quote:But if you try to make sense of things, then it can look like reconciling religious beliefs with observed reality is a pretty taxing exercise.
I don't have such problem. But then I find I often have a different idea of what religious beliefs and observed reality are.
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Most materialist thinking discards the notion of personal volition, which would seem to me to be strongly contradicted by observed reality and a pretty huge, unprovable assumption.
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quote: And when they use the word "faith" i'm assuming they're using that as a catchall for "a religion". I don't think they're implying a person's individual faith inevitably leads to this stuff, but that when organizations come around that make conflicting claims and develop belief systems based on holy writ, that violence is an inevitability.
That's what I assumed he meant, too. It just seems to me that if you look at the percentage of people who don't use religion as an excuse to harm others (And I mean that in a larger-scale sense; I'm not talking about personal faith and personal violence.) then it would make sense to start looking for other factors that are causing such behavior. In other words, just because two a-holes that happen to have a lot of power create a conflict regarding their religion that leads to death, does that make religion the cause? Or, in a world devoid of religion, would those a-holes have come up with other excuses to attack each other? Is a religious zealot dangerous because he's religious, or because he's a zealot? Zeal seems like a personality trait that's independent of religion.
Once again, I'm ignorant. I know I've been around Hatrack long enough that I probably shouldn't have that excuse, but I've largely avoided religious threads since about '04.
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quote:Occam thought God made things simpler, but he was wrong.
No, he didn't.
Occam used his razor to show the opposite. His point was that many things, among them God, are not provable by reason.
As he used it, Occam's Razor was both a guide to rational investigation and an acknowledgment of the limitations of rational investigation.
Except Occam himself believed in God, and made an escape clause for an omnipotent being. Well, he at the very least *pretended* to believe in god, going so far as to say that the words of an infallible source could substitute for reason.
Other people have since used the same razor to prove that disbelief is rational, but I don't recall Ockham himself solely using it that way.
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posted
I don't think Ockham thought God made things simpler, either, but was merely meshing his current belief with his philosophy. I don't remember ever reading that he believed a divine creator was the simplest answer, but I could be wrong there.
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Is 'Occam' the result of someone noticing that 'Ockham' has more alphabetical entities than necessary?
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Heh, not a clue. I always assumed there were multiple spellings of the town. I think of the theory as Occam's, because that's how I saw it spelled when I learned it. But after studying it more in depth, I think of the man himself as William of Ockham.
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quote:Most materialist thinking discards the notion of personal volition...
I think it's more that most materialists consider the concept of personal volition to be fictional but useful.
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