quote:Originally posted by String: No, my default position is not whatever the minority wants. Being a Christian puts me in a HUGE majority.
It's too bad you didn't get from the context that that was a typo on my part. Read "majority," not "minority," and see if you can respond again in that light.
From your response though, I'm guessing I was right.
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quote:But religion will feed our spirits, and help us remain human even amongst the stars. It will provide social stability, and help us educate the next generations on both their rights and their responsibilities as human beings.
Will it?
Give it another 5 millenia. You never know... Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Your comparison to a Hatrack post serving as evidence for leprechauns is also pretty cheesy, for a variety of reasons you're already familiar with. One of them being that if someone claimed to have seen leprechauns in their garden in a Hatrack post, you would have a much higher reasonable standard of believing they were simply lying for laughs than you would if they claimed to have prayed and through prayer communicated with God, for example.
Wait, what? Why would I think so?
quote:How is it you are in a position to evaluate someone else's experience and judge whether it is weighty evidence or not? I'm not talking about specific cases which can be reasonably evaluated, I'm talking about the sweeping generalizations you routinely engage in on this topic. Kwea or Scott or myself are not just evaluating the evidence incorrectly, all religious people are.
When different people have very similar experiences but interpret them
a) differently and b) in accordance with the myth that happens to be prevalent in their own neighborhood,
then the reasonable conclusion is that their experiences just don't arise in the manner they claim. Thus, when your spiritual experience, or rather your interpretation of it, is directly contradicted by someone else's interpretation of his spiritual experience, then I conclude that the experiences are real, but what they're taken as evidence for is essentially random. In randomness is no information; there's no there there, to coin a phrase.
quote:'The evidence', by any fair standard you could possibly be using, neither supports nor does not support the existence of God, KoM. It simply doesn't. If you were agnostic as opposed to a militant atheist, though, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Yes, yes. There's a standard answer to this which you know perfectly well, so I don't know why you're even bothering to bring this up.
quote:This supposes, wrongly, that a given piece of evidence can reasonably only point towards one conclusion. That it cannot possibly point to more than one thing at a time.
The gestalt of all the evidence available to you gives you a unique maximum-likelihood hypothesis, which you are obliged to take as your current best guess. What you want to believe does not come into it, unless you are a monkey.
quote:I postulate that there are truths which can not be discovered by the scientific method. You are arguing that this postulate is false (or even evil) because it can't be explored scientifically.
You are mistaking 'using evidence and reason' for 'the scientific method'; the two are not the same. The scientific method is a much narrower category. One more time, and now if you don't get it I'm going to give up on you: Spiritual experiences are evidence, about which we can reason. To simply assert "I believe X", however, is not evidence, and is not a means to truth. If it were, then everyone who asserts their belief would agree on what they took on faith; since they contradict each other, they cannot possibly all be correct, and therefore do not have reliable knowledge. Nowhere have I required lab experiments to replicate spiritual results; all I desire is that people not jump to the conclusion they wanted, especially when - odd coincidence - that conclusion happens to be the socially acceptable one in their neighbourhood.
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Science is a perfectly good tool to examine religion. People who want to substantiat religious beliefs as more than simply personal choice frequently make this claim, but I don't think it actually holds any weight, upon examination.
What Truths do you propose are untestable scientifically, and by what means do people otherwise come to posess these Truths?
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: How do we determine what constitutes a "true belief"?
Reality testing.
What did you have in mind? Judging beliefs by the sincerity of believers, or how strongly believers like their beliefs?
quote:You start from the assumption that material truth is the only truth.
No, it's the only kind of claim that we can possibly verify or falsify. How can anyone know truth without a reliable way of detecting false?
You are still begging the question. You can't detect hydrogen with x-ray photo electron spectroscopy. That isn't evidence that hydrogen doesn't exit or isn't important or interesting.
X-ray photo electron spectroscopy can't detect fairies either. Does this mean that since x-ray photo electron spectroscopy can't detect everything, it's sound for me to conclude based on x-ray photo electron spectroscopy data that fairies exist?
If you are trying to say that x-ray photo electron spectroscopy:science :: science:other kinds of thinking, that still doesn't fly, becuase hydrogen is detectable with other scientific instruments whose accuracy is borne out by reality testing. That way of thinking which claims that Mohamamd was the last and best prophet if God has not yielded as many accurate and falsifiable claims as scientific instruments do, nor has any other religous belief system.
quote:I postulate that there are truths which can not be discovered by the scientific method.
Again, how can you determine if you've found a truth without a robust method of distinguishing truths from falsehoods?
Mohamamd can't be the last prophet if Jospeh Smith is a prophet too.
quote:You are arguing that this postulate is false because it can't be explored scientifically.
No, I'm arguing those postautles are 99.99999999999% likely to be wrong, and that as it's better to be neutral than to believe a false thing, those posulates shouldn't be held. And my conclusion isn't a postulate, it's an evidence-based conclusion based on the evidence of human history and psychology.
quote:The fact that your tool doesn't allow you to measure something, is not evidence its non-existence or its morality. Its evidence of inadequacy of the tool.
Okay, so how adequately does your religion answer the question of "Who was God's last prophet?
I would say that an "adequate" answer here has to be accurate. So how do you determine the accuracy of your answer? How would you know if your answer were flat out wrong?
If my soulmeter (which is just whatever I feel about you and your beliefs) tells me that you are a heretic, and it would be better for you to be tortured into repentance than to live in falseness, and to be condemend to eternal damnation in hell after you die, how would you measure the accuracy of my soulmeter?
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Before I answer that, let me ask another question, please: would you actually believe something other than, "It's a joke for laughs," if someone on Hatrack created a post which said, "I just came inside from seeing a leprechaun in my garden," and that person is otherwise, so far as you can tell, quite sane and non-delusional and had been behaving in similar fashion for as long as you had known them?
Would your first most likely explanation for the post be something other than, "Heh, this is a joke!"
quote:When different people have very similar experiences but interpret them...
How are you in a position to evaluate whether their experiences were very similar or not? Unless I'm mistaken, physics just as an example does not train one in finding and gauging the extent of insanity or delusion, and even folks actually trained and educated in doing so will tell you it's far from a sure thing without extensive investigation.
quote:...in accordance with the myth that happens to be prevalent in their own neighborhood...
This I agree with. While of course I don't go as far as you do into thinking they're stupid and insane, I am - absent any other information and all other things being equal - likely to be at least a little less convinced that someone who was brought up steeped in a particular religion has reached that religious conclusion completely independantly and fairly than someone who, for example, converts. But my word on this - as a convert - well, there's a huge potential for bias there, so take it for what it's worth.
quote:Thus, when your spiritual experience, or rather your interpretation of it, is directly contradicted by someone else's interpretation of his spiritual experience...
I have often wondered if human beings experience spirituality in many common ways at all, or if this is just a facet of the limits of human language.
quote:Yes, yes. There's a standard answer to this which you know perfectly well, so I don't know why you're even bothering to bring this up.
I'm bringing it up because you usually go a great deal further than the thoroughly reasonable style you're taking today. But I guess I shouldn't have done that, my mistake.
quote:The gestalt of all the evidence available to you gives you a unique maximum-likelihood hypothesis, which you are obliged to take as your current best guess. What you want to believe does not come into it, unless you are a monkey.
I disagree that the gestalt of all the evidence available gives only one current best-guess. For example, I honestly don't know which I would want to believe more at any given time: that God exists, or that there is no God, or that if there is a God, I ought not spend any time believing in God. I know myself pretty well, and if there are times when I have wanted to believe in God, I knew even while wanting to believe that that there had been and would be again times I would not want to believe in God, or would rather simply not care.
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quote:Before I answer that, let me ask another question, please: would you actually believe something other than, "It's a joke for laughs," if someone on Hatrack created a post which said, "I just came inside from seeing a leprechaun in my garden," and that person is otherwise, so far as you can tell, quite sane and non-delusional and had been behaving in similar fashion for as long as you had known them?
Would your first most likely explanation for the post be something other than, "Heh, this is a joke!"
Well no, and I did not say so. Rather my assertion is that, if someone came into Hatrack and said, "I just decided to believe in a God, since it's not really about evidence", my first reaction would be to dismiss it as a joke, if one in rather bad taste. It took me quite some time before I could believe that kmb really intended to say this; I thought we had to be mis-communicating very badly.
In other words, you've got my symmetry backwards: I do not say that leprechauns are as likely as gods, but that gods are as likely as leprechauns.
quote:How are you in a position to evaluate whether their experiences were very similar or not?
I merely take them at their word: They describe them in very similar terms. Only the conclusions differ.
quote:I disagree that the gestalt of all the evidence available gives only one current best-guess.
Well, I will concede the possibility that two hypotheses could be roughly equally well supported, perhaps each having a 30-40% probability. In this case you would be justified in hedging your bets. I suggest, however, that the hypotheses 'God' and 'no God' are not in this state.
I don't quite see the relevance of your uncertainty on what you most want to believe; could you clarify?
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Leprechauns is an arbitrary example, and the only reason it seems like a joke when someone making the same claim about seeing an aparition of the Holy Virgin must be considered to be a non-joke is the cultural context.
They're equally unlikely, but we're expected to respect a subset of unsubstantiated and highly unlikely claims which would otherwise be rejected, simply because they fall within the local cultural expectations.
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quote:In other words, you've got my symmetry backwards: I do not say that leprechauns are as likely as gods, but that gods are as likely as leprechauns.
I didn't ask the question to make a statement about your symmetry, but just to gauge whether it was a real question or simply one to make a rhetorical point.
quote:I merely take them at their word: They describe them in very similar terms. Only the conclusions differ.
My favorite food is spaghetti and meatballs. My sister's favorite food is spaghetti and meatballs. Although we both make the same claim, we of course mean radically different things. She prefers her spaghetti and meatballs with only enough sauce to thinly coat the past; I prefer enough sauce to make the pasta swim sometimes. She prefers her meatballs small, bite-sized; I prefer my meatballs 2-3' in diameter, large enough to require spade-work on the plate to get bite-sized pieces. She prefers no pepper at all that I've ever seen her add; I prefer gobs of fresh-cracked black pepper. She prefers what I consider to be crappy store-bought grated cheese in a plastic can sprinkled on her spaghetti; I prefer mine straight up or very rarely with a very small amount of good, freshly grated cheese.
While my sister and I mean the same thing when we say, "My favorite food is spaghetti and meatballs," we also mean something very different. If human language cannot be relied upon to accurately express the whole picture on something as basic as favorite foods, why on Earth are you so ready to accept that when people use the similar language to describe their spiritual experiences, they're referring to the same spiritual experiences? Perspective changes things. My sister can describe music in professionally educated terms; I cannot. She would be better equipped to explain why she likes a given piece of music than I would, even if I liked it much more or less than she did. By the standards you're using, though, if we both said, "I like this song," you would presume we liked it to a similar extent for similar reasons.
quote:Well, I will concede the possibility that two hypotheses could be roughly equally well supported, perhaps each having a 30-40% probability. In this case you would be justified in hedging your bets. I suggest, however, that the hypotheses 'God' and 'no God' are not in this state.
How are you in a position to speak so authoritatively on where those two hypotheses fit for someone else? You've already granted the possibility of meanginful personal evidence, but you dispute how weighty it ought to be. Where is the cutoff? How do you decide where the point is where personal evidence ceases to matter?
quote:I don't quite see the relevance of your uncertainty on what you most want to believe; could you clarify?
The relevance is that, for me, 'wanting to believe in God' is not a thing which actually motivates me to believe in God. I suggest that this kind of thinking might be less common than you think, but even if it's not, it's not why I believe.
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quote: If human language cannot be relied upon to accurately express the whole picture on something as basic as favorite foods, why on Earth are you so ready to accept that when people use the similar language to describe their spiritual experiences, they're referring to the same spiritual experiences?
But human language is reliable for describing the differences in food preference; you just did so yourself. The equivalent of your 'spaghetti and meatballs' construction is 'spiritual experience'; but that's not a description, it's a label. Although the Twitter version doesn't allow one to compare two spiritual experiences, it does not follow that it cannot be done at all.
In addition to this, your objection applies just as much to drawing any conclusion whatsoever from a spiritual experience. Suppose you have an ecstatic vision of the Virgin Mary; you ponder the matter and take it as evidence for Catholicism. Well, how do you know that other people's 'Virgin Mary' is anything like yours? If you cannot rely on language for communications about spiritual experience, then you cannot say anything about how similar your religion is to anyone else's; it would then be each man for himself, to invent a new religion wholly from scratch. If you were really going to assert this, then for consistency you'd have to abandon everyone else's visions and experiences as being evidence supporting your religion.
quote:How are you in a position to speak so authoritatively on where those two hypotheses fit for someone else? You've already granted the possibility of meanginful personal evidence, but you dispute how weighty it ought to be. Where is the cutoff? How do you decide where the point is where personal evidence ceases to matter?
At the point where others have the same experience but draw a different conclusion. If mystics all agreed, that would be one thing; but all they can agree on is "We can see glorious visions and receive messages". Very well, I do not dispute that part, only the significance they attach to the messages; they all cancel out, leaving nothing but random noise. Notice that the cancellation means that the actual weight doesn't really matter; 1000-1000 is the same as 1-1, to wit, zero.
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It is only reliable for description with exhaustive explanation even for very simple things. Unless you're claiming to have done so in all, most, or even a sizable minority of the conversations you've had with religious people (or read their works, etc.), then i think my point still stands. My point was not that it could not be done, though I do think it cannot be done perfectly or even very well in many cases, but that you have not done so.
quote:Well, how do you know that other people's 'Virgin Mary' is anything like yours? If you cannot rely on language for communications about spiritual experience, then you cannot say anything about how similar your religion is to anyone else's; it would then be each man for himself, to invent a new religion wholly from scratch. If you were really going to assert this, then for consistency you'd have to abandon everyone else's visions and experiences as being evidence supporting your religion.
You're omitting a step in the process: seeking out the same source that led to the ecstatic vision in the first place, and learning what you can from there. I can see how that step would be unpersuasive at best if you discount its utility to begin with, thogh.
Anyway, speaking strictly for myself, I do abandon everyone else's visions and experiences as evidence for my own religion. Actually, I don't abandon that-I never held to such an idea in the first place.
quote:At the point where others have the same experience but draw a different conclusion.
Now we're back to them having the same experience and then drawing a different conclusion. It seems possible to me at least that they had different experiences, reached different conclusions, but used similar language to describe both.
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quote:Originally posted by String: No, my default position is not whatever the minority wants. Being a Christian puts me in a HUGE majority.
It's too bad you didn't get from the context that that was a typo on my part. Read "majority," not "minority," and see if you can respond again in that light.
From your response though, I'm guessing I was right.
Really? is your only rebuff to my statement that I failed to correct a mistake that you made? Your statement was still bigoted, and patently false. next time you attack someone personally, try to know who they are first.
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quote:I defined perfection to include true beliefs; I observed that one cannot form such beliefs without evidence; I therefore discarded faith, to be understood as the rejection of evidence.
I think it would be possible to do an experiment to see if you can form such beliefs without evidence (as you are defining evidence):
First we come up with a broad variety of questions on different topics. Then we give these questions to people and ask them to answer them, using one of two methods. One set (Group A) of people can only answer the questions using their own evidence and their own reasoning; they can't look up answers in books or ask people. The other set (Group B) of people can only answer the questions by finding people or books that they feel are trustworthy and trusting those sources; they aren't allowed to find any other evidence themselves and aren't supposed to use their own reasoning to solve the problems. Then we compare the two groups to see which gets more correct answers....
My bet is that Group B ends up with quite a few true beliefs by the end... and possibly more than Group A does.
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But, to make it a fair analogy, we need to make sure that Group B is exposed to a number of equally credible-seeming experts who're all saying contradictory things.
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Better yet, let's ask two groups to determine the validity of various urban legends and pseudoscientific claims.
Group A uses double blind testing and peer reviews their results. Group B uses Yahoo! Answers and accepts the majority view.
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That wasn't an analogy. It was an attempt to test KoM's claim that one cannot form true beliefs without evidence.
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I believe his point is that it's impossible to know whether or not a belief is true without evidence.
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quote:Prayer does nothing tangible, but it does offer some people comfort. If they are unable to find that comfort elsewhere, and if the act of that prayer is otherwise neutral, I don't have a problem with it, any more than I go around telling children that Santa Clause is their parents.
Of course you have a problem with it, or at least it certainly sounds like you do. At least KoM is copping to it.
I thought about this for a while, to make sure you weren't correct, and it turns out that you're not.
Here's why:
The closest analogy I can come up with is that I view religious belief acts as a drug. I don't have a problem with people taking pain medication to manage their pain, just like I don't have a problem with people using their faith to help them overcome struggles in their lives.
If someone becomes addicted to painkillers, I feel bad for them, and I worry about the negative implications it might have on their life and relationships, but ultimately it's not my problem.
Now if someone decides to drive while under the influence, I have a big problem. If someone is a school bus driver and uses on the job, I have a really big problem with that.
Follow that analogy to its conclusion with religious beliefs, and you've got a fairly accurate analog to my view on religious faith.
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Except you treat all religious activity as if it were of the "driving under the influence" kind.
If you really believed your analogy, we could see your lassaiz faire instead of you having to tell us about it.
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quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: First we come up with a broad variety of questions on different topics. Then we give these questions to people and ask them to answer them, using one of two methods. One set (Group A) of people can only answer the questions using their own evidence and their own reasoning; they can't look up answers in books or ask people. The other set (Group B) of people can only answer the questions by finding people or books that they feel are trustworthy and trusting those sources;
Okay, sure. We take 4 third graders, and explain the Monty Hall problem to them. We tell one student to simulate the Monty hall problem with 3 cards 100 times. We tell the other students to ask the people he thinks are good sources. One asks his 5th grade brother and his dad. Another asks his 3rd grade math teacher. The other asks his neighbor, whom he knows is a math professor at university.
Are the second and third and fourth students equally likely to get the right answer? Or is the likelihood of getting the right answer proportional to the authority being familiar with the facts of the math?
Is the first student likely to get the wrong answer if she simulates the problem correctly and accepts what the evidence tell her?
We are back to the evidence; the closer you are to it, the more likely you are to be accurate. And some authorities are closer to the evidence than others. Math professors aren't just making things up to sound superior; they really do know a lot more math than your dad.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: Except you treat all religious activity as if it were of the "driving under the influence" kind.
Really? I could be wrong, but I don't see anyone on this board calling for every religious person to be locked up.
I'll criticize people I think drink too much, and I'll also criticize people who drink and then drive. But I'd only call for one to suffer legal penalties. The same goes for religious belief.
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quote:Really? I could be wrong, but I don't see anyone on this board calling for every religious person to be locked up.
Well no, the logistics would be quite impractical. It's already much too expensive to lock up the 3% of the population we've got behind bars in this year 2010. Even the destructive-labour camp is unlikely to be a practical solution when one attempts to apply it to something like four-fifths of the population.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: Except you treat all religious activity as if it were of the "driving under the influence" kind.
If you really believed your analogy, we could see your lassaiz faire instead of you having to tell us about it.
You perceive me treating all religious activity that way, because you drive under the influence but you don't think it hurts anyone, so you want to be left alone.
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quote:You perceive me treating all religious activity that way, because you drive under the influence but you don't think it hurts anyone, so you want to be left alone.
If your posts on religious topics and people are any indicator, you do treat all religious activity that way - it's just that the good religious activity is in spite of and not because, and it's really quite lucky nobody was hurt. They're just DUIs that don't happen to hurt anyone this time. Like I said though, at least KoM cops to it.
quote:Now if someone decides to drive while under the influence, I have a big problem. If someone is a school bus driver and uses on the job, I have a really big problem with that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to you isn't driving under the influence in this comparison 'using religion as the basis for any action that affects any other human being anywhere'?
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Looks like it. Apparently MC only approves of religion if the person in question neither believes nor follows it.
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As with religious belief, you've both elected to ignore all evidence and simply choose to believe what you wish were true.
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Apparently your belief in your own omniscient discernment and psychic powers over the Internet is boundless. Talk about deluded.
I suppose your wisdom and rationality is something you'll have to lay claim to later rather than demonstrate.
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quote:As with religious belief, you've both elected to ignore all evidence and simply choose to believe what you wish were true.
Yes, that's certainly a fair characterization of religious belief.
Dude. King of Men, in this thread, has said that being religious does not necessarily mean ignoring all evidence. You're more radically atheist than King of Men. I never thought that would happen!
Anyway, as for ignoring all evidence, I can't remember ever hearing of a time when you regarded religious belief that, at best, led to anything that couldn't be accomplished better than some other way. The good things religion does are better done by other, not-crazy/stupid methods the bad things are hallmarks of religion.
The funny thing about this conversation is, I don't even have a problem with someone holding that belief. Perfectly civil and (for me, at least) interesting conversation with KoM just now along some of those lines. My problem is that you won't cop to it.
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To be fair, I do think that Lisa and the others are, in fact, allowing their emotions to influence their evaluation of the evidence. However, there is a difference - to use religious terminology - between being a sinner who acknowledges the right path, and being a Satan-worshipper, deliberately breaking the commandments not through failure of character but through plain rebellion.
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quote:Ad hominems always win. Good show. I have been bested.
The irony is so thick, you could cut it with a The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Who exactly are you caricaturing, MightyCow? Yourself? That's a serious question, because I'm beginning to think this is deliberate. If it is, and I've missed the joke, it wouldn't be the first time, stuff whooshes over my head all the time.
ETA: I realize substantive responses to direct criticism aren't your thing, MightyCow, but exactly where was the strawman? -------------
quote:To be fair, I do think that Lisa and the others are, in fact, allowing their emotions to influence their evaluation of the evidence. However, there is a difference - to use religious terminology - between being a sinner who acknowledges the right path, and being a Satan-worshipper, deliberately breaking the commandments not through failure of character but through plain rebellion.
Granted. My point is, though, that you do (unless I'm mistaken) acknowledge that some, at least, of the things religious people use as the basis of their beliefs are evidence-just not that it should be considered compelling, definitely not more compelling than other evidence.
That said, I do wonder how you know any given religious person well enough to gauge if at all, much less to what extent, her emotions influence her evaluation of her religious experiences.
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quote:Okay, sure. We take 4 third graders, and explain the Monty Hall problem to them. We tell one student to simulate the Monty hall problem with 3 cards 100 times. We tell the other students to ask the people he thinks are good sources. One asks his 5th grade brother and his dad. Another asks his 3rd grade math teacher. The other asks his neighbor, whom he knows is a math professor at university.
Are the second and third and fourth students equally likely to get the right answer? Or is the likelihood of getting the right answer proportional to the authority being familiar with the facts of the math?
Is the first student likely to get the wrong answer if she simulates the problem correctly and accepts what the evidence tell her?
We are back to the evidence; the closer you are to it, the more likely you are to be accurate. And some authorities are closer to the evidence than others. Math professors aren't just making things up to sound superior; they really do know a lot more math than your dad.
The key question is: Is the first student more likely to get the correct answer than the second, third and fourth students are? My guess is that the first third grader won't be able to figure out how to simulate the problem correctly on their own, or do the math correctly to analyze their results on their own, without help from some authority - meaning the students who ask others will likely do better answering the question. And clearly, those who find authorities who have greater knowledge of math will be more likely to give the correct answer to the student.
If all that is true then the experiment would show that, when it comes to third graders trying to solve the Monty Hall problem, faith in an authority trumps trying to examine evidence themselves, as long as you find a knowledgable enough authority. But if the authority knows nothing about math, then examining evidence yourself is better.
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I don't get this objection. Surely KoM is working on a picture according to which expert testimony counts as "evidence."
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If he accepts that a rational person can consider expert testimony to be evidence, then he can begin to understand the logic of a person with faith.
The question then becomes: How do we determine what counts as an expert authority and what doesn't?
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I'd agree with that. But what happens when you don't know enough or lack the ability to fact check well? For instance, the third grader doesn't know enough math to go out and verify if the math professor knows his stuff, or if math professors in general do.
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Some factors may include how much original research they do, the quality of their reviews, peer or otherwise, the logic of their reasoning, and their presentation of evidence and sources.
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quote:I'd agree with that. But what happens when you don't know enough or lack the ability to fact check well?
The ideal would be to stay undecided about the matter in question until one attains the knowledge or ability to fact check. Kids can't always do this, but in practice adults pretty much always can.
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I should add that, as in the math professor case, fact-checking authorities whose domain you don't understand can be done by asking authorities you already believe are reliable (since you've fact-checked them in areas you do understand). So the third-grader could ask his dad, "Who knows more math, you or the professor?"
Assuming the kid doesn't know his dad to be a moron or pathological liar.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: The ideal would be to stay undecided about the matter in question until one attains the knowledge or ability to fact check. Kids can't always do this, but in practice adults pretty much always can.
I'm not convinced of this. Even setting aside the time commitment (and related opportunity cost) of studying to the required level of competency in every discipline you want to fact check, people's brains work differently and not all adults have the capability to become competent in every area. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that few if any do. In theory your statement is true, in practice not so much.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote:Granted. My point is, though, that you do (unless I'm mistaken) acknowledge that some, at least, of the things religious people use as the basis of their beliefs are evidence-just not that it should be considered compelling, definitely not more compelling than other evidence.
Right.
quote:That said, I do wonder how you know any given religious person well enough to gauge if at all, much less to what extent, her emotions influence her evaluation of her religious experiences.
When someone reaches a conclusion which her stated evidence just doesn't support, I must conclude that there is some additional thing which convinced her, which she has not given; humans being what they are, emotion is the most obvious candidate.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: The key question is: Is the first student more likely to get the correct answer than the second, third and fourth students are? My guess is that the first third grader won't be able to figure out how to simulate the problem correctly on their own, or do the math correctly to analyze their results on their own, without help from some authority - meaning the students who ask others will likely do better answering the question.
This doesn't help you. If you are alledging that people who know the facts and how to analyze them are better at getting correct answers than people who don't, that supports my argument, not yours.
quote:And clearly, those who find authorities who have greater knowledge of math will be more likely to give the correct answer to the student.
It was always clear to me. It wasn't clear to you, since you have often said that people should go with their "personal judgment", even when the expert opinion completely disagrees. Why bother finding good authorities when you are going to go with what your "personal judgment" says, and not what the authorities tell you?
quote:If all that is true then the experiment would show that, when it comes to third graders trying to solve the Monty Hall problem, faith in an authority trumps trying to examine evidence themselves, as long as you find a knowledgable enough authority.
To sensible people who use words to communicate, and not to confuse issues like you do, it is not faith to conclude that the sun will rise to morrow, nor is it faith to trust an authority who knows the relevent evidence. It is perverse for you to use the term "faith" to refer to the above things, it is dishonest for you to keep using it in that way when you have been told not to over and over again not to, and it is just stupid for you to be dishonest so transparently.
Basically, you are asserting that it is impossible for anyone to collect evidence, but that it's good to trust authorities. How do you think authorities become good ones? God tells them what to believe? They make things up and proclaim things with such authority that what they say magically becomes true? Maybe that's how you operate, but that's not how real experts become experts. Experts are the people who know the evidence.
Basically, by saying "Forget evidence, trust authorities", what you are saying is that you should find an "authority" who is saying what you want to hear, tell yourself they are a good authority, and then you should believe them.
Posts: 575 | Registered: Feb 2007
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quote:I'm not convinced of this. Even setting aside the time commitment (and related opportunity cost) of studying to the required level of competency in every discipline you want to fact check, people's brains work differently and not all adults have the capability to become competent in every area. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that few if any do. In theory your statement is true, in practice not so much.
I agree with dkw on this. In addition to what was mentioned in the quote, there's also just some subjects that are difficult to fact-check in a cut-and-dry way.
I do agree, though, that sometimes in order to verify one authority we can check with other authorities we've previously verified.
quote:This doesn't help you. If you are alledging that people who know the facts and how to analyze them are better at getting correct answers than people who don't, that supports my argument, not yours.
It helps me if it's the truth, regardless of whether it supports my argument or not.
quote:Basically, by saying "Forget evidence, trust authorities", what you are saying is that you should find an "authority" who is saying what you want to hear, tell yourself they are a good authority, and then you should believe them.
I'm not saying any of that. I don't agree with any of those four things.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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quote:When someone reaches a conclusion which her stated evidence just doesn't support, I must conclude that there is some additional thing which convinced her, which she has not given; humans being what they are, emotion is the most obvious candidate.
This is perfectly sensible, but it runs again into the problem of human language as a means of communication. I mean, it's all we've got, but it's far from perfect. Incredibly flawed, in fact-people have gotten killed over the flaws. So when a given person's stated evidence doesn't support their stated conclusions, there are three possibilities that I can think of: that they're simply being deceitful, that there is a separate piece of evidence that has been omitted from the statement, or that the stated evidence was not understood. Or I suppose there is a fourth possibility, that the stated conclusion is supported by the stated evidence, and the one hearing it is simply mistaken in thinking it doesn't, but that's fine, we generally think everyone else is wrong anyway.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:This doesn't help you. If you are alledging that people who know the facts and how to analyze them are better at getting correct answers than people who don't, that supports my argument, not yours.
It helps me if it's the truth, regardless of whether it supports my argument or not.
This is exactly what was alleged about you before, and you denied. But a tiger can't change his stripes.
If arguments are presented that demolish your claims, and you accept those arguments, you should stop believing those claims.
So if you accept that looking to evidence-based sources to base one's decisions on is more likely to lead to truth, then you should stop believing that evidence is worthless, and that people shouldn't bother with it.
quote:
quote:Basically, by saying "Forget evidence, trust authorities", what you are saying is that you should find an "authority" who is saying what you want to hear, tell yourself they are a good authority, and then you should believe them.
I'm not saying any of that. I don't agree with any of those four things.
They are direct consequences of your previous arguments; that people shouldn't bother trying to collect evidence, because it's too hard; that it's just as much a "faith" call to accept overwhelmingly well-supported claims as it is to believe somethign with absolutely no evidentiary support at all; that a person should ignore reason and evidence if their "personal judgment" disagrees with what reason and evidence tell them.
Posts: 575 | Registered: Feb 2007
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posted
Why do you consistently make up positions and assign them to me (or others)? I have not said to "forget evidence" or that "evidence is worthless" or that "people shouldn't bother trying to collect evidence", so for the record, any interpretation of anything I've written along those lines is not accurate. I agree with the importance and value of evidence.
posted
You are doing a remarkably good impression of a man who has "evidence doesn't matter" as his basic position until someone calls him on it, and then he acts all indignant and says "I never said that!" At an absolute minimum, then, I think it's fair to say that you're doing a really terrible job of communicating your real thoughts on the issue; which is indeed what one would expect of someone who insists on his own meanings for words.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
To return to Rakeesh's point above, that I can't be certain spiritual experiences described in the same terms are really saying the same thing: I cannot reconcile this with the way such experiences are described. There are limits to the number of interpretations one can put on such phrases as "a sense of peace", "I saw a light/an angel/a figure", "a voice told me". These things are not so much more complex than the spaghetti-and-meatballs example; a paragraph suffices to get the essential points across. If we cannot judge similarity on these grounds, then we cannot use language to discuss such matters at all; and if this is so, then spiritual experience can never be convincing even to the one experiencing it, because he cannot match it against the doctrine of any religion. If we take this stance, then "A woman appeared to me, gentle and sorrowful of countenance, and told me she was Mary; and said I should be healed" followed by an unexpected and complete remission of cancer could not be taken as evidence in favour of Catholicism even by the one who saw the woman, because what does 'Mary' and 'sorrowful of countenance' mean? This is a nihilist position which annihilates itself.
As for your assertion that you do indeed disregard others' experience as evidence for your faith, I think I must simply beg to differ. If you belong to any religious community whatsoever, you must at least recognise some sort of common beliefs with the others of that community, and with its founders; how can you do so, if you cannot relate your visions to what they say? (It would be helpful here if you could remind me what denomination you belong to; I could then be a bit more specific, and the argument would be easier to follow.)
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
I think that again, we are running into conflicting uses of "evidence". For example, I have a great deal of evidence and I imagine that Tresopax does, too. I do not have proof. Without proof, it is a matter of faith.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
No; we've had that discussion before. It is not a question of the meanings of 'evidence' vs 'proof'; we've spent at least two threads establishing this.
ETA: By that standard, it is a matter of faith and not evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow; this is not sensible use of language, and I believe we've agreed on that in the past.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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