Are you sure you even know what “excel” means?
I should’ve known you wouldn’t actually respond to the same point that Hotflungwok has successively avoided.
It would be much easier if I just followed the script so that you can make your points, but I seem to have lost my copy.
FYI-“supreme being” is not the only definition of “god”.
I noticed it, and it’s not accidental. I define faith as the difference between where your evidence takes you and your level of certainty. If the evidence you have provides you certainty X about something, and you have certainty X about something, then you are excersizing no faith, by my definition. So, by my definition, faith need not be a leap, but it does need to be a least a tiny little hop.
And sure, somebody could acquire self-confidence by having really small amounts of faith in themselves. But a person can also carry out the same acts absent faith. They need only carry out acts with doubt. For example: whenever I loan somebody something, I have no faith that they will return it. In fact, I’m generally doubtful beyond available evidence. But yet, I still lend things out! Why? Because I’m capable of acting without certainty, and because I can rationally determine that the risk of not getting it back is worth the potential benefit of improving my relations with others. (I also never lend anything out I coudn’t stand losing.) Similarly, a person with low self-esteem can make actions with no faith in their success, and observe success, and thereby add to the stock of evidence that they can be successful. By rinsing and repeating this, a person can improve their self-esteem, not by faith, but by gradually proving their worth to themselves. Personally I believe this is the way it usually happens in cases of incremental improvements in self-esteem, since I’ve had low self esteem before and when you do, you don’t have faith in yourself. (Pretty much by definition.) Based on that, and the observation that people in general seem pretty quick to incorporate negative evidence about themselves into their perception of self-worth, which you wouldn’t expect of faith-based self-worth, I don’t really believe that most people derive their self-esteem from faith.
Relating this to the debate at hand, I basically think that “believing in yourself” faith events (which I never have heard about until now) aren’t that common a thing, and I find it hard to believe that it contributes all that much value to the world, as these things go. Feel free to present evidence otherwise, but merely showing people who have demonstrated improvements in self-esteem, isn’t going to cut it unless you can demonstrate that faith was a not-insignificant reason for the improvement.
This half is merely a restatement of your general of your general “can’t be compared” argument, and doesn’t seem specific to the question of non-denial vs. denial faith. I shall address the general argument below.
How much of religion do you think is disproven by a correct translation of the Bible, or an unclouded reading of it and understanding of who wrote it and when? You would probably be able to demonstrate that the different writers had different motivations, and that not all of them could possibly have been speaking for a consistent God all the time. You could probably even demonstrate that a given writer was inconsistent beween different parts of his writings.
But could you prove that any given writer, at any given verse, wasn’t inspired by and/or speaking accurately?
Would a preacher be able to cherry pick the bible, assemble a consistent set of beliefs, declare that he was inspired by god as to which scriptures were true, and that rest are uninspired (provably so by contradiction with the ‘inspired writings’). Would such a preacher be unable to find like-minded or persuadable followers?
Such a preacher would be able to discard any biblical message he wants, including anything preaching tolerance for homosexuals, blacks, women, etcetera. Given that this pretty much happens today, even without the granted ability to apocryphize verses and books you don’t like, I don’t see how demonstrating that the bible is imperfectly inspired is going to reign in the interpreters.
it will, however, get rid of those pesky literalists, militant creationists, and anoying anti-evolutionists, allowing those debates to end. That alone might be enough to make such people nicer to live with. (As long as they’re not focussing on the bits about stoning unbelievers, anyway.)
Is nobel personally responsible for all the evil made possible by his invention of dynamite? No. Is Einstein responsible for all the evil made possible by his work in atomic theory? No. Are the persons of faith who founded organizations responsible for all the good done by organizations they founded?..
I say no. The good of the red cross and the AA and all them is based primarily in the actions of the persons who contribute to them. And I don’t believe that all or even most of those acts can be attributed to faith. I think that a lot of people who donate do it only because their preacher told them to, yes. But I think far more of them do it because they personally are inclined to such behavior. Perhaps it’s a whim. Perhaps it’s motivated by other factors. (Like, I don’t believe that all that blood given on 9-11 was inspired by faith. Sympathy and solidarity, more likely.)
This would be why I stick to examples where we know that faith was involved. And it’s they’re easier to find in large numbers than the good guys. Ever wonder why? There’s two major reasons.
Firstly, you see, there’s a fundamental difference between good acts and opinions, and evil acts and opinions. Good acts and opinions you don’t have to justify. Evil acts and opinions you do; if you don’t convince yourself that your actions are justified, you’ll experience guilt, fear, and an inhibiting lack of motivation; and if you don’t convince the people around you that your actions and opinions are justified, you’ll experience unpopularity, ostracization, abuse, prison, or maybe even death, depending on various factors.
Faith is an excellent justifier. Heck, it’s unconstrained by reality! (Or loosely constrained, if you want to step back from the handful of things that can be proven false, which includes no moral positions.) If you have faith that it’s okay to kill your neigbor, then that’s all the convincing you need. So, faith levels the playing ground at a personal level; unlike the case where faith is absent, evil actions can now be completely justified, easily.
But that’s only a small problem, things get much worse when religion is involved. Religion supplies groups of people who are like-minded thinkers, bound by a similar set of faith beliefs. Within this group, you can act on these beliefs, and the group will encourage and support you. When the beliefs promote good behavior, the group promotes it - though it was certainly acceptible to do good things even absent religion and faith. When the beliefs promote value-neutral behavior (ie: praying, attending church, wearing specializd clothes) the group promotes it (as opposed to the mild reisistance one usually gets for doing odd but harmless things). And when the beliefs promote evil behavior… the group promotes it, in direct contrast with what they’d do if they weren’t all in camp with you.
So:
Good acts are somewhat more approved of if supported by the religion.
Neutral acts are more approved of if supported by the religion.
Bad acts get a huge increase in approval if supported by the religion.
This looks like a fast road to value-minus to me.
Factor two is: I don’t believe that metaphorically “saving” a life is as good as actaully taking a life is bad.
This is a personal opinion; you may disagree. But the way I see it, you can make a live person dead, but you can’t make a dead person alive. So the best you can do is make an almost-dead person alive, which would be almost as good as killing one person is bad. However, relatively few people individually nurse a person back from the brink of death, so instead you pull out examples such as guiding a person back from alcoholism. Well, that’s good, but it’s not as good as killing someone is bad. Even weaker, you have the examples of persons giving to charity. Well, that’s good, but unless you give a lot of money it’s not even positive-value an action as helping the alcoholic was, and is nowhere near as good as killing somebody is bad.
So, when one even theorizes about the numbers, the good acts don’t add up as quickly as the bad ones to, since it’s really quite easy to do a really horrible bad act, wereas most really good good acts take a fair amount of time and effort to get done. One little idealogical war where a fifty or sixty thousand people get slaughtered is a more significant evil than millions of charitable donations can account for, in my eyes. And there have been far more people than that killed in the name of unjustified belief.
So it’s not “yeah but look at the crusades. religion bad.” It’s “Look at the crusades; that tops the Red Cross, pretty much on its own. And there’s lots more where that came from.”
I’m not sure it’s even possible to find instances or categories of positive faith events that I find significant enough to balance the evil of even one senseless war. Maybe the actions of great persons whose actions significantly and specifically improved life for generations following…but how many are there, faith-based or otherwise?
The division doesn’t matter. You don’t have stats indicating that the 90 are better or better off than the 10; absent reason to believe otherwise, we would have to assume that the proportions of good and bad are equally distributed per capita, on average. If that’s all you know then the 90/10 tells precisely you nothing; it could be 60/40 or 50/50 or 100/0 or 0/100 and it’d all be the same: in all cases absent other information we assume that the good and evil are distributed proportionately on either side of the colon. Which would give faith exactly zero value.
However, as we noted, there is a good reason to suspect that the 90 is more evil than the 10: the 10 have a natural bias against evil which is present but diluted in the 90 by the ability of faith to support evil freely. Multiply this difference by the comparative ease of doing great evil as opposed to the difficulty of doing equivalent good, and you start to expect to see things like repeated historical examples of whole groups doing evil, balanced only by a scattering of less potent acts by small groups or disparate individuals.
I dismissed the 90-10 argument because it literally tells us nothing, due to a complete lack of a statistical ‘value’ information about the acts of the ninety or the ten. I have not dismissed your argument putting the red cross and the AA (and other good effects) on the scale opposite heinous murders, racial oppression, and brutal war (and other bad effects). I merely think that you have yet to reasonably demonstrate that both sides of the argument balance. To me it looks like you’re putting a large amount of feathers and pieces of packing popcorn (several tons worth) against an equal or even perhaps somewhat smaller number of lead weights and medium-sized boulders (several hundred tons worth). You’re going to need to put something more substantial on the ‘good’ side of the scale (or persuasively demonstrate a flaw in my personal system of assessing the value of actions :dubious: ) to make me even question my position. Not impossible, I suppose. But you’ll need to have something more up your sleeve than you’re currently showing.
(You might say that, in my view, reality has the bias, not me.)
Oh? 
Anyway, let’s look at your *current * definition: “the difference between where your evidence takes you and your level of certainty.”
How do you measure “where your evidence takes you”? What are the units of measurement, and are they the same as those for “your level of certainty” so that you can calculate the “difference”?
Also, do you think that evidence has a life of its own, that it somehow “takes you” somewhere, regardless of your interpretation of the evidence?
Perhaps you should go back to one of the dictionary definitions.
Brevity, friend, brevity. Basically what you’ve said is that you do not interpret certain actions as faith. Okay. We look at life’s events differently.
Not the point at all. It’s not a matter of disproving anything and there is no correct translation of the Bible.
More later
Are you sure? Cuz I could have sworn that word had a lot of other connotations and baggage that went along with it. Like I said before, and you ignored btw, ‘Supreme Being’ is a very general description.
This is bordering on insulting. You wanna claim that we don’t have a grasp on theology then you better stop doing things like calling the Tao a god.
God, a god, the god, who cares? If you’re going to split hairs in your argument, then you should tell us beforehand. Dropping the word god, and then declaring later ‘oh I meant this specific type of god’ is moving the goalpost.
Gosh, I was just thinking something almost exactly like this. I’m trying to understand what you’re talking about, but you’re making it really hard when you jump around in definitions like that.
Memo - To: The Pot, From: The Kettle, Re: color
:rolleyes:
“where your evidence takes you” = unjustified confidence
“where your evidence takes you” = justified uncertainty
While my definitions and understandings of things have been known to shift and evolve over the course of a discussion, it doesn’t generally happen this fast (except for that one time I declared I’d had an epiphany). I’m merely using different words for the same concept. To keep my fingers from being bored. There’s some risk of confusion, but I didn’t think it was that bad.
Also note that there doen’t have to be units of measure available for there to be a difference. We’re reasonably confident that happy is happier than sad and less happy than ecstatic, even though we have no units for happiness.
And your interpretation of the evidence is how it takes you where it takes you.
But I’m not good at brevity!
I look forward to hearing about what your point is, then. And just to be clear: Are we talking about actual, observed real-world effects of this faith, or the speculated what-if world where all people have this faith? (It makes a difference in applying the discussion back to the OP if you get to speculate a happy world where dogs and cats life together and everyone gets along.)
And are we merely talking about people who choose not to believe things contrary to evidence they’ve actually encountered, or ones that go actively hunting potential contrary evidence and will not rest until they’re certain that there is none? These are different sorts of people, and I think most people are far to lazy to do things the second way. It sounds like a lot of work!
(There’s no correct translation of the bible? :dubious: )
I assume that you didn’t mean to use “where your evidence takes you” in both cases, but I don’t know what you would consider to be the correct wording.
I’ll await your clarification of this point.
Any chance of responding to the post in question?
No pressure. 
:smack:
“your level of certainty” = unjustified confidence
“where your evidence takes you” = justified uncertainty
(darned copy-pasting-in-a-hurry errors…)
And I haven’t really been avoiding you; it’s just that I consider the question of ‘how do people evaluate evidence’ to be somewhat tangential to the subject of determining the value of faith as a whole, as opposed to the blatantly-on-OP discussion I’m having with cosmosdan. I can’t respond to everyone at once; I type slow.
(And I couldn’t resist responding to Scylla. I’m weak, I know.)
I’ll try to set aside some time later to lay out some thoughts on evidence assessment and belief construction. (Hopefully today; if not then over the weekend.)
Very general yes, but appropriate. Once we accept that definition, we can argue about the supreme being’s specific attributes, get it? Expecting me to justify my position by dead religions is sort of silly IMO. If we are going to allow science and philosophy to progress, why not theology? The main religion that we call ‘Pagan’ in this day and age, Hinduism even has a notion of a supreme being. The ‘Tao’ is such a supreme being, but it focuses more on the verb than the noun, which is of course very eastern in contrast with the west that is more obsessed with nouns. In the east it is the states that are subordinate to the movement, and in the west it is the movement that is subordinate to the things. From the Taoist perspective matter is confluence of energy forming a solid yet still transient state. In the west we measure movement in terms of forces being exerted upon it by matter. Now, with that in mind we get into whether the observance of these ultimate states is worthy of personification or whether that is mere projection within the mind of the observer.
Yes, but sad/happy/ecstatic are intrinsically comparative. How do you compare “where your evidence takes you”? (Does that question even make sense?) What are the possibilities: here, there, nowhere, and everywhere?
The “level of certainty” is similar to your “sad/happy/ecstatic” example: There’s a range of certainty and doubt. But how do you determine the *difference * between a level of certainty and “where the evidence takes you”?
Okay. Sort of. 
You had said that your definition of *faith * is: “the difference between where your evidence takes you and your level of certainty.”
With your new equations, it becomes: the difference between justified uncertainty and unjustified confidence.
We seem to be going backwards. Or, maybe, in circles.
Now I need your clarification of justified/unjustified and confidence/uncertainty, along with some way of evaluating them to determine the “difference”.
Seriously, why not go with one of the dictionary definitions, or a combination of them? I offered seven, and you added one, (or two). I can get more, if you want:
- confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another’s ability.
- belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
- belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
- belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty.
- a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith.
- the obligation of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, etc.: Failure to appear would be breaking faith.
- the observance of this obligation; fidelity to one’s promise, oath, allegiance, etc.: He was the only one who proved his faith during our recent troubles.
And yours:
8. firm belief in something for which there is no proof
and your modifed version,
8a. firm belief in something for which there is no compelling evidence
I know that you needed to deal with the issue of what is “compelling” and I’m guessing that’s what led you to another attempt at defining faith.
BTW, for 8a, you said:
And previously, you had said:
Which of the seven definitions that I offered *excludes * “the cases of people having faith in deities”?
#3 explicitly mentions God and #5 explictly mentions religious belief. The other five seem to include “persons having faith in a deity”.
Do you mean that you will reject any definition that *includes * the cases of people not having faith in deities? Or do you mean something else?
This “we” that calls Hinduism the main ‘Pagan’ religion-who would be included in that, exactly?
If a something is onl rational in terms of a given viewpoint, than it is not.
In order to be rational, it must be intrinsically so.
If something appears to be rational only from a given viewpoint, than it either isn’t or your looking at the wrong thing.
Which one is God?
Okay, here’s the confusion, which is entirely my fault. “Where your evidence takes you” was meant to be shorthand for “where on the continuous range between absolute uncertainty and absolute certainty a rational (or otherwise non-faith-based) examination of the evidence takes you”. I thought it was already clear (between me and cosmosdan, anyway) that we were specifically speaking about the credibity of given facts; such credibility being a continuum with only one dimension of possible travel.
(I’m addressing this slightly backwards: from the perspective of how evidence effects your belief in a given fact, not which facts may be inferred from a given piece of evidence. This seems to be a reasonable way to approach the question of faith, which is always framed relative to specific beliefs. I’m not sure if that clarifies anything or not.)
If you will imagine this graphically, picture the continuum of credibility (for an arbitrary specific fact) with two marks on it. One marks the level of certainty that can be reasonably inferred from a rational or otherwise non-faith-based analysis of the evidence. When speaking of something that cannot be definitively proven to be true or false, such as whether God exists, this mark will likely lie somewhere in the middle or towards the low end of the credibility continuum. The other mark indicates the actual level of actual belief the person has. For some people this will be all the way at the far end; they are dead certain that God exists, evidence or no evidence. For others this mark may not be at the very end; they may not be perfectly certain.
First mark = justified belief.
Second mark = actual belief.
I consider the difference between these two marks to be “faith”. The bigger the difference, the more faith the person is employing in believing the fact to that unjustified degree. If there is little or no evidence in favor of the fact (or the evidence argues against it) and the person is highly certain of it anyway, then a lot of faith is being employed. If the person is only slightly more certain than is merited by the evidence, then very little faith is being employed. If the person is exactly as certain as is merited by the evidence, then they have no faith. (Not about that belief, anyway.)
I hope this makes things clearer about how I personally define the word and concept of ‘faith’.
“Confidence” is, uh, confidence. The level of certainty held by a specific individual about the truth of a specific proposition. (The ‘second mark’, above.)
‘justified’ is an adjective; the noun here is ‘belief’. Justified belief is that quantity of belief which can be rationally inferred from evidence (or other non-faith sources). (That is, the ‘second mark’, above.)
I’m almost afraid to ask: are we clear on these terms now? I warn you in advance, I may at any random point use slightly different terms to refer to the same concepts if I believe them to describe the same thing to a degree of similarity sufficient for understanding. (I get tired of using exactly the same words over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over; sorry.)
Actually no; I’ve had the same concept of what faith is for a while now (at least as long as you and I have been exchanging posts) and it hasn’t really fluctuated much in the meantime. The presentation of 8a was based on your request for a clarification of what I thought “no proof” was intended to mean by M-W; since swapping in a term with its meaning doesn’t change the definition, there is no modification of meaning in spite of the word difference. My comment to cosmosdan was meant to refer to exactly the same definition of faith as well. Just because I use different arrangements of words doesn’t mean I’m referring to different concepts.
And why don’t I go with a dictionary definition? I do; 8 is my definition, to the extent that the little soundbyte captures the concept I have explained at length above. 2 would work as well only if you interpret it as allowing for the person to simultaneously entertain a level of belief that is based on proof, where the excess belief is the faith, but 2 can also be read as restricting faith only to cases where there is no proof at all, and I do not accept that definition.
1 is too specific (restricts to beliefs in the reliability of people and things); 3 is too specific (restricts to religion); 4 is too general (it doesn’t exclude justified beliefs); and 5, 6, and 7 are talking about completely different and separate things (the organizations of religion, committments (somewhat archaic usage), and reliability (somewhat archaic usage), respectively).
Even though it didn’t compell me to change anything, I do admit that “compelling” could probably use futher examination, if only as an intellectual excersize. First though, I think I want to make sure we’re clear and roughtly in agreement on all the above stuff. (Also it’s starting to get a little late.) If we assume for the moment that “the available evidence” magically confers a specific level of justified belief on a given proposition, then are we clear and in approximate agreement on all the other terms and meanings here? Or do I need to adjust something to make it mutually palateable?
Since you ask, definitions 1, 5, 6, 7, and possibly 4 exclude the belief of whether a diety’s exists or not.
But actually I mentioned that 8 met my prerequisite because I’d previously stated that I was indeed accepting it as a prerequisite for my accepting of any definitionof “faith”, so clearly the one I accepted needed to be checked against that prereq.
And the main impetus for my mentioning that prerequisite in the first place was nothing to do with you at all; it was actually for cosmosdan’s benefit, in case he is reading the posts not addressed to him. Given his druthers he would like to redefine faith to exclude faith that requires denial. Well, how much denial is denial? Is denial required to ignore a lack of evidence? Is denial required to ignore the presence other alternative explanations? Is denial required to utterly disregard Occam’s razor; and other rational cautions against unjustified belief? If the answers to all these questions is ‘yes’, then faith that rejects denial automatically rejects all God beliefs, among with many other beliefs besides; leaving only categories of faith where there is enough rational evidence to justify belief independently, and faith is spent in merely believing already reasonable things a little more than is justified by the evidence. (Like, being absolutely certain that the sun will rise tomorrow or that you won’t be struck and killed by a meteor if you go outside, instead of being merely almost absolutely certain.)
As you can see, that would totally change the face of the question, not to mention deviating wildly from the common usage of the word. I don’t know if cosmosdan is willing or wants to go that far, but whether he is or not, as long as we’re discussing definitions anyway I’m going to state pre-emptively that I’m not going to accept definitions that far from the norm. (Though I believe he’s expressed willingness to discuss denail-faith in addition to his preferred brand, so even if he moves the goalposts, it’s merely as part of a side discussion specifically about the new goalposts.)
Oh, and speaking of cosmosdan:
Hey, cosmosdan! I sort of missed this on the first read of it; am I interpreting this incorrectly or are you actually saying that there are no actions that you do not interpret as faith? That there is no such thing as actions based only on available evidence?
If you actually believe this and not just regarding the essentially irrelevant “hairline amounts” sort of faith that is commonly used to disregard solipsism and whatnot, then hoo boy do we look at life’s events differently!
I think the only way in which we move forward is by taking these consistent tiny hops. We may not have certainty about the details and outcome of every action, or every choice but if we desire progress, personal and for society, we must act in faith that what we hope for is possible, and a certainty that our unseen goals are a within our grasp. I see that as faith and an essential element for mankind. If your response is “I don’t see it as faith” then it’s something we don;t agree on and there is no evidence or likely argument that will convince the other.
I think a more accurate phrase to capture my meaning would be there is no correct interpretation of the Bible, although I doubt scholars would agree on translation either. It is the undeniable nature of the Bible that the reader must decide what it means for them. If faith does not deny the evidence then people would have to face up to the fact that the Bible is a book written by men and every meaning they declare is not “God’s will” but there own. When people are made to take personal responsibility for their beliefs and choices rather than try and justify it by pointing to the “word of God” in some old book, then they would also be required to defend them with evidence. Wouldn’t that be helpful?
Excuse me but what the hell does this have to do with anything? Honestly, it appears to be one more attempt to minimize the positive effect of faith. It’s a pretty lame attempt at that. I’m not arguing anything about the founders of select organizations. I’m talking about the many many people who operate within those organizations over the decades. Each individual who goes to serve others in a soup kitchen or a low cost health care facility is operating on faith. Every alcoholic who asks his higher power to help him is doing it on faith. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize there are probably millions of examples like these. That is, unless you’d just rather ignore them or declare them not real faith in order to support your own presupposed disposition on the subject
And I say bullshit. What about the people who actually do the work? What about those who volunteer to help others? What about soup kitchens and shelters and hospitals supported and run by churches? I am in no way claiming every motivation has to be faith but for you to rephrase and minimize in this way to try and support your argument while doing just the opposite with examples that support your position is disingenuous in the extreme. It’s so obviously biased that it becomes ludicrous and frankly pretty uninteresting.
Please see previous response.
Who is this we who knows faith was involved?
<snip>
for brevity’s sake.
Sure I get it. When people are motivated by greed for power or money to use the cloak of religion to serve their evil intent then it’s obviously a problem with faith having a negative effect, not greed. When people sacrifice their time and money to help others because their religious beliefs teach that such behavior is proper behavior then it’s probably something other than faith. They’re just that way regardless. I don’t see how any reasonable person wouldn’t see that. It could be a tad bit biased. Probably not though.
Well there you have it.
Please remember that my original point is that we have no real way to measure the bad effect of faith and the good to make a realistic comparison, while you said
even a cursory examination showed bad faith far out in the lead.
My point is that while it’s very easy to point to some infamous events and blame them on faith, even though they may not be faith motivated, it’s not so easy to count all the day to day acts of kindness charity and sacrifice that have a positive effect on real people’s lives. How many homeless people fed and sheltered does it take to equal a lost life? How many saved alcoholics? How much suffering is alleviated by church funded medical help? You obviously have an opinion but what you don’t have are any realistic statistics or any way of realistically gathering them.
Totally unjustified. How about hundreds of millions of acts of kindness, charity and compassion, preformed by hundreds of millions of believers over the centuries? How about those who sacrifice their lives for others because of their faith?
Of course you don’t. Because you’ve already decided, so you downplay, dismiss and minimize every example offered. The fact is without any serious question and requiring little imagination, faith based charitable work such as the ones I mentioned and more, involve hundreds of thousands of people over generations affecting millions of lives, and even tens of millions. If you can’t see that it’s because you willfully choose not to. Even at that I don’t make the reverse of your unsupported claim. I don’t claim that it’s obvious that faith has a more positive effect. I can see that it’s more complex than that. Not all good deeds are done based on faith. Then again when greed uses religion as a disguise is it faith to blame or greed? I really don’t know. I’m pretty confident you don’t either.
<snip> again, for brevity’s sake.
No I definitely wouldn’t say that. I’m usually amused when atheists insist their own unfounded and largely unsupported beliefs are based on reality and reason but now it’s just getting old.
I haven’t even the foggiest notion how you got that interpretation from my comment.
I did say certain actions rather than every action didn’t I?
Well, I knew the patient was ill, but now that you’ve started the surgery, it will be easier to diagnose the specific illness. First, let’s examine the exposed organs.
These are the entities that you’ve identified:
- continuum of credibility
- an arbitrary specific fact
- the evidence of that “fact”
- first mark = justified belief = a rational or otherwise non-faith-based analysis of that evidence
- second mark = level of actual belief
Also, you refer to “certainty”, and “certain”, “highly certain”, “dead certain” and “not perfectly certain”.
Is all of the above correct so far? If not, please identify and correct any errors.
If yes, please clarify how *certainty * is related to credibility. Is each a dimension in a two-dimensional model, or do both words refer to same dimension?
(BTW, here’s a reminder of one of your posts:
By using “X” as a variable and referring to “the difference”, you present your definition as being mathematical, or even … scientific. I think that this is the start of the problems with your definition.)
Also, please explain how the location of the first mark is determined. Specifically, what does “a rational or otherwise non-faith-based analysis of the evidence” consist of?
As a way of clarifying the method for placing the first mark, I propose two extended analogies for you, and I would like you to choose one for discussion purposes:
- Given the motion of the Sun across the sky, how do you conclude that the Earth revolves around the Sun?
- Given a gun as evidence, how do you determine that I murdered a man?
I’m okay with explorining either option as a way of determining whether your definition works in an example other than one that deals with faith in god. (After all, your definition makes no mention of god(s).)
Please let me know.
Thanks.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? If something has these attributes then it can be called the Supreme Being? See, you have to show it’s existance before you can argue about whether it likes chocolate or vanilla.
Er, huh? What dead religion did I expect you to justify your position by?
Because it isn’t a body of actual knowledge? Studying about religions is one thing. But any organization, movement, philosophy, etc. has to verify it’s beliefs or ideas before it can be knowledge. It’s one thing to know that these people believed this at this time in this place. That is knowledge. But the thing that they believed in, until verified, is not.
I don’t understand why you call the Tao a being at all. It doesn’t make sense. Taoists do not personify the Tao, why are you?