The problem is, you can never be sure; a person who operates without evidence is likely to wander into/create a disaster without realizing. Like your example of evolution; if you don’t believe in it, you might vote for people who oppose teaching it, which will hurt American scientific education and America itself in the long run.
If we have repeatedly sensed the same conditions and acted on them in a certain way without a bad outcome how in the world can be we afraid of the outcome this time?
Your statement makes no sense in the context of having had a lot of previous experience. I don’t see how confrontations can be a case of an experience with a uniformly positive or uniformy negative outcome. We are apprehensive about confrontations precisely because we can never be sure of the outcome and that apprehension is based on experience.
We can be absolutely confident, i.e. without fear of being wrong, if we expect the unexpected in confrontations.
P.S. On the other hand, if you don’t like Clifford’s description of truth you have my permission to disregard it.
All the same, I will continue to regard it as useful.
Another case in point. A small child wanders in front of a car. He doesn’t think that the driver of the car might fail to stop. No, he has perfect faith that he personally has magic car stopping powers. The proof? Why, the fact that cars keep stopping! Doi! :rolleyes:
Rejecting the (divine) truth of the Bible does not imply rejecting all its moral advice. It means you have to consider it. Accepting it, however, implies that you must follow at least the advice that you consider to be divinely given. For a true Christian, the answer to “if Jesus told you to jump off a cliff, would you?” has to be yes.
None of what I said implies that you can prove that your senses are correct. In fact it means that you must constantly check them - and we know that our senses often are not correct, in the case of mirages etc.
Now if your senses gave you incorrect information a large part of the time, you would at least go to the doctor, right? The Bible gives us incorrect factual information a very large part of the time. That doesn’t mean that the rest is necessarily wrong, but it means we need to go to the Bible doctor to check it out. And the Bible doctor, the consensus of Bible historians, tell us that the Torah was not written by Moses, and the books of the gospel were not written by eye-witnesses. Someone can choose to believe despite this, but shouldn’t claim it is true.
Less rational than believing in your senses due to Ockham’s Razor, which applies perfectly in this case. You’d still act exactly as if you believed in your sense, right? You might look for bugs, but aside from that your behavior would be indistinguishable from believing in your senses, so you’d be rational to all intents and purposes. We’re probably all irrational deep inside, but map our behavior so no one can tell.
But Neo tested the falsity of the “real world” all the time by doing his tricks, right? If he had come out of that telephone, tried to jump between buildings, and always went splat, he might wonder whether he was hallucinating the out of world experiences.
Movies about the supernatural almost always present tests to the characters which show the supernatural is true. If the real world were like that, no one would doubt. The biggest complaint I have about movies like this is that they don’t deal with the wrenching disruption to our belief systems if the stuff they show to be true was. It’s a colossal failure of nerve. The good thing about Men in Black was that it spent a lot of time showing how the existence of aliens was covered up.
I’d have to say believing that the universe is real, and that I didn’t just dream it all up, is about the only thing it’s perfectly reasonable to simply accept. Properly testing this belief is, as far as I can tell, most certain to be lethal, or at least highly unpleasant, should the belief be correct. There doesn’t seem to be a penalty for being wrong, as it makes no difference in practical terms, so any approach to reality seems to be preferable to solopsism.
The only way I can make sense of the quote is for fear to mean fear that the “truth” is not true. There can be all sorts of undesirable outcomes even from acting on true things, he says none are due to the true thing being false.
I don’t buy it. One might act on something knowing it might be false, just that it is predominantly likely to be true. Under this rule, there are hardly any scientific truths, since all actions based on them must consider the chance (perhaps very small) of them being false.
I’d have to say believing that the universe is real, and that I didn’t just dream it all up, is about the only thing it’s perfectly reasonable to simply accept. Properly testing this belief is, as far as I can tell, most certain to be lethal, or at least highly unpleasant, should the belief be correct. There doesn’t seem to be a penalty for being wrong, as it makes no difference in practical terms, so any approach to reality seems to be preferable to solipsism.
Oh, entirely so. But it won’t impact their own lives, and thus, from their own perspective, it’s not important.
Pleeese oh please delete my previous post! Hit the wrong button again.
You test this belief all the time by observing the consistency of real life as opposed to the inconsistency of dreams. As Dijkstra said, testing only proves the existence of bugs, never their absence, so you’ll never know for sure that your belief in reality is correct.
I think the standard objection is I can’t control my unconscious “mind” (whatever that’s supposed to be), and don’t know if it behaves consistently sometimes or not. As it’s impossible to distinguish between a consistent unconscious and a consistent external reality, I’ve no way to decide. The decision may be made for me, in any event, by the fact that, being indistinguishable, one could conclude there’s no real difference except in a nitpicky semantic sense. How one is supposed to decide on even the semantics of meaning of “no real difference” when nothing might be “real” is, quite frankly, such a masturbatory exercise I consider it beneath human life.
But surely we only know the outcome of our actions because of our senses. I mean, I might take the fact that I can use visual information to avoid walls as evidence that vision is correct – but how do I know I’m avoiding walls? I guess I know it because I don’t feel any uncomfortable “bumping” sensation as I’m walking around, but what if that sense is in error as well?
In other words, it seems like the best we can tell is that my various senses are consistent. In other words, my eyes tell me I’m avoiding walls and my other senses (touch, pain receptors, etc.) confirm this, but this could either mean they’re both right or they’re both wrong. Perhaps I’m running into walls constantly, but I’m oblivious to it because I can neither see nor feel them.
I must admit, however, that I’m kind of playing devils advocate at this point. I can see an argument for trusting that our senses are correct simply because we have a strong natural intuition that this is true and no evidence to the contrary.
I could also imagine someone arguing that the consistency of our senses is somehow evidence that they corrspond to reality, but I’m not sure I buy that.
It’s a simpler assumption; Occam’s Razor in action.
:smack: You are correct. I lifted the quote away from the context of the first part. My apologies. I get it in context.
I was thinking that at times searching for the truth requires us to take leaps of faith that can be pretty scary. Like a scientist working on a theory that his peers reject because he has faith and a desire for truth. Or someone going to a another country and culture to work.
There seems to be a huge misconception of what christianity means on the board. It really bothers me when people base their opinions on religion based on a few. If you turn on spike tv in the morning and see a religious show, you’re going to have a completely misguided view of what it means to believe in God. The problem I am seeing is that a lot of christians that you might talk to do not know exactly why they believe in what they do. Let me walk you through how I personally questioned the Bible:
To help understand God, you have to understand Gods Word and the bible. I am confident that if you actually tried to disprove the bible, you would come to see just how true and life altering it is. The problem is that these things in your life that you think are going to make you happy, just are not going to make you happy. You see these people who say that they look to the bible for guidance to their life. So you start to ask why would this sort of ancient document have any relevance to our lives? What bothered me was that these people who believed in the bible, seemed to be committing intellectual suicide.
You ask someone why they read the bible, and they would say because “it is God’s word”. And so you say, how do you know its God’s word, and they would say, “because its in the bible”. And I would think to myself that that is some weird circular logic. So a major question you start asking is, can the bible be true? You start by looking at the people who actually saw these stories in the bible. The problem is that none of the witnesses are still alive. So you look at their testimony using the best technology they had at that specific time. Much of the bible is written in papyrus which is what they used before paper. Another thing that you have to ask is, how do we know that this is what was actually written? I mean centuries have gone by, so some people have tampered with it, right? So you have to verify the records. You have to look at the authenticity of the bible. Fortunately, the bible is not the only work of antiquity we have to wrestle with. There are the works of Aristotle, the works of Plato, and Ceaser and his record of the wars. There are none of these where we have the actual witnesses of coarse, so you have to take the academic protocol and apply it in the same way to all of them. There is a historian named C Sanders who developed the bibliographical test. What we have is hand written copies of these different documents and don’t have the actual original document. There are two questions in this test to figure out if what we are looking at, is what was written at the time? The first test is, how many ancient copies do we have? Because the more copies we have, the more we can compare and contrast what we have today. The second question we ask is, what is the oldest manuscript we have, and how far is the time frame between that oldest manuscript and when we know when this thing was original written. The less the time span , obviously the greater the degree of confidence we have. So we take a look at the best of the bunch .Some of the better ones are Ceasar and his record of the gallic war. There are ten existing manuscripts that we have that describe Ceasar and the gallic wars, and thats pretty good. Aristotle, we have 49, and the best of the bunch we have is Homer and his work of the illiad where we have 643 existing manuscripts that we can compare and contrast to have a high degree of confidence of what we have today is what was original written. However, the illiad is the second best work of antiquity . The best is the new testament of the bible, where we have 24,633 different existing manuscripts of antiquity. So much so, that you can piece back almost 99 percent of the bible just from other references of documents not from the bible from that time.
The second question is, what is the time gap? The oldest document we have, how long was that written after we believed the first document was written? So you take a look at Ceasar and the gallic war. It is about a 1000 year gap. Aristotle is about a 1400 year gap and again the best of the bunch is Homer and the illiad and the gap is about a 500 year gap. The new testament of the bible is a gap of 25-85 years depending on which scholar you talk to. That is only a single lifetime. I never heard anyone say that “Im not so sure that this guy named Ceasar really lived?” I always here these things like the “myth of Jesus”. We have to be consistent. This doesn’t mean the bible is the inspired word of God, but this means we have a huge amount of confidence that what was written back then, is what we see today. There are 184,590 words in the new testament. The number of words that are on the scholars list of questionable is 400. 400 of 184,590 words that we do not fully understand because of things such as the context or meaning. Less than a fraction of one percent are up for debate. So that answers the question of how reliable the original writing is what we are seeing today. So you then think to yourself, maybe this was written by a bunch of douche bags. So you have to go into, how does this relate to the world as I know it and how does it relate to any kind of outside observances. As far as relating to the world, the description of the human race that describes this broken world is a very realistic picture of our world today. It is a better picture of reality than I have seen anywhere else. The second , is what kind of outside verification do we have. People outside of the historians whose works are not reflected in the bible. This is not very good logic because it says the only people who are reliable for saying whether the bible actually happened is people who weren’t followers of Christ. So as soon as someone believes what Jesus said, they become discounted. This obviously is not the best logic but we will go on it. I thought there was no support for what Jesus said and most people think this too. But most people were wrong. This is the most shocking part of what we know. It blew me away because of the other false things I have heard. Thallus, , who wasn’t a follower of Christ and was a roman historian, recorded this strange daytime darkness that fell over the land when Jesus was crucified. Josephus, was one of the most reliable Jewish historians ever who didn’t believe Christ was the son of God, and in his work, he describes Jesus as a wonder worker who talks about Christ’ crucifiction.and the fact that he performed miracles. Tacitus, was a roman historian who described this ‘pernicious superstition’ that was spreading, that this man named Jesus who they all saw die on the cross actually rose and lived again. The babylonian talmud, describes this weird guy named Jesus who worked magic. There is so many more. So the next thing you say is, all these people could be wrong. So thankfully, there is still more evidence to look at. You can look at archeology. Miller Burrows, a professor of archaeology at Yale university, said, “On the whole, however, archeological work has unquestionably strengthened confidence in the reliability of the scriptural record”. A lot of relevant discoveries have happened in our lifetimes. One thing you look at, is the old testament. If we could get a copy of the old testament that is a long time period before the oldest one we currently have, we could compare the two and see how much has been changed. In 1947, in a cave in Qumran, they found clay pots called the ‘dead sea scrolls’. What was so amazing is that their were copies of the old testament that were 1000 years closer to the original date when it was written than we had before. And what they found in these older copies, was that 95 percent of them were identical, word for word. The 5 percent was attributed to either obvious slips of the hand or alternative spellings of the same word. The US is not even a quarter of that old. Another example is people who are mentioned in the bible who had power. One of the questions was, why do we have no record of them? Cayasyths, was the high priest Jesus went up to before his crucifiction. People would say this man was a legend since we had no record of him. They said that up until 1990. In 1990, some construction workers accidently broke through a hidden burial chamber from the first century A.D. in Jerusalem. What they found was a burial box and transcribed on it was, “Cayasyths, the high priest.” Another one is king David who was described as a powerful king. People said he was also ‘made up by the bible’. On July 21st of 1993, at a excavation site, they discovered a monument that was inscribed “the king of Israel, the house of David”. The physical evidence is there, even in our lifetime. We have to be careful though. Nothing will ever for 100 percent prove God. There is this thing called faith. But I have came to a place where I cant lie to myself enough to try and say God does not exist… I just cant do it. I would be committing intellectual suicide.
Glurge deleted.
A few points:
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The accuracy of the transcription of a book is no measure of its truthfulness. All copies of The Wizard of Oz are faithful to Baum’s original, but don’t expect to visit the place any time soon.
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None of the actual writers of the Bible were around when the events happened.
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You are aware, right, that the Iliad was written from an oral source, and that it is almost certain that Homer (if there was such a person) did not write it. Counting it as something accurately transmitted is absurd. Whether or not Aristotle’s works are accurately transmitted, his conclusions are still wrong. BTW, Socrates certainly never said most of the stuff Plato has him saying - it was common then to put your words in the mouth of a respected person from the past. If the Gospel writers followed a similar model, then Jesus never said the things they claimed for him.
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All historical sources must be crosschecked against others. You must also check the motives of the writer, since the dedication to our kind of truth did not exist back then. Travel books, for example, were typically sexed up. I believe I read that there are inaccuracies in the Gallic Wars. There are tons in the Bible - I bet you wouldn’t be able to defend a lot of it. For instance, though David might have existed, there is no record of an empire the size described in Kings and Chronicles. Solomon’s buildings date from after his time. And camel were not domesticated until 1,000 BCE, so Abraham could not have had flocks of them.
We won’t even talk about Genesis.
- Will whatever church who sends people to lecture us at least send someone from their B team? This is pitiful.