer to a particular type of quadruped. There’s no justification for this use; it’s just stipulated that that’s how we use it. But the fact that ‘cow’ means ‘four-legged cud-chewing ungulate (fill in blanks)’ doesn’t tell us anything about the world–it is, in an important sense, not a factual claim. We can go find out whether there are things in the world that satisfy that definition, and *only then * have we learned a matter of fact.

So the reason axioms and other stipulated claims cannot be justified isn’t because they are assumed or taken on faith–it is because in an important sense they are not making any factual claims in the first place. They don’t have any factual content to justify. (I feel like I am channeling A.J. Ayer.)

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Of course, you may have meant to challenge the claim that one logical system or another actually applies to reality, which is another discussion, but by your use of symbology without much else presented it looked like you were claiming that fact that there are different logical systems with different definitions of “~” was somehow a problem, which it is not.
[/quote]

That is, of course, what I was suggesting: I was talking about the foundation assumptions of science, not of proposed formal logic systems. My understanding is that the scientific method assumes that if P is true, ~P is false.

No fair questioning the senses or appealing to illusion - that’s dealt with in statement 4! One thing at a time!

Okay, fair enough–but then you don’t get to appeal to #4 until we get there. That means no references to data gathered by the senses. If you’re unwilling to meet that criterion, then no objecting to my pointing out that such data may be flawed.

If reality has been a series of coincidences it’s been doing a remarkable job of looking like there are consistent rules - so much so that the statistics give very compelling evidence that this is not the case.

The problem is that the descriptive power of statistics assumes a rational universe: if the universe is irrational, statistical theory is useless for providing theories. In an irrational universe, that compelling evidence is nowhere near compelling. You can’t assume that which you’re trying to demonstrate.

And even if it is and things suddenly start going completely random, that doesn’t change the fact that there was still a tremendous preponderance of compelling evidence supporting the conclusion “The cosmos operates according to the principles of reason” - so it remains the case that the statement was not taken axiomatically. Even if it does turn out to be wrong.

I’m not suggesting that things will start going completely random: I’m suggesting that they’re going completely random right now, and that it’s sheer chance (or else some strange alien unreason that our brains are ill-equipped to comprehend) that has resulted in our belief that things operate according to reason. I don’t believe for a second that that’s true: I take it on faith, I take it as axiomatic, that it’s not.

If things started going haywire, I’d drop the axiom, in the same way that Euclid would’ve dropped “the shortest distance between two points is a line” if someone showed him how to get a shorter distance using an arc. In neither case does a willingness to drop the axiom in the face of countering evidence suggest that it’s not an axiom.

If all we observe is an illusion then that illusion is part of the universe.

Yes, which is why I said that science accepts it as axiomatic that our senses provide a more-or-less accurate understanding of the objective universe.

And, the preponderance of consistency in our observations is still evidence for the axioms you presented so they’re not taken on faith.

Going back to Euclid: can you connect two dots in a way that’s shorter than a line drawn between them? If not, do you reject Euclid’s assertion that this is an axiom?

Science is about describing and predicting observable reality to the best of our ability - if it does that well, it’s not flawed. Even if it fails to reference the lowest level of reality. (I mean, come on, how much of science is really about quarks directly? Not much? Exactly.)

NObody is saying science is flawed, and this is a common misconception among scientists: a belief that a system with axioms is a flawed system. It ain’t. Every system rests on the back of axioms.

Daniel

[Indistinguishable]

[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
Speaking for myself and not begbert2–axioms of logic cannot be justified because they are in a sense arbitrary. They are stipulated. Asking for a justification of a particular logical rule, whether in Aristotelian logic, multi-valued logic, or whatever, is like asking for a justification for using the word ‘cow’ to refer to a particular type of quadruped. There’s no justification for this use; it’s just stipulated that that’s how we use it. But the fact that ‘cow’ means ‘four-legged cud-chewing ungulate (fill in blanks)’ doesn’t tell us anything about the world–it is, in an important sense, not a factual claim. We can go find out whether there are things in the world that satisfy that definition, and *only then * have we learned a matter of fact.

So the reason axioms and other stipulated claims cannot be justified isn’t because they are assumed or taken on faith–it is because in an important sense they are not making any factual claims in the first place. They don’t have any factual content to justify. (I feel like I am channeling A.J. Ayer.)
[/QUOTE]

I mostly concur with this post, although I’d say there are some senses in which a definition broadly, or an axiom of logic/rule of inference/etc. specifically, could be justified; for example, one could justify the claim that it formalizes our conventional usage. That is, the same way one might in some sense justify a definition of cow as “four-legged cud-chewing ungulate (fill in blanks)” by pointing out “Hey, all the archetypal things we call cows are like this, and we’d rarely be inclined to call anything a cow if it were significantly different from this” or object to a definition of “cow” as “four-legged barstool”, or quibble over whether the context is appropriate to take “cow” to actually mean “female ungulate (…)”, so too can one justify logics/rules of inference/whatever as accurately capturing external linguistic norms in this sense (e.g., “Well, of course A & B should imply A; that is a hallmark of how people generally use conjunction”).

And then there is another sense, in which one might feel one could justify a definition in a particular context, even one which would depart from existing linguistic norms, on the grounds that another way of speaking might be more useful or natural in some way; e.g., one might argue the most natural use of the term “ape” in biology would refer to a clade encompassing humans despite the historically more restricted, but less biologically useful, use of the term, and thus that its definition, within that context, should reflect that. (A logical analogue might be something like justifying taking universally quantified propositions to lack existential import, despite reservations as to whether this tracks common usage in ordinary language, on the grounds that it leads to a more natural mathematical system. Similarly, one might justify (restricting ourselves to) the rules of intuitionistic logic, within the context of certain tasks, by arguing that this usefully aids the relevant analyses we would like to carry out, even where this departs with ordinary practice or other logics)

But overall, I do agree with you; it’s meaningless to take claims about rules of logic to be factual, as though there were a distinguished “logic of the real world”, whose properties we might hope to discern by external investigation.

[Indistinguishable]

I find myself noting a bad messageboard habit: something catches my interest, I rush to post my first draft response, and then end up modifying it frantically as the edit window closes on me, only to end up staring at my locked-in text at some stage, still feeling it somewhat inchoate. It would probably pay to spend more time revising to begin with, before actually posting. Ah well… anyway, I wanted to emphasize, where I perhaps failed to above, that the kinds of justification discussed above were, of course, not particularly the sort of justifications of belief usually discussed when discussing faith.

[cosmosdan]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I’d suggest that this should be “suggest answers” not “answer” since one characteristic of religion and moral philosophy in general is the inability to give final answers. This is not a weakness, since final answers may not exist. Questions that science cannot answer include ones on the purpose of life and what is good.

Now, the difference between religion and moral philosophy is that philosophy gives provisional answers to these questions, while many religions claim to give absolute answers. The absolute answers come from the supposed ultimate authority of God. But, to learn what God says involves first demonstrating the existence of God, and second, demonstrating that God is in communication with those claiming to be speaking for him. Without this, religion becomes no more than moral philosophy with singing. To convince anyone that a religion has access to God requires documentation of the transmission path, which involves claims about events, which gets us back to science again.
[/QUOTE]

We’ve talked about the provisional thing before. I agree that the nature of religious beliefs should be provisional. I’d say even the believers who cling to beliefs as absolute actually hold them provisionally. I mentioned long held traditions that have changed. When believers and religious leaders cling to certain beliefs as absolute they merely slow their own growth. The weight of evidence and the progress of those around them will gradually erode those absolute beliefs. Progress has been slow but as our modern age makes information more accessible and people begin to challenge beliefs, we’ll see them change more quickly.

[cosmosdan]

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
But virtually everyone considers it a subjective experience of an objectively real being. Again, not like an emotion. You are simply wriggling, trying to redefine God according to his critics, until God becomes something it’s own followers would never call God.

[/QUOTE]

There is a difference between a *real *spiritual being and an *objectively real *being. Most believers would say God is *real *but I think if you asked if God was objectively real , such as had a physical form, was measurable in some way as far as height and width and weight etc. very few would agree. If you have some other definition of objectively real then please elaborate.

Unless you have some cite to give concerning believers thinking of an objectively real god then we don’t really have a debate, just a difference of opinion.