That's why we have the ability to judge matters. Some judgements provide that we be open-minded and some others provide that we be skeptical, as well as a mix of both at times.
What is true religion .
- Thread starter china
- Start date
I think there's some confusion here with multiple meanings of the word 'faith,' a common fallacy called equivocation. I can say "I have faith that the sun will rise* in the morning," and all it means is that I fully expect the sun to rise in the morning because it has every other morning of my life and I have no reason to think it won't tomorrow. Similarly, I can say I have faith that my wife and children love me, but that's because they frequently tell me so and demonstrate it by their behaviour. In other words, I have good evidence for those beliefs, evidence that anybody could understand.
Another meaning of faith is 'belief in the absence of evidence,' which is what it means in the context of religious beliefs. There's no good evidence that any god exists or doesn't exist, the claim is unprovable either way anyway, and nobody can offer evidence that's easily shared, it's largely a matter of interpretation of feelings so the only evidence available is somebody else's report on it. Hearsay and anecdote is all you can get on that one. You can, for instance, directly observe that my wife and children love me, you can hear them say it, you can watch how they treat me, and easily draw the same conclusion I have. For a claim like "God loves me" you can't do that. God isn't going to tell you that directly, you have to interpret that conclusion from other observations about the nature and quality of my life or various other claims that amount to another fallacy, the argument from authority.
Common words rarely have single, precisely defined meanings, and one of the most common fallacies in argument is assuming they do.
*An interesting and essentially false statement, a carryover from the days when it was thought that the earth was stationary and all other bodies in the sky revolved around it. The sun doesn't rise, what happens is that the patch of the earth you're on rotates toward it.
Another meaning of faith is 'belief in the absence of evidence,' which is what it means in the context of religious beliefs. There's no good evidence that any god exists or doesn't exist, the claim is unprovable either way anyway, and nobody can offer evidence that's easily shared, it's largely a matter of interpretation of feelings so the only evidence available is somebody else's report on it. Hearsay and anecdote is all you can get on that one. You can, for instance, directly observe that my wife and children love me, you can hear them say it, you can watch how they treat me, and easily draw the same conclusion I have. For a claim like "God loves me" you can't do that. God isn't going to tell you that directly, you have to interpret that conclusion from other observations about the nature and quality of my life or various other claims that amount to another fallacy, the argument from authority.
Common words rarely have single, precisely defined meanings, and one of the most common fallacies in argument is assuming they do.
*An interesting and essentially false statement, a carryover from the days when it was thought that the earth was stationary and all other bodies in the sky revolved around it. The sun doesn't rise, what happens is that the patch of the earth you're on rotates toward it.
My own delving into that search has convinced me that there's nothing to look for, all such experiences exist only inside our own heads and represent just a particular electrochemical state in the brain which can be induced in a variety of ways, like sensory deprivation, certain drugs, direct electrical stimulation, emotional or physical stress, illness and fever, meditation, and so on. There's no external reality to it, in my opinion.
------------------------------------------------------Dexter Sinister-------------------------------------------
Thanks for the correction on the mice in the last post.
It Was lazy of me not to verify, trusting my own vague memory of it.
But I'm up to bat again -- to this same pitch of yours.
I'm pushing for a balk.
Hindus think of this life as a dream by a person in a Lotus flower (something like that ---again
if lazy memory serves incorrect it doesn't devalue the premise to be considered) and so such
positing of this life as a dream is analogous to you saying most of what we feel and see results
from some manipulation of the brain, a pitch you insist that "has no external reality to it."
So it's all in our heads.
Make another pitch on this. Expound on this a little more.
------------------------------------------------------Dexter Sinister-------------------------------------------
Thanks for the correction on the mice in the last post.
It Was lazy of me not to verify, trusting my own vague memory of it.
But I'm up to bat again -- to this same pitch of yours.
I'm pushing for a balk.
Hindus think of this life as a dream by a person in a Lotus flower (something like that ---again
if lazy memory serves incorrect it doesn't devalue the premise to be considered) and so such
positing of this life as a dream is analogous to you saying most of what we feel and see results
from some manipulation of the brain, a pitch you insist that "has no external reality to it."
So it's all in our heads.
Make another pitch on this. Expound on this a little more.
Perhaps it is only in certain types of people that everything is in their heads, like your Hindus, for instance; but I see, hear, etc. realities all around me and the only parts of them that are in my head are my interpretations of them. IOW, yes there is sound coming from the falling tree in the forest with no-one in it to hear.
No, I wouldn't say it's all in our heads. There is an objective reality out there that exists regardless of our limited perceptions of it. Evolution has fitted us to the environment we find ourselves in, so we have senses that can detect information from that environment in the form of radiation, mechanical vibrations, temperature, and so on. But evolution's not a maximizer, it's a satisfier: our senses aren't perfect, they're simply 'good enough.' We can't 'see' x-rays for instance, because there aren't enough of them in our environment to make them a useful source of information. We can't 'see' infrared radiation either, but we can detect it, rather coarsely, as heat. If you've ever seen thermal images, you'll have noticed that they're pretty fuzzy, which suggests the wavelength is too long to discern fine details visually, so we don't detect it that way. It's hardly accidental that our eyes are most sensitive to radiation in the frequency band most dominant in the sunlight that reaches us through the atmosphere. We've devised various means of extending our senses artificially, but they're all extensions to detecting things that we already detect part off. If there were any other source of useful information available in the environment, like psychic vibrations for instance--and think of what a powerful advantage that would be to a band of paleolithic hunters trying to communicate over long distances in a cooperative hunt--we'd have evolved senses capable of using them.
What might be all in our heads is our interpretation of the information we get from the environment, and that's a critical point. We're not born knowing how to think clearly and critically, that's a learned skill we've been developing only for a few centuries, and most of us aren't very good at it. That also goes back to evolution's satisfying rather than maximizing. We make a lot of mistakes in our interpretations, but few of them are fatal, so we haven't been killed off.
You say it yourself though Dex. Nature is about satisfying, not maximizing. Yes, psychic ability would have been a powerful advantage in a hunt, but, nature sought only for a satisfactory result, not a maximal one.
Great post Dexter, as usual. That point about evolution being satisfying rather than maximizing
is thought provoking for this person who hasn't thought about that.
Anyway, you did clarify , "There is an objective reality out there that exists regardless of our limited perceptions of it."
And we'll always be discovering something more of this infinity, which is why arguments against
a God or for a God end up sounding both like a religion to me---- unprovable in a sequential
plodding logic method.
Both sides sound unreasonably sure. Both sides sound complacently self-satisfied.
Both sides strongly believe what they believe and actually think logic can prove their
case.
is thought provoking for this person who hasn't thought about that.
Anyway, you did clarify , "There is an objective reality out there that exists regardless of our limited perceptions of it."
And we'll always be discovering something more of this infinity, which is why arguments against
a God or for a God end up sounding both like a religion to me---- unprovable in a sequential
plodding logic method.
Both sides sound unreasonably sure. Both sides sound complacently self-satisfied.
Both sides strongly believe what they believe and actually think logic can prove their
case.
See. Now that's your interpretation of what you sense. Mine would be that it's ridiculous to follow with logic an idea that has no evidence to support it, hence the word "faith". The other side at least has the logical point that there is a conspicuous lack of evidence supporting the idea, and an awful lot of things that have been claimed to support the idea have been proven wrong by actual scientific evidence.
Um, I gotta thank you, Dex, for expatiating on my seemingly too blunt to understand point.
Makes me think the comment that people prefer things to be complicated rather than simple. lol
Last edited: