quote:One such perspective is that life sure would be hard. Or, "I've been believing the opposite my entire life." or, PROVE it to me - what? You can't prove god, or that I exist? Then it's all stupid anyways, and so I don't care. Or, I don't want to believe in God, because if he exists, he sure is mean...
I can see you've beaten up a lot of straw men lately.
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In case there was ambiguity, my "indeed" was to KoM's comment about the argument being refuted.
As far as Armoth's comment: it depends what he means by 'perspective'. For example, I don't have a problem with someone updating an argument based on new scientific knowledge. For example, one might have thought that the First Cause argument was strengthened by the Big Bang (it's not). I do agree that it is very hard to come up with an entirely knew argument for the existence of god.
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: Right. What I offer is not a proof, only a large probability.
But a probability large enough to be compelling and obligating.
I think you will find it very hard to meaningfully measure what is probable or not. How would you argue for the high probability?
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: You know, I can't think of a line any any of the creeds that says the resurrection is evidence of Jesus' divinity. How'd you come to pick that one?
Without the miracles performed by Jesus, and in particular the resurrection, the whole thing dissolves into another set of moderately ethical guidelines with no supernatural content, such as anyone with a modicum of charisma and a desire for attention might preach. To "have faith" in such a mish-mash is quite un-necessary; you could just say that you try to follow the guidelines and be done.
So that's an argument for including the resurrection. How is it an argument for requiring the idea that the resurrection is evidence of divinity?
I reason thusly: If you do not give some sort of evidence for divinity - if you just say "Jesus was divine" without further argument, as indeed kmb just did - then you're just following fashion. I don't call that conviction, I call it rubbing blue mud in your bellybutton. The resurrection is the most spectacular miracle, it is the one that demonstrates mastery over death ("I bring good news!") and I think you might also find that most believers who are not sophisticated theologians would quote it if asked to give evidence that Jesus was a god. (At least, I hope they would. I admit that I'm very prone to overestimating the intelligence of average people.) It is, further, central to the entire sacrifice-for-your-sins theme; Jesus would hardly be Jesus without the crucifixion, and the resurrection is the miracle that overcomes the punishment and original sin.
I can in principle see that someone might advance a different argument for Jesus's divinity, but it's rather harder to see why they would bother. The promise of Christianity as practiced by the mass of its believers is forgiveness of sins and eternal life; without the resurrection, you have instead got pie in the sky promised by an above-average conman.
I realise this is not the religion you practice, nor your conception of Christianity. That is not a problem for my argument, which is precisely that you are not a Christian as the term is properly understood.
So if a person believed that Jesus was divine and that he was resurrected, but believed that God could, in theory, resurrect anyone, divine or not, and therefore the resurrection is not proof of Jesus divinity, they're just following fashion and not really a Christian?
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quote:So if a person believed that Jesus was divine and that he was resurrected, but believed that God could, in theory, resurrect anyone, divine or not, and therefore the resurrection is not proof of Jesus divinity, they're just following fashion and not really a Christian?
I think that's picking a fairly minor nit, Dana. "Divinity" in this case is obviously being used to mean "extra-sooper-specialness," not necessarily "actually and fully a god."
That said, KoM certainly deserves to be the recipient of nit-picking, so pick away.
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Seems KoM is practicing the no true scotsman fallacy. Kind of turns things around, doesn't it?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: "Divinity" in this case is obviously being used to mean "extra-sooper-specialness," not necessarily "actually and fully a god."
That wouldn't be consistant with his criteria, I think.
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Meh, edge cases. I'd classify such a person as Christian on the grounds that they believe in miracles and that Jesus was the recipient of one, pending further discussion of what they thought the basis of their faith was. In any case I care less about making the definition super consistent than about making it useful.
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: When we talk about epistemology, we need to analyze what is a source of truth and what is not. Ultimately, it's all going to come down to what each person believes is a reality for him.
That's not the value of epistemology, nor is that what it comes down to.
EXPLAINED
quote:That's the problem though, given the extremely fallible nature of human memory (and I mean extremely - one of my professors was able to implant totally false memories in research participants just by suggesting their parents had told him about the event), and our tendencies to both more easily remember things that agree with our points of view (... Read Moreconfirmation bias) and overemphasize certain events over others (attentional bias), we have a tendency to believe more strongly in things we see or hear about that agree with our own ideas, even if they're no more likely than even chance. Without subjecting ideas to statistical analysis, double blind studies, and rigorous controls of some kind we're depending on individuals to be utterly unbiased in their examination of the facts, and humans never evolved to be unbiased - biases are really useful for day-to-day survival, but not for logic.
epistemological sciences are differentiated from casual, personal, anecdotal, etc interpretations because they compensate for how ridiculously fantasy and fallacy prone our own interpretations trend towards.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Meh, edge cases. I'd classify such a person as Christian on the grounds that they believe in miracles and that Jesus was the recipient of one, pending further discussion of what they thought the basis of their faith was. In any case I care less about making the definition super consistent than about making it useful.
I would argue that such "edge cases" (of which that was only one example) constitute a large percentage of Christians over the entire history of Christianity.
But it appears that your definition boils down to "people my favorite arguments apply to are really Christian, anyone else is just following along." I can see where that would be useful, I guess.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: In any case I care less about making the definition super consistent than about making it useful.
I think that a definition that cuts out a large number of people who call themselves 'Christians' from being Christians is not a very useful one.
A definition that only cuts out a few percent is probably workable, but I think yours eliminates 30-50%, if not more.
It's about the difference between what things should be, and what they are. You might argue that Christians should be defined by claiming to believe based on evidence that all those points or true, but your 'should' isn't more important than the way the Christian population defines itself, and they include a lot of people that you say 'shouldn't' be included.
Your argument is not very distant from one on another thread, where one pesron is arguing that marriage should be primarily about having children, and everyone else is saying "But it's not, because lots of married people don't think that their marriages are primarily about that. Most of them think it's about love between adults, and kids come after that."
I think that the number of self-defiend Christians you'd exclude, and the numbers of self-described married couples Clive'd exclude are comparable.
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If we were talking about civil rights for Christians, sure. (I'm agin them, as you no doubt knew.) But in fact this is an internal classification scheme for myself, to use
a) When arguing with theists; do I need to educate them in the importance of evidence (as with kmb) or can I take that as a foundation and hammer on the quality of the evidence (as with BlackBlade and Armoth)? b) When I become dictator; is there hope for a re-education camp, or should it just be straight to the biodiesel vats?
That said, perhaps I wrote the requirements a bit hastily; the real distinction is between basing beliefs on evidence (Christian/Moslem/atheist) and basing them on whatever happens to be around you (fellow-traveler). I then got a bit sidetracked by having to limit it to Christians instead of theists, and thus needing to include the divinity-of-Jesus bits.
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So...pretty much narrowing it down to whoever needs evidence you can refute. Well that makes it easy.
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I'm still willing to argue with fellow-travelers, you'll note. The question is what we're arguing about. Incidentally, have you come up with a distinction between "having faith" and "making things up" yet?
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What do you claim that I have "made up"? And again, any evidence for this "fellow-travel" theory of yours?
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If you believe X, and cannot offer evidence for it, then you have made up X, possibly with help from other people. I don't say that your religion is particularly original.
Evidence for fellow-traveling seems rather good: The hypothesis is that there are people who claim to be Christians and to base their beliefs on evidence; and there are also people who claim to be Christians and not to base their beliefs on evidence. Since we have explicit examples of both in this very thread, I must say I don't feel any great need for more data.
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How are you using evidence here? Scientific proof type evidence or Tresopaxish reasons to believe something that are not proof type evidence?
And how does it follow that something one cannot prove must be made up? You got proof for that?
And what is your evidence - or even reasons for believing - regarding my motivation for believing what I believe? Or are you just making that up? Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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The kind of evidence that, you say, "it's not about".
quote:And how does it follow that something one cannot [show evidence for] must be made up?
Fixed that for you. Simple: If it were neither made up nor based in evidence, where did it come from? There is no third option. Take the story of the little pigs and the big bad wolf; either this is based on a real incident, for which the original story-teller's tale is evidence; or else someone made it up. Would you like to offer a third option?
quote:And what is your evidence - or even reasons for believing - regarding my motivation for believing what I believe?
Observation of primate behaviour in other circumstances.
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All sorts of other options, inspiration, revelation. Records of the original story tellers are reason to believe; they are not scientific evidence.
Observations of primate behavior. That is not terribly convincing on its face. Do you wan't to elaborate (and give evidence) as to how your observation applies to me? Or not. Up to you.
Can I use "observation of primates" as evidence, too?
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quote:If it were neither made up nor based in evidence, where did it come from? There is no third option.
There's an enormous distinction between not having evidence for something and not having evidence that you can show someone.
You can hammer away at this as long and as loudly as you want, but you're never going to make them the same. Your attempt to turn "You can't be sure that X is true" into "X isn't true" is never going to be successful.
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I'm comfortable with uncertainty, evidence that isn't conclusive, and to a limited extent even evidence from personal experience, making due allowance for its known unreliability. But kmb is making the assertion that evidence does not matter at all, which is quite a different matter.
quote:All sorts of other options, inspiration, revelation. Records of the original story tellers are reason to believe; they are not scientific evidence.
Pardon me, they certainly are. You appear to be confusing 'evidence' with 'proof' or perhaps with 'conclusive evidence'.
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quote:I don't have to present evidence - nor could I. It isn't about evidence. Not everything is about evidence.
quote:The things I believe are true. Prove they aren't.
quote:Those people may have needed the evidence of miracles. I don't. Which is good because what I have is stories of miracles written down by people who heard stories of miracles. I believe those stories, but they are not evidence.
quote:Jesus would still be God without the miracles.
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: [QUOTE] I consider people Christians (or Muslims, Jews, whatever) if they rest their belief on some evaluation of the available evidence.
Being Jewish is not a matter of belief. Judaism has specific laws that determine who is a Jew.
An interesting article, perhaps relevant
quote:Britain has nearly 7,000 publicly financed religious schools, representing Judaism as well as the Church of England, Catholicism and Islam, among others. Under a 2006 law, the schools can in busy years give preference to applicants within their own faiths, using criteria laid down by a designated religious authority.
By many standards, the JFS applicant, identified in court papers as “M,” is Jewish. But not in the eyes of the school, which defines Judaism under the Orthodox definition set out by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Because M’s mother converted in a progressive, not an Orthodox, synagogue, the school said, she was not a Jew — nor was her son. It turned down his application.
...
In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”
The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.
“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.” The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said.
There is the caveat that this is in the context of publicly funded schools (which may or may not be treated differently from privately funded schools).
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It sucks, but don't take public money if you don't want to have to live with stupid public rules.
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quote:Originally posted by Ace of Spades: No Orthodox Jew should ever refer to any rule as stupid.
Ace, I think what you said is incredibly offensive, and you never would have said it if we were face to face.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: So all the stuff that Tresopax was talking about, evidence or not evidence?
Tres has got the definition correct: "Evidence for X is that which moves you towards belief in X". He applies it wrongly, in that he took his pre-existing belief "Qualia are non-physical" and then applied "evidence by personal incredulity" (I don't see how these phenomena can be just electrons) to strengthen his pre-existing conclusion.
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Oh, I have a whole lifetime of stuff that "moves me towards belief". It is not generally transferable, though and each individual bit of stuff is sufficiently open to interpretation that, if I chose to, I could interpret it differently.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: Oh, I have a whole lifetime of stuff that "moves me towards belief". It is not generally transferable, though and each individual bit of stuff is sufficiently open to interpretation that, if I chose to, I could interpret it differently.
So you know that your evidence is not strong enough to cause belief in any other circumstance; but you assiduously believe anyway. Tell me, when you read 1984, did the concept of "doublethink" remind you of anything? To assert as truth that which you well know you had to consciously decide to be convinced of: This is a lie, and you a bald-faced liar.
And your case is actually worse than Orwell's imagination could come up with: A doublethinker who asserts the truth of X will ignore the quality of his evidence for X, but he acknowledges that evidence is necessary. He is merely careful to not to let himself know what the evidence actually is. You, on the other hand, are nowhere near as constrained by the demands of rationality: You baldly assert that evidence is irrelevant, conveniently sparing yourself the trouble of forgetting how bad yours is. Can you not see that this is evil? By your method, there is no need for torture to assert that two and two make five; no, you'll just acknowledge that two fingers on each hand do in fact make four, and discard this as irrelevant: "It's not about evidence"!
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quote:So you know that your evidence is not strong enough to cause belief in any other circumstance; but you assiduously believe anyway. Tell me, when you read 1984, did the concept of "doublethink" remind you of anything?
That isn't true. In many circumstances, I believe without evidence that can only be interpreted one way or that would be transferable enough to use as proof for someone else.
How do you know what Orwell's imagination could have come up with? Perhaps he thought of much worse things but was too horrified to share them? Not a reasonable explanation, but prove your hypothesis is correct.
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Here is the Orwell I was thinking of, related to doublethink but not exactly the same; it is in "Notes on Nationalism":
quote:When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
"In the sight of God"! Truly, a perfect phrase for describing your belief!
quote:Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events.
And, of course, "It's not about evidence".
quote:Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to FEEL that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him.
When you, calling yourself a Christian, say that if the Resurrection were shown not to have happened, this would not shake your faith - then I think a better fit to "uninterested in what happens in the real world" would be hard to find. For of course it's not about evidence.
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quote:So you know that your evidence is not strong enough to cause belief in any other circumstance; but you assiduously believe anyway. Tell me, when you read 1984, did the concept of "doublethink" remind you of anything?
That isn't true. In many circumstances, I believe without evidence that can only be interpreted one way or that would be transferable enough to use as proof for someone else.
Would you accept the "things that move you towards belief" as evidence for, let's say, the proposition that the Earth is round? You would not. Nor would you try to say "It can be interpreted other ways" or "It's not transferable"; because in all things other than religion, you know perfectly well that these are nitwit games which do not lead to truth.
quote:How do you know what Orwell's imagination could have come up with? Perhaps he thought of much worse things but was too horrified to share them?
Oh sure, attack a throwaway phrase unimportant to the actual argument. I don't care whether Orwell was capable of imagining the Escher drawing that passes for your mind. The point here is that you are behaving rather worse than the dystopic villains he did in fact portray.
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Nonsense. People take action with less "proof" that that all the time. Say, crossing the street. We put ourselves in the path of cars that could quite likely kill us on the assumption that they will stop at stop signs and traffic lights. We even have evidence to the contrary. We know that cars don't always stop yet we trust our lives to the belief that they will because most of the time it works for us.
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Could you please try to distinguish between "Good enough evidence" and "complete, 100% proof"? We very reasonably believe that cars will stop at stop signs this time because they do so in 99.9% of cases, and we have run the experiment many times. To cross the street in these circumstances is not an act of faith, it is a weighing of evidence against costs. But your 'evidence' is - you admit this - of the same order as that of a pedestrian in some third-world hellhole, where stop signs are completely optional and what would otherwise be the brake pedal is connected instead to the horn, who decides that nonetheless, the oncoming truck will stop for him. This is a leap of faith from insufficient evidence, and if you weren't emotionally attached to your beliefs you would call it stupid.
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We make huge life changing decisions based on our belief in the reliability of the love of a partner or spouse when evidence everywhere you look shows that such love is, as often as not, unreliable. We choose to rely on such love anyway because we are emotionally attached and because our lives are better because we do.
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Are they, indeed? All those divorced people - and their children - would say "I do" all over again, then, if given a chance to go back and re-decide?
Further, the analogy breaks down: People go into marriage with their eyes open, knowing that yes, love does fail, but willing to give it a try. They do not assert "I know that my wife/husband will love me until death; evidence has nothing to do with it" because they realise that it would be stupid.
And, finally: If other people behave in a silly manner, is that an excuse for you to do so?
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Also, IIRC, the marriage rate has been seen significant decreases, the age of first marriage has been increasing, and it would not surprise me if the number of pre-nupitals has increased in recent years.
It can not be said that people are not adjusting to the risks of marriage in this day and age.
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Suppose a jury were to say "We don't think the evidence shows this, but we're pretty sure he's guilty"; what do you call it? I call it dishonesty, lie, and deception, and it is precisely what you admit to doing.Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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What kind of evidence are we talking about again. The transferable, only can be interpreted one way kind of the reason enough to believe kind? Do we think the juries evidence shows something else? Are we talking about forcing other people (the defendant) to abide by evidence that is interpretable and non-transferable? Do you assume I do that?
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