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"How do you know what not to believe in?" There are an infinite number of things we can believe in. This makes it necessary to come up with a rational framewo

"How do you know what not to believe in?" There are an infinite number of things we can believe in. This makes it necessary to come up with a rational framework based on what we know to make probabilistic inferences. This is basically an argument handled as such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot I don't want to come off as attacking faith or your beliefs, either. I know what it is like to believe and to not believe so I can respect your experience even though I don't share it.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Hey -- I have very little faith, so no harm done. I'm not a religious person. You are answering in the positive -- how you know _what_ to believe in. That is not the question, and the two are not logical opposites of one another. Let's try a thought experiment, shall we? Let's say you and I meet on a train. If I told you my barn was red, would you believe me? You might or might not. We might have a discussion about science and how we know things. I'm sure we could come to some sort of understanding about levels of proof and this and that. Why is that? Because reasoning and logic work inside of a web of meanings that we call language. That's what science is built on. It's both part of everyday knowledge and part of advanced reasoning. We are dealing with concrete things: nouns with meanings, lists of things, perceptions and the relationship of formal systems, empiricality and positivism. But what happens if I introduce an item without common meaning? Perhaps things without any meaning at all. Let's say you are a caveman and I am from the year 4000. I say "I have something that you do not understand. It is so outside your understanding such that that I cannot describe it to you inside of our limited window of conversation. I cannot even begin to describe the generics of the things that lead to those concepts" Now you're perfectly capable of saying "I don't believe that. I only believe things that have a strict order (not realizing, of course, that all of "common sense" is tenuous at best. Read up)" That's cool. Nothing wrong with that. But it does not impact the veracity of my statement. In fact, without language, reason, observation, theory, and reproduction, _you're unable to make any conclusions about my statement one way or another_. Things outside our web of understanding exist in a place where we can make no conclusions one way or another. All I am saying is that there is a class of such statements. There always have been, and there always will be. Most of these statements -- perhaps 99.99999% of them -- are eventually dealt with as our experiential and smenatic toolbox expands. God, to me, is the set of those true statements that we are unable to understand. Now I'm not talking about reasoning in common language and logical space -- I think science probably forms the interface between the true and unknowable and the true and knowable. In that sense, science and religion are like yin and yang -- one is simply the thing the other is not (and likewise, one is contained inside the other) Looking back over written history, we can see the wonderful dialectic of reason and faith. One can look at this as the war of reason over superstition, or one can look at it as the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not. Same thing, different viewpoint.
- aswanson 18y ago
  Well argued, can't find a flaw if you place it on those terms.
- Panoramix 18y ago
  One of the problems in these matters is that everybody's definition of god is completely different. You seem to tie it to some Gödel-incompleteness-teoremish thing. This need not be the case for most other people. And while I accept the existence of arithmetical statements which are true but not provable, I seldom encounter people who refer to them as god.
- IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
  God, to me, is the set of those true statements that we are unable to understand. Isn't that basically just a restatement of the whole non-overlapping magisteria argument? Ie, Science talks about things we know, and religion talks about all the things that are also true, but unprovable. Some assumptions there that should definitely not be accepted at face value: 1. Science is about talking. 2. Religion says true things. 3. It is reasonable to accept these things as true despite being unprovable. Science is not: a body of information, a group of people, a way of speaking, or the use of technology. Science is a method of analyzing the unknown, which boils down to a simple rule: Theories are verified by evidence. Yes, any sufficiently complicated axiomatic system will contain unprovable true statements. But we're not living in an axiomatic system, we're living in the universe, where the technical term for the class of statements which are fundamentally and forever unverifiable is "meaningless". That's why Einstein's theories, while elegant and useful, were not accepted until they made a risky prediction that came true. To paraphrase Popper, if a theory makes no risky predictions, then it might be an interesting story, but that's all it is. Another way to put this is that the meaning of a proposition is the difference between two hypothetical universes, alike in every way, except that in one (A), the proposition is false, and in the other (B), it is true, and the necessary differences implied by this. This isn't all that crazy; whenever you start a statement with "That means...", this is what you're mentally doing, calculating the delta between the world with and the world without. Take the statement "God exists." If there is not, and can never be, any observable difference between universes A and B, then that statement has no meaning, and we shouldn't even bother talking about it when we could be petting cats or folding socks. But that's not the case, for most values of "God" that people talk about. A universe designed intentionally by a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent fairy would very likely be very different from the one that fell together by random chance, in ways very much NOT outside our web of understanding. the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not We don't get our morality from religion. If we did, then how would christian parents know that they're not supposed to stone their children? (It's not the law, either, because those laws were made mostly by christians, so how did the lawmakers know that stoning ought to be immoral?) The common response is, It's not all meant to be taken literally, but if that's the case, how do you know which parts to take literally, unless you get your moral sense from somewhere else? To the extent that truth exists and can be found, science--that is, making up logically coherent stories and then testing those stories against evidence--is the way to find it. I include in that the very real human need for morality and the experiences commonly described as spirituality. If those types of experiences are valuable and psychologically useful, great; let's investigate and study them. There is a wealth of literature in the Buddhist tradition doing just that. (Buddhism has some warts, but it's always struck me as the least irrational religion, overall.) The non-overlapping magisteria argument basically amounts to filling in any gaps in our knowledge with the sticky goo of religion to make ourselves feel better until science can come along and clean up the mess. But doesn't that just add friction to the progress of understanding? Is it really so torturous to just admit we don't know something, and live with it, letting it spur us on to more investigation?

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

Hey -- I have very little faith, so no harm done. I'm not a religious person. You are answering in the positive -- how you know _what_ to believe in. That is not the question, and the two are not logical opposites of one another. Let's try a thought experiment, shall we? Let's say you and I meet on a train. If I told you my barn was red, would you believe me? You might or might not. We might have a discussion about science and how we know things. I'm sure we could come to some sort of understanding about levels of proof and this and that. Why is that? Because reasoning and logic work inside of a web of meanings that we call language. That's what science is built on. It's both part of everyday knowledge and part of advanced reasoning. We are dealing with concrete things: nouns with meanings, lists of things, perceptions and the relationship of formal systems, empiricality and positivism. But what happens if I introduce an item without common meaning? Perhaps things without any meaning at all. Let's say you are a caveman and I am from the year 4000. I say "I have something that you do not understand. It is so outside your understanding such that that I cannot describe it to you inside of our limited window of conversation. I cannot even begin to describe the generics of the things that lead to those concepts" Now you're perfectly capable of saying "I don't believe that. I only believe things that have a strict order (not realizing, of course, that all of "common sense" is tenuous at best. Read up)" That's cool. Nothing wrong with that. But it does not impact the veracity of my statement. In fact, without language, reason, observation, theory, and reproduction, _you're unable to make any conclusions about my statement one way or another_. Things outside our web of understanding exist in a place where we can make no conclusions one way or another. All I am saying is that there is a class of such statements. There always have been, and there always will be. Most of these statements -- perhaps 99.99999% of them -- are eventually dealt with as our experiential and smenatic toolbox expands. God, to me, is the set of those true statements that we are unable to understand. Now I'm not talking about reasoning in common language and logical space -- I think science probably forms the interface between the true and unknowable and the true and knowable. In that sense, science and religion are like yin and yang -- one is simply the thing the other is not (and likewise, one is contained inside the other) Looking back over written history, we can see the wonderful dialectic of reason and faith. One can look at this as the war of reason over superstition, or one can look at it as the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not. Same thing, different viewpoint.

aswanson 18y ago
Well argued, can't find a flaw if you place it on those terms.
Panoramix 18y ago
One of the problems in these matters is that everybody's definition of god is completely different. You seem to tie it to some Gödel-incompleteness-teoremish thing. This need not be the case for most other people. And while I accept the existence of arithmetical statements which are true but not provable, I seldom encounter people who refer to them as god.
IsaacSchlueter 18y ago
God, to me, is the set of those true statements that we are unable to understand. Isn't that basically just a restatement of the whole non-overlapping magisteria argument? Ie, Science talks about things we know, and religion talks about all the things that are also true, but unprovable. Some assumptions there that should definitely not be accepted at face value: 1. Science is about talking. 2. Religion says true things. 3. It is reasonable to accept these things as true despite being unprovable. Science is not: a body of information, a group of people, a way of speaking, or the use of technology. Science is a method of analyzing the unknown, which boils down to a simple rule: Theories are verified by evidence. Yes, any sufficiently complicated axiomatic system will contain unprovable true statements. But we're not living in an axiomatic system, we're living in the universe, where the technical term for the class of statements which are fundamentally and forever unverifiable is "meaningless". That's why Einstein's theories, while elegant and useful, were not accepted until they made a risky prediction that came true. To paraphrase Popper, if a theory makes no risky predictions, then it might be an interesting story, but that's all it is. Another way to put this is that the meaning of a proposition is the difference between two hypothetical universes, alike in every way, except that in one (A), the proposition is false, and in the other (B), it is true, and the necessary differences implied by this. This isn't all that crazy; whenever you start a statement with "That means...", this is what you're mentally doing, calculating the delta between the world with and the world without. Take the statement "God exists." If there is not, and can never be, any observable difference between universes A and B, then that statement has no meaning, and we shouldn't even bother talking about it when we could be petting cats or folding socks. But that's not the case, for most values of "God" that people talk about. A universe designed intentionally by a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent fairy would very likely be very different from the one that fell together by random chance, in ways very much NOT outside our web of understanding. the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not We don't get our morality from religion. If we did, then how would christian parents know that they're not supposed to stone their children? (It's not the law, either, because those laws were made mostly by christians, so how did the lawmakers know that stoning ought to be immoral?) The common response is, It's not all meant to be taken literally, but if that's the case, how do you know which parts to take literally, unless you get your moral sense from somewhere else? To the extent that truth exists and can be found, science--that is, making up logically coherent stories and then testing those stories against evidence--is the way to find it. I include in that the very real human need for morality and the experiences commonly described as spirituality. If those types of experiences are valuable and psychologically useful, great; let's investigate and study them. There is a wealth of literature in the Buddhist tradition doing just that. (Buddhism has some warts, but it's always struck me as the least irrational religion, overall.) The non-overlapping magisteria argument basically amounts to filling in any gaps in our knowledge with the sticky goo of religion to make ourselves feel better until science can come along and clean up the mess. But doesn't that just add friction to the progress of understanding? Is it really so torturous to just admit we don't know something, and live with it, letting it spur us on to more investigation?