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bedstuy
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« Reply #50 on: October 16, 2015, 08:20:43 AM »

You're not going to come up with any logical argument to believe in God.  People believe in God because it's comforting emotionally.

The first cause argument is just silly.  You can make these deductions about an event that you've never witnessed even once.  That sort of logic works when you reason from experience.  But, you don't have experience or knowledge about universe creation.  You haven't seen universes that didn't exist because God wasn't there to create them.  And, more broadly, you have to understand much more about an event before you assume a variable.  That's an argument from ignorance, I don't know therefore...
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Abraham Reagan
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« Reply #51 on: October 16, 2015, 10:20:48 AM »

I'll refer to Albert Camus, a French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher:

 "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."

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afleitch
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« Reply #52 on: October 16, 2015, 12:01:49 PM »

I'll refer to Albert Camus, a French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher:

 "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."



How can you live out your life as if there is a god when there are countless iterations of what god is and what it wants?
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Figs
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« Reply #53 on: October 16, 2015, 12:10:40 PM »

I'll refer to Albert Camus, a French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher:

 "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."



How can you live out your life as if there is a god when there are countless iterations of what god is and what it wants?

And, crucially, when many if not most of those iterations' demands are incompatible with one another?
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Abraham Reagan
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« Reply #54 on: October 16, 2015, 12:55:36 PM »

I'll refer to Albert Camus, a French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher:

 "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."



Given that Camus was Catholic, I don't think he was just referring to God in the general sense. He would've been talking about the God of Isaac and Abraham, the God that came to earth both perfectly human and perfectly divine and died for the sins of man.

When you look at it that way, you find the real point of his quote. I'd rather believe in God wrongly than not believe and end up going to hell.
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Figs
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« Reply #55 on: October 16, 2015, 12:59:32 PM »

I'll refer to Albert Camus, a French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher:

 "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."



Given that Camus was Catholic, I don't think he was just referring to God in the general sense. He would've been talking about the God of Isaac and Abraham, the God that came to earth both perfectly human and perfectly divine and died for the sins of man.

When you look at it that way, you find the real point of his quote. I'd rather believe in God wrongly than not believe and end up going to hell.

I don't know that anything you just said changes what anybody perceived the point of the quote to be.
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Abraham Reagan
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« Reply #56 on: October 16, 2015, 01:18:47 PM »

Well when the question, "How can you live out your life as if there is a god when there are countless iterations of what god is and what it wants?" it stands to reason that the person, afleitch and you, asking this, perceived the "God" in the quote to mean god in the general sense, pertaining to no particular religion. My point was that the quote was referring to the God of Christianity, and therefore doesn't beg the "which god should I follow" question.
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Figs
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« Reply #57 on: October 16, 2015, 01:20:42 PM »

When you bring up the "I'd rather believe and have it not be true than not believe and have it be true" argument, you have to take into account the fact that in that formulation, believing in something that turns out to be wrong is the same as not believing. So you need some kind of heuristic that tells you that the faith you're choosing to abide by is more likely than the countless others, if only by some small margin, to be true.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #58 on: October 16, 2015, 01:24:11 PM »

The question that the thread starts with is flawed, and not just in the obvious sense: very few people believe in whatever it is they believe* as a result of sitting down and trying to work out which of the various 'options' strike them as the most plausible. It wouldn't even occur to most people to even think about doing this (again, about anything). Personal beliefs typically reflect someones cultural/family background, their education, their experiences, and often their personalities. This is the case even when someone's beliefs are primarily a reaction against the first and/or second of those two things (i.e. a reaction is still a reflection). If intellectualised defences of one belief or another (including the absence of, etc) often look more like the products of mildly pathetic post hoc intellectual parlour games than the actual reason why the person in question believes whatever they do, then that is because they almost always are.

Or at least that's my view: quite possibly this subject looks very different to other individuals. We are not all alike.

*And this obviously applies to far more things than religion.
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DavidB.
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« Reply #59 on: October 16, 2015, 02:22:09 PM »

(Let's start by saying that I don't think "belief" or "religion" aren't really adequate terms when describing one's experiences in Judaism: these terms are firmly rooted in a discourse that was originally Christian-centric. I'll use them anyway in my reply because it seems fruitful in the discussion, but I don't think these words entirely cover the "Jewish experience".)

Anyway, as someone who "believes" (but didn't exactly grow up as religious as I am now), I think Sibboleth is exactly right on this. My belief in G-d and my Jewish observance don't stem from a rational choice, they probably stem from my "package" of background, family, education, experiences during one's youth, political preferences, developments in society, loyalty preferences, and most of all life experience. Sure, I think it was "meant to be" (in a "religious" sense) that I would eventually come back to Judaism, but the combination of the previous factors enabled me to do so. That's also why I think elaborate debates on this issue are post-hoc rationalizations of processes in which rationality is often quite limited.
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muon2
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« Reply #60 on: October 16, 2015, 03:39:43 PM »
« Edited: October 16, 2015, 03:42:14 PM by muon2 »

I'm doing a little bit of thinking on this while I'm grading qualifying exams. I want to make sure we are on the same page about paradigms. A paradigm is more than just a consistent set of hypotheses, observations, and knowledge derived from them. It also importantly includes a framework for thought that specifies the types of questions one might reasonably ask and proper methods for discerning the answers to those questions. For example it is grammatically correct to ask "How many centimeters are in a pound?", but that is a nonsense question to a scientist, because there is no framework in our scientific paradigm to compare a measurement of length to one of weight.

From what I've read the famous question about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin is a similar example that seems nonsensical to modern western thought. Yet it meant something entirely different in the paradigm of the medieval scholar. We would view it as something that should be answered with a physical counting. The ancient scholar would not have thought about it that way, but instead would look at the question as a way to understand the nature of the immaterial world of the divine.

OK, but how do we determine what are reasonable unfalsifiable hypotheses to believe in the social paradigm?  I understand the reason (more or less) why we accept and proceed with unfalsifiable hypotheses in mathematics -- they're necessary for consistency with observable phenomena.  I assume you agree that there are some beliefs, in the social paradigm and elsewhere, that aren't reasonable...or do you think that all beliefs, if unfalsifiable, are equally reasonable to hold?

Let's consider the universe of all unfalsifiable hypotheses. Within this universe some of these hypotheses are contradictory at some level. A paradigm requires some of these hypotheses as the basis of its internal logic, so a subset of the hypotheses will exist in any paradigm. The paradigm uses the hypotheses and applies them along with accepted methods of interaction within the paradigm to make decisions. If the selection of hypotheses is too narrow there will be true but unprovable assertions that are left out, yet if all such unprovably true hypotheses are included there will be internal contradictions. The result is a set of hypotheses that can entertain some, but not too many, internal contradictions. This is true for any rational system of thought, not just science.

Because the paradigm is more than just its set of hypotheses it provides the means to judge the reasonableness of other hypotheses. It has the accepted history of events in the paradigm and accepted procedures for evaluating information in context. If a new unfalsifiable hypothesis is introduced it is interpreted in the paradigm to see if it pushes inconsistencies too far. The farther it pushes inconsistencies, the less reasonable it will seem.

I assume a social paradigm is not the same as one in natural science, but like a scientific field a society has a collection of accepted historical events and accepted norms for evaluating information to make decisions. A field of science has a belief system (ie unfalsifiable hypotheses) that is generally consistent within its paradigm, and it seems to me that a society likewise has a belief system that is generally consistent within its paradigm. Here I use generally to mean that some inconsistencies are permitted to increase the pool of unprovably true statements accepted in the paradigm. If it makes sense to speak of social paradigms, then it seems that a society will adjust to new beliefs in a way that is consistent with its own paradigm. Those beliefs will seem most reasonable that are least contradictory to the existing set of beliefs and to the other features of the paradigm.
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Alcon
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« Reply #61 on: October 16, 2015, 05:56:09 PM »
« Edited: October 16, 2015, 06:19:08 PM by Grad Students are the Worst »

I think the key distinction here is not just whether the claim is substantiated by our observations rather than our lack of observations (though the latter would be a less compelling claim all things being equal) but also is in what domain we would expect the laws to apply. We would expect something as fundamental to our understanding of our universe as causality to apply throughout. On the other hand, we would not expect to observe something out of our space-time so the fact that we don't observe it doesn't tell us anything other than it's not a falsifiable hypothesis.

Right, but the nature of an uncreated entity is not a falsifiable hypothesis either.  We don't know what would prompt an uncreated entity to come into existence, so the assumption that it would recur in a manifest way later on isn't based on a falsifiable claim, either.  The problem with "____ of the gaps" article is that you can fill any gap with just about anything.

And, again, either way, recall that my original post on this subject would still hold up to even the revised version.  The argument was that it must be true something exists outside of space-time, because everything within space-time must have cause.  However, that requires holding that it must be true that, if there are things that need not have cause, we would have observed them by now.  Accepting a world in which things can exist outside of space-time is accepting a world in which there are things that do not operate by the observed rules -- or at least happen beyond our observed rules.  If you argue that God can exist out of space-time and impact something within space-time, you're arguing that something outside of the rules of space-time (including causality) can manifest within those rules.  As such, it's logically incoherent to argue that it's impossible that something not have a cause, and therefore God must have influenced the world's creation from outside space-time; opening up the gate for God opens up the gate for the very hypotheses he was rejecting to affirm the necessity of God.

The particular challenge here is that these sorts of claims have probabilities that can't be evaluated in a way that isn't completely arbitrary. I guess we disagree on the definition of "reasonable" here. For instance I wouldn't consider someone's beliefs unreasonable for believing in Hinduism on the basis that I think its odds of being true are less than 50%. I guess I see "reasonable" meaning something along the lines of "plausible".

Sorry, but I don't buy that's how people use "believe."  When someone says "I believe x is true," do you really think they mean "I think x is more probable than other hypotheses, even if I don't even think x is likely?"  It would be like me saying "I believe, if I pick a random person off of Earth, their name will be Muhammad."  I simply don't think that's ever how we use "believe."  Also, if you asked what people mean when they claim they have religious beliefs, I really doubt they'd say anything like this definition of "believe."

For why people have a high level of certitude about deductive claims while coming to a wide array of conclusions I have several hypotheses to offer up. I will let you subjectively decide if you think they are reasonable Tongue Sad

Do you think any are reasonable?  I appreciate the attempt to explain the behavior, and your hypotheses line up with the ones I've thought of, but I'm really interested in debating what's logical, not what people do.  People are the worst Tongue.

1. Despite believing that others' experiential claims are true, people still believe their own and think others who disagree are merely misinterpreting their own experience. These sorts of ideas are so deeply ingrained in the way we view the universe that we simply can't see how everyone else doesn't agree.

That's not reasonable.  It suggests that you, for some reason, are correct, while other people with the exact same methodology aren't.  This is how people behave, but it doesn't make sense.

2. A sort of Pascal's Wager comes into play here. (Yes I know there are a lot of philosophical problems with using Pascal's Wager as an argument to actually prove anything.) But the options posed by it still may inform people's decision making process.

Not reasonable, since there's no reason to assume that wanting to believe something has any effect on whether it's true.

3. The inherent assumptions behind the deductive arguments are sufficiently abstract that our view of which are most plausible is mostly determined by our experiential views of the universe. For instance I don't see the universe coming into existence uncaused as a very compelling answer though obviously others disagree. Yet it is abstract enough that I wouldn't at all think they're lying if they say it best matches their experiences.

OK, you're basically making an argument that it's reasonable to prefer your intuition over other people's intuitions.  Of course.  But does it make sense to have certitude about your intuition?  To be clear, there are some cases in which there are unfalsifiable claims that are so narrow, specific, and ridiculous ("God actually a hedgehog in a tutu and he only responds to 'Chesney'") that I think it's reasonable to find them so counterintuitive that they shouldn't be entertained as possibilities.  But when other reasonable, intelligent people come to strong, conflicting intuitions using the same mental methodology, completely dismissing these conclusions and maintaining certitude doesn't make sense.  That's not just me saying that -- it's based on the fact, outside of religion, people don't really behave this way in any other contexts.

4. The arguments get very complicated very quickly, so much so that the majority do not actually understand their opponents' views as well as they think they do. Understanding their own much better, they of course see them as the most reasonable.

Also true, and I accept that someone can reach unreasonable or illogical conclusions for reasonable and logical reasons (for instance, they might not care enough to spend the mental energy analyzing their beliefs).
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Alcon
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« Reply #62 on: October 16, 2015, 06:11:51 PM »

The question that the thread starts with is flawed, and not just in the obvious sense: very few people believe in whatever it is they believe* as a result of sitting down and trying to work out which of the various 'options' strike them as the most plausible. It wouldn't even occur to most people to even think about doing this (again, about anything). Personal beliefs typically reflect someones cultural/family background, their education, their experiences, and often their personalities. This is the case even when someone's beliefs are primarily a reaction against the first and/or second of those two things (i.e. a reaction is still a reflection). If intellectualised defences of one belief or another (including the absence of, etc) often look more like the products of mildly pathetic post hoc intellectual parlour games than the actual reason why the person in question believes whatever they do, then that is because they almost always are.

Or at least that's my view: quite possibly this subject looks very different to other individuals. We are not all alike.

*And this obviously applies to far more things than religion.

How does that make this thread or question flawed?  You're merely pointing out that most people's reason for belief isn't intellectualized, while most responses in this thread (including the OP's) are.  I don't see anything in this thread that stops someone from giving a non-intellectualized answer, besides the embarrassment that comes from overtly stating "I believe this because my parents believed this" or "I believe this because it gives me happy feelings that I like."  Whatever complaint you're getting at, it's not a flawed question.

Let's consider the universe of all unfalsifiable hypotheses. Within this universe some of these hypotheses are contradictory at some level. A paradigm requires some of these hypotheses as the basis of its internal logic, so a subset of the hypotheses will exist in any paradigm. The paradigm uses the hypotheses and applies them along with accepted methods of interaction within the paradigm to make decisions. If the selection of hypotheses is too narrow there will be true but unprovable assertions that are left out, yet if all such unprovably true hypotheses are included there will be internal contradictions. The result is a set of hypotheses that can entertain some, but not too many, internal contradictions. This is true for any rational system of thought, not just science.

Because the paradigm is more than just its set of hypotheses it provides the means to judge the reasonableness of other hypotheses. It has the accepted history of events in the paradigm and accepted procedures for evaluating information in context. If a new unfalsifiable hypothesis is introduced it is interpreted in the paradigm to see if it pushes inconsistencies too far. The farther it pushes inconsistencies, the less reasonable it will seem.

I assume a social paradigm is not the same as one in natural science, but like a scientific field a society has a collection of accepted historical events and accepted norms for evaluating information to make decisions. A field of science has a belief system (ie unfalsifiable hypotheses) that is generally consistent within its paradigm, and it seems to me that a society likewise has a belief system that is generally consistent within its paradigm. Here I use generally to mean that some inconsistencies are permitted to increase the pool of unprovably true statements accepted in the paradigm. If it makes sense to speak of social paradigms, then it seems that a society will adjust to new beliefs in a way that is consistent with its own paradigm. Those beliefs will seem most reasonable that are least contradictory to the existing set of beliefs and to the other features of the paradigm.

I'm not sure whether you're simply describing a phenomenon that happens, or advocating for accepting traditional beliefs or social norms as a paradigm and then accepting unfalsified hypotheses that are consistent with those beliefs/norms.  It doesn't necessarily follow, though, that any given paradigm necessarily justifies affirming unfalsifiable hypotheses.  I understand (loosely) why mathematical paradigms would justify that -- because we have clearly, manifestly identifiable ways in which mathematics function that require certain preconditions/hypotheses to be true.  So I "get" why we accept unfalsifiable hypotheses for mathematics.  But why would we give that treatment to a social paradigm, and how do we decide which one?
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TJ in Oregon
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« Reply #63 on: October 17, 2015, 12:50:23 AM »

Right, but the nature of an uncreated entity is not a falsifiable hypothesis either.  We don't know what would prompt an uncreated entity to come into existence, so the assumption that it would recur in a manifest way later on isn't based on a falsifiable claim, either.  The problem with "____ of the gaps" article is that you can fill any gap with just about anything.

And, again, either way, recall that my original post on this subject would still hold up to even the revised version.  The argument was that it must be true something exists outside of space-time, because everything within space-time must have cause.  However, that requires holding that it must be true that, if there are things that need not have cause, we would have observed them by now.  Accepting a world in which things can exist outside of space-time is accepting a world in which there are things that do not operate by the observed rules -- or at least happen beyond our observed rules.  If you argue that God can exist out of space-time and impact something within space-time, you're arguing that something outside of the rules of space-time (including causality) can manifest within those rules.  As such, it's logically incoherent to argue that it's impossible that something not have a cause, and therefore God must have influenced the world's creation from outside space-time; opening up the gate for God opens up the gate for the very hypotheses he was rejecting to affirm the necessity of God.

I am a little unclear as to what the second sentence here is referring to (is it referring to "God"?).

If God: The entire point of invoking an uncreated entity ("God") is precisely that the entity doesn't come into existence at all but is outside of time and thus outside of causation and creation. The entity simply is. Otherwise it would just be adding another step without addressing the issue (ie. "If God created the universe then who created God?"). That was the point my original post was trying to clear up and is the difference between the original misconstructed argument and my corrected version.

For the latter part of your question, the argument is that everything within our space-time must have a cause, not that its cause must be within our space-time. Indeed virtually everything within our space-time clearly does have a cause within our space-time. However, if everything within our space-time must have a cause, at least one thing must have a cause outside of our space-time because it cannot cause itself. (An alternative explanation here would be a circular time but we have a lot of physical reasons to reject that idea.)

Sorry, but I don't buy that's how people use "believe."  When someone says "I believe x is true," do you really think they mean "I think x is more probable than other hypotheses, even if I don't even think x is likely?"  It would be like me saying "I believe, if I pick a random person off of Earth, their name will be Muhammad."  I simply don't think that's ever how we use "believe."  Also, if you asked what people mean when they claim they have religious beliefs, I really doubt they'd say anything like this definition of "believe."

Oh I do think they really mean they believe their own hypothesis is >50% likely to be true when they say they believe it. However, the actual probability and perceived probability is obviously different given the widespread disagreement. I agree that it would not be reasonable for a person to say they believe something they do not think is more likely than not to be true. However, I do not think it is unreasonable for another person to have a different belief about what is more than 50% likely to be true due to our inability to evaluate the ideas' likelihood in a universally understood way. Instead I would consider someone else's stated belief to be reasonable (assuming they think it >50% likely to be true) if the belief is plausible even if I do not think it likely to be true.
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TJ in Oregon
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« Reply #64 on: October 17, 2015, 12:51:26 AM »
« Edited: October 17, 2015, 12:53:22 AM by Justice TJ »

For why people have a high level of certitude about deductive claims while coming to a wide array of conclusions I have several hypotheses to offer up. I will let you subjectively decide if you think they are reasonable Tongue Sad

Do you think any are reasonable?  I appreciate the attempt to explain the behavior, and your hypotheses line up with the ones I've thought of, but I'm really interested in debating what's logical, not what people do.  People are the worst Tongue.

Well, as your name suggests, grad students are the worst. Tongue Or maybe the second worst and professors are the worst (except for muon of course Wink).

1. Despite believing that others' experiential claims are true, people still believe their own and think others who disagree are merely misinterpreting their own experience. These sorts of ideas are so deeply ingrained in the way we view the universe that we simply can't see how everyone else doesn't agree.

That's not reasonable.  It suggests that you, for some reason, are correct, while other people with the exact same methodology aren't.  This is how people behave, but it doesn't make sense.

I am somewhat split on whether or not this hypothesis is reasonable or not. I was immediately about to reject it as unreasonable upon re-reading it since it is believing an anecdote over the wider array of information that can be gathered by looking at others' experiences as well. On the other hand, the opposite hypothesis (look at peoples' experiences as a whole and don't take too much stock in your own) does not seem reasonable either as it results in ignoring your own intuitions and simply agreeing with the majority opinion whatever it may be without being able to question it. In reality this is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy and we're forced to consider the question somewhere between the two extremes; neither seems particularly reasonable, but we don't really have a better option here if we're going to consider the topic at all.

I do think it is probably the most common reason why people behave the way they do regardless of whether it is reasonable.

2. A sort of Pascal's Wager comes into play here. (Yes I know there are a lot of philosophical problems with using Pascal's Wager as an argument to actually prove anything.) But the options posed by it still may inform people's decision making process.

Not reasonable, since there's no reason to assume that wanting to believe something has any effect on whether it's true.

Here, I would agree that this is not a logical position to hold for certitude, but it is a logical reason to act without complete certitude in virtually the exact same manner as someone with certitude in every way except claiming certitude, provided the person is convinced the belief is at least likely to be true.

3. The inherent assumptions behind the deductive arguments are sufficiently abstract that our view of which are most plausible is mostly determined by our experiential views of the universe. For instance I don't see the universe coming into existence uncaused as a very compelling answer though obviously others disagree. Yet it is abstract enough that I wouldn't at all think they're lying if they say it best matches their experiences.

OK, you're basically making an argument that it's reasonable to prefer your intuition over other people's intuitions.  Of course.  But does it make sense to have certitude about your intuition?  To be clear, there are some cases in which there are unfalsifiable claims that are so narrow, specific, and ridiculous ("God actually a hedgehog in a tutu and he only responds to 'Chesney'") that I think it's reasonable to find them so counterintuitive that they shouldn't be entertained as possibilities.  But when other reasonable, intelligent people come to strong, conflicting intuitions using the same mental methodology, completely dismissing these conclusions and maintaining certitude doesn't make sense.  That's not just me saying that -- it's based on the fact, outside of religion, people don't really behave this way in any other contexts.

Eh, I do think people occasionally do act this way outside of religion -- not as universally so -- but they sometimes do. I remember going to a conference about liquid crystals 3 or 4 years ago and there were a couple professors who would dive in repeatedly in the Q&A sessions and bicker about a feud they were having over whether or not bent-core liquid crystals have biaxial alignment. Most of the people there would roll their eyes and try to ignore them. I think the necessary condition is having a strong passion for a particular outcome. Regardless, that does hamper their objectivity somewhat.

I think this hypothesis might actually be the same as the first one and my view of it is the same.

4. The arguments get very complicated very quickly, so much so that the majority do not actually understand their opponents' views as well as they think they do. Understanding their own much better, they of course see them as the most reasonable.

Also true, and I accept that someone can reach unreasonable or illogical conclusions for reasonable and logical reasons (for instance, they might not care enough to spend the mental energy analyzing their beliefs).

Indeed. There is always a limit to just how much time one can devote to reading and studying these arguments.
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muon2
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« Reply #65 on: October 17, 2015, 10:34:32 PM »


Let's consider the universe of all unfalsifiable hypotheses. Within this universe some of these hypotheses are contradictory at some level. A paradigm requires some of these hypotheses as the basis of its internal logic, so a subset of the hypotheses will exist in any paradigm. The paradigm uses the hypotheses and applies them along with accepted methods of interaction within the paradigm to make decisions. If the selection of hypotheses is too narrow there will be true but unprovable assertions that are left out, yet if all such unprovably true hypotheses are included there will be internal contradictions. The result is a set of hypotheses that can entertain some, but not too many, internal contradictions. This is true for any rational system of thought, not just science.

Because the paradigm is more than just its set of hypotheses it provides the means to judge the reasonableness of other hypotheses. It has the accepted history of events in the paradigm and accepted procedures for evaluating information in context. If a new unfalsifiable hypothesis is introduced it is interpreted in the paradigm to see if it pushes inconsistencies too far. The farther it pushes inconsistencies, the less reasonable it will seem.

I assume a social paradigm is not the same as one in natural science, but like a scientific field a society has a collection of accepted historical events and accepted norms for evaluating information to make decisions. A field of science has a belief system (ie unfalsifiable hypotheses) that is generally consistent within its paradigm, and it seems to me that a society likewise has a belief system that is generally consistent within its paradigm. Here I use generally to mean that some inconsistencies are permitted to increase the pool of unprovably true statements accepted in the paradigm. If it makes sense to speak of social paradigms, then it seems that a society will adjust to new beliefs in a way that is consistent with its own paradigm. Those beliefs will seem most reasonable that are least contradictory to the existing set of beliefs and to the other features of the paradigm.

I'm not sure whether you're simply describing a phenomenon that happens, or advocating for accepting traditional beliefs or social norms as a paradigm and then accepting unfalsified hypotheses that are consistent with those beliefs/norms.  It doesn't necessarily follow, though, that any given paradigm necessarily justifies affirming unfalsifiable hypotheses.  I understand (loosely) why mathematical paradigms would justify that -- because we have clearly, manifestly identifiable ways in which mathematics function that require certain preconditions/hypotheses to be true.  So I "get" why we accept unfalsifiable hypotheses for mathematics.  But why would we give that treatment to a social paradigm, and how do we decide which one?

The paradigms I use as a basis are from science, not mathematics. It was for science that the modern notion of a paradigm was constructed. Science does deal with untestable hypotheses and does make value judgments about which should be pursued. When a paradigm shifts. the value set shifts as well. It's not purely from the observational data, but also by the belief system of the scientists that influences how they interpret the observations.

My invocation of mathematics is in looking at the set of untestable hypotheses as a set of logical propositions that can be true or false. Mathematics and the philosophy of logic say that I cannot have a subset of such hypotheses that is simultaneously complete and consistent. There will either be true statements that are outside my subset or there will be statements within the system that are logical contradictions.

My connection is that in science, and I suspect in other areas of life we naturally deal with this dissonance for good reason - it's unavoidable. Paradigms in science must contain unfalsifiable hypotheses to function, including some that can lead to inconsistencies, because without them the logical framework is too narrow to deal with world. It is with that in mind I look to extend the analogy from science to other areas of society where belief sets include unfalsifiable hypotheses and internal inconsistencies.
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Alcon
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« Reply #66 on: October 18, 2015, 12:29:20 PM »

I am a little unclear as to what the second sentence here is referring to (is it referring to "God"?).

"It" refers to "uncreated entity" (the subject of the sentence), whether God or something else.

If God: The entire point of invoking an uncreated entity ("God") is precisely that the entity doesn't come into existence at all but is outside of time and thus outside of causation and creation. The entity simply is. Otherwise it would just be adding another step without addressing the issue (ie. "If God created the universe then who created God?"). That was the point my original post was trying to clear up and is the difference between the original misconstructed argument and my corrected version.

Understood...but do you understand how that's not relevant to my criticism of the logical construction?  If so, I think we're on the same page Tongue

For the latter part of your question, the argument is that everything within our space-time must have a cause, not that its cause must be within our space-time. Indeed virtually everything within our space-time clearly does have a cause within our space-time. However, if everything within our space-time must have a cause, at least one thing must have a cause outside of our space-time because it cannot cause itself. (An alternative explanation here would be a circular time but we have a lot of physical reasons to reject that idea.)

Right, I understand that.  But why do you believe that everything within our space-time need have a cause?  Because that is how we observe things in space-time to work.  But, by the same token, we do not observe things outside of space-time (if such things exist) to manifestly affect things within space-time.  The argument is based on the idea that an uncreated creator is consistent with something outside of space-time manifestly affecting something within space-time.  But it is also consistent with the idea of something existing within space-time being uncreated. 

If it's consistent with both, how do you reject the idea of an uncreated entity, and use that rejection to affirm the idea of an entity out of space-time having a manifest influence within space-time?  The only argument for this I see is that we regularly observe entities within space-time having causal origins*, but we don't regularly observe entities outside of space-time having manifest influence; as a result, we can assume that everything within space-time must be created, but can't reach any conclusions about the nature of entities outside of space-time.  This doesn't make sense, though.  If we can conclude from observation that entities within space-time must have causal origins,* how can we simultaneously avoid the conclusion that entities outside of space-time must not have manifest influence on entities within it, since -- as this argument presumes -- everything manifest within space-time has causal origins*?  You can't affirm one idea while rejecting the other; you definitely can't affirm one idea by rejecting the other, as the post I was responding to did.

* - Although not always, as muon notes.

Oh I do think they really mean they believe their own hypothesis is >50% likely to be true when they say they believe it. However, the actual probability and perceived probability is obviously different given the widespread disagreement. I agree that it would not be reasonable for a person to say they believe something they do not think is more likely than not to be true. However, I do not think it is unreasonable for another person to have a different belief about what is more than 50% likely to be true due to our inability to evaluate the ideas' likelihood in a universally understood way. Instead I would consider someone else's stated belief to be reasonable (assuming they think it >50% likely to be true) if the belief is plausible even if I do not think it likely to be true.

I mean, I totally get that sometimes people say "I believe x to be true" as a shorthand for "I believe x is the most reasonable possibility and we should operate under the assumption that x is true."  But I know very few people who characterize their religious beliefs as being merely more probable than other equally reasonable conclusions...and even if they do, they still claim they choose to believe they're certainly true anyway, which is obviously logically incoherent.

I totally understand that it's a natural human tendency to dismiss other people's observations or intuitions in favor of our own.  But we have resounding evidence that it's not rational to do this.  We chronically overestimate our ability to perceive things accurately vs. others', which is totally bizarre, because I don't think any of us believe other people are either less sane or less honest.  Natural, common, but bizarrely irrational -- so much so that I think people can't really even rationalize why they do this.
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Alcon
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« Reply #67 on: October 18, 2015, 12:50:26 PM »

Oops, didn't notice there were two posts.

I am somewhat split on whether or not this hypothesis is reasonable or not. I was immediately about to reject it as unreasonable upon re-reading it since it is believing an anecdote over the wider array of information that can be gathered by looking at others' experiences as well. On the other hand, the opposite hypothesis (look at peoples' experiences as a whole and don't take too much stock in your own) does not seem reasonable either as it results in ignoring your own intuitions and simply agreeing with the majority opinion whatever it may be without being able to question it. In reality this is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy and we're forced to consider the question somewhere between the two extremes; neither seems particularly reasonable, but we don't really have a better option here if we're going to consider the topic at all.

No one is arguing the bolded argument.  I am arguing that it's reasonable to include your own experience, and even adjust whatever weight you attach the possibility that you are more perceptive than other people.  In fact, in general, I think it's reasonable to give this some weight, simply because even if you believe others to be honest, sane, and comparably perceptive, there is some information asymmetry.  But enough to weight others' opinions so low relative to your own that you affirm your own with certitude?  No way, dude.

Imagine you were a witness to a crime along with several of your friends who you know to be honest, trustworthy, and sane.  If they all had different perceptions of what occurred, it would not be reasonable to conclude your own perception was true with certitude.  More likely to be true, simply because of information asymmetry?  Yes.  So likely to be true that it's rational to believe it with certitude?  Obviously not.  Any reasonable person with this information should conclude that they can't be certain, or even reasonably confident, that they perceived correctly.  And we have empirical evidence (about eyewitness reports) that indicates that this is the correct conclusion.

Here, I would agree that this is not a logical position to hold for certitude, but it is a logical reason to act without complete certitude in virtually the exact same manner as someone with certitude in every way except claiming certitude, provided the person is convinced the belief is at least likely to be true.

This is a side debate, but imagine a construction like "there's a 51% chance that it's wrong to believe x is less than 100% certain"...mind-numbing Tongue

Eh, I do think people occasionally do act this way outside of religion -- not as universally so -- but they sometimes do. I remember going to a conference about liquid crystals 3 or 4 years ago and there were a couple professors who would dive in repeatedly in the Q&A sessions and bicker about a feud they were having over whether or not bent-core liquid crystals have biaxial alignment. Most of the people there would roll their eyes and try to ignore them. I think the necessary condition is having a strong passion for a particular outcome. Regardless, that does hamper their objectivity somewhat.

I'm actually confused why I wrote that it never happens outside of religion, because I remember specifically thinking that it happens in other areas where people have strongly-held conclusions they want to reach.  Just to be clear, I don't think there are any behaviors that are totally limited to religious thought.  Hell, the eyewitness example I gave earlier is such a case.  I've also been in arguments where someone maintained with total certitude they didn't say anything, despite the involvement of 5+ neutral witnesses.  I suppose maybe I meant that it's the only place where it's socially accepted as reasonable.  Sorry...
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Alcon
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« Reply #68 on: October 18, 2015, 01:02:29 PM »

The paradigms I use as a basis are from science, not mathematics. It was for science that the modern notion of a paradigm was constructed. Science does deal with untestable hypotheses and does make value judgments about which should be pursued. When a paradigm shifts. the value set shifts as well. It's not purely from the observational data, but also by the belief system of the scientists that influences how they interpret the observations.

My invocation of mathematics is in looking at the set of untestable hypotheses as a set of logical propositions that can be true or false. Mathematics and the philosophy of logic say that I cannot have a subset of such hypotheses that is simultaneously complete and consistent. There will either be true statements that are outside my subset or there will be statements within the system that are logical contradictions.

My connection is that in science, and I suspect in other areas of life we naturally deal with this dissonance for good reason - it's unavoidable. Paradigms in science must contain unfalsifiable hypotheses to function, including some that can lead to inconsistencies, because without them the logical framework is too narrow to deal with world. It is with that in mind I look to extend the analogy from science to other areas of society where belief sets include unfalsifiable hypotheses and internal inconsistencies.

I understand that and the basic rationale for that, and I wish I knew more about the original of the unfalsifiable hypotheses that are accepted, but I have a vague sense of why such hypotheses are accepted for consistency with the paradigm.  I also understand that your point was just meant to rebut the idea that it's inherently unreasonable to accept unfalsifiable hypotheses.  However, I'm a lot less clear on how you see applying the affirmation of these unfalsifiable hypotheses to unfalsifiable hypotheses in the social realm.  You specifically invoked consistency with "accepted historical events and accepted norms for evaluating information to make decisions."  The parallels between "accepted historical events and accepted norms" in scientific/mathematical paradigms and social paradigms are unclear to me.  Mathematical/scientific paradigms are not merely traditional beliefs.  They're rooted in observations and inductive thinking in a way a lot of social norms and beliefs like religion are not.  I assume you understand what I'm getting at -- obviously, not all unfalsifiable hypotheses are reasonable to believe; the arbitrary belief in unfalsifiable hypotheses is the characteristic trait of delusion.  So, what trait of unfalsifiable hypotheses related to the social paradigm make some reasonable to affirm?  You can be really concrete here (relate it to religious views, even your own specific ones), if you want.
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muon2
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« Reply #69 on: October 19, 2015, 01:57:21 PM »

The paradigms I use as a basis are from science, not mathematics. It was for science that the modern notion of a paradigm was constructed. Science does deal with untestable hypotheses and does make value judgments about which should be pursued. When a paradigm shifts. the value set shifts as well. It's not purely from the observational data, but also by the belief system of the scientists that influences how they interpret the observations.

My invocation of mathematics is in looking at the set of untestable hypotheses as a set of logical propositions that can be true or false. Mathematics and the philosophy of logic say that I cannot have a subset of such hypotheses that is simultaneously complete and consistent. There will either be true statements that are outside my subset or there will be statements within the system that are logical contradictions.

My connection is that in science, and I suspect in other areas of life we naturally deal with this dissonance for good reason - it's unavoidable. Paradigms in science must contain unfalsifiable hypotheses to function, including some that can lead to inconsistencies, because without them the logical framework is too narrow to deal with world. It is with that in mind I look to extend the analogy from science to other areas of society where belief sets include unfalsifiable hypotheses and internal inconsistencies.

I understand that and the basic rationale for that, and I wish I knew more about the original of the unfalsifiable hypotheses that are accepted, but I have a vague sense of why such hypotheses are accepted for consistency with the paradigm.  I also understand that your point was just meant to rebut the idea that it's inherently unreasonable to accept unfalsifiable hypotheses.  However, I'm a lot less clear on how you see applying the affirmation of these unfalsifiable hypotheses to unfalsifiable hypotheses in the social realm.  You specifically invoked consistency with "accepted historical events and accepted norms for evaluating information to make decisions."  The parallels between "accepted historical events and accepted norms" in scientific/mathematical paradigms and social paradigms are unclear to me.  Mathematical/scientific paradigms are not merely traditional beliefs.  They're rooted in observations and inductive thinking in a way a lot of social norms and beliefs like religion are not.  I assume you understand what I'm getting at -- obviously, not all unfalsifiable hypotheses are reasonable to believe; the arbitrary belief in unfalsifiable hypotheses is the characteristic trait of delusion.  So, what trait of unfalsifiable hypotheses related to the social paradigm make some reasonable to affirm?  You can be really concrete here (relate it to religious views, even your own specific ones), if you want.

I' not sure I agree with the strength of your assertion that I emphasized. The whole notion of the scientific paradigm exists to explain how science can ignore facts and reasoning if they fall too far outside the existing paradigm. Consider part of the history of the speed of light.

In the 17th century Newton and Huygens investigated the speed of light but differed on its nature. Newton believed it to be a particle and Huygens thought it a wave, but both agreed that it must be one or the other. In order to explain optical and gravitational phenomena which reached across a vacuum both believed in an aether of small particles that acted to transmit those phenomena. This was not based on observational evidence, but simply a belief by analogy with water which acted as a medium for its waves. Newton rejected the wave model of light in the aether because it would disturb the motions of planets, yet couldn't remove himself from belief in the aether.

In the 18th century there were discoveries such as observation of stellar aberration, which was inconsistent with a waving aether unless only the Earth moved but not the observed stars. This gave more weight to Newton's particle view, until at the beginning of the 1800's Young showed that only the waves nature of light could explain his double slit interference patterns. This left theoreticians to construct elaborate and unverifiable frameworks to explain stellar aberrations and planetary motion with respect to light. Fizeau's experiments in the 1840's and 50's on the Doppler shift of light through water didn'treally fit any model, but it best fit Fresnel's aether dragging theory. However, the physicists had measured effects with light of different colors that plainly meant it didn't fit Fresnel's theory either.

In the 1860's Maxwell derived his famous equation that held that light in a vacuum could only have one speed. But to the science of the day, believing in the aether and the exclusive wave nature of light, that meant the aether must be static and we move through it. This was despite all the contradictory results over the prior two centuries, which came to a head in the 1880's when Michelson and Morley were unable to measure any motion of the Earth in the aether at very high precision. After those observations Lorentz, Fitzgerald and Poincare had worked out detailed equations to describe the effects but they were still embedded in theory of magical aether. Neither observations nor mathematics were enough to change the fundamental beliefs about light.

In 1905 Einstein publish two papers that ended the old beliefs. He showed that the equations of Lorentz could be derived without any recourse to the aether, which he did by postulating that the speed of light was itself a universal constant. Since the time of Newton (and even back to Galileo) it was understood that physical constants would be the same to all observers regardless of their relative motion. That his postulate was based on other parts of the old paradigm allowed science to discard the aether postulate. At the same time Einstein also published his explanation of the photoelectric effect (for which he won his Nobel prize) and described light as a particle that could act like a wave. This resolved the Newton-Huygens debate by showing that both were right, depending on which type of experiment one did.

My point of the long history is to provide an instance (there are others) where science locks into  hypotheses and are willing to accept contradictory evidence in order to hold on to the fundamental beliefs. Note that many of the continuously held hypotheses in the above history had been falsified for decades! New beliefs came about in the context of the paradigm - accounting for the benchmark theories and experiments that have gone before.
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Alcon
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« Reply #70 on: October 21, 2015, 02:11:33 AM »

It may take me a few days to reply.  Death in the family, getting a cold, and it's political mailer season so work is busy.  Sorry -- appreciate the reply!
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Alcon
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« Reply #71 on: October 22, 2015, 09:09:49 PM »

I' not sure I agree with the strength of your assertion that I emphasized. The whole notion of the scientific paradigm exists to explain how science can ignore facts and reasoning if they fall too far outside the existing paradigm. Consider part of the history of the speed of light.

In the 17th century Newton and Huygens investigated the speed of light but differed on its nature. Newton believed it to be a particle and Huygens thought it a wave, but both agreed that it must be one or the other. In order to explain optical and gravitational phenomena which reached across a vacuum both believed in an aether of small particles that acted to transmit those phenomena. This was not based on observational evidence, but simply a belief by analogy with water which acted as a medium for its waves. Newton rejected the wave model of light in the aether because it would disturb the motions of planets, yet couldn't remove himself from belief in the aether.

In the 18th century there were discoveries such as observation of stellar aberration, which was inconsistent with a waving aether unless only the Earth moved but not the observed stars. This gave more weight to Newton's particle view, until at the beginning of the 1800's Young showed that only the waves nature of light could explain his double slit interference patterns. This left theoreticians to construct elaborate and unverifiable frameworks to explain stellar aberrations and planetary motion with respect to light. Fizeau's experiments in the 1840's and 50's on the Doppler shift of light through water didn'treally fit any model, but it best fit Fresnel's aether dragging theory. However, the physicists had measured effects with light of different colors that plainly meant it didn't fit Fresnel's theory either.

In the 1860's Maxwell derived his famous equation that held that light in a vacuum could only have one speed. But to the science of the day, believing in the aether and the exclusive wave nature of light, that meant the aether must be static and we move through it. This was despite all the contradictory results over the prior two centuries, which came to a head in the 1880's when Michelson and Morley were unable to measure any motion of the Earth in the aether at very high precision. After those observations Lorentz, Fitzgerald and Poincare had worked out detailed equations to describe the effects but they were still embedded in theory of magical aether. Neither observations nor mathematics were enough to change the fundamental beliefs about light.

In 1905 Einstein publish two papers that ended the old beliefs. He showed that the equations of Lorentz could be derived without any recourse to the aether, which he did by postulating that the speed of light was itself a universal constant. Since the time of Newton (and even back to Galileo) it was understood that physical constants would be the same to all observers regardless of their relative motion. That his postulate was based on other parts of the old paradigm allowed science to discard the aether postulate. At the same time Einstein also published his explanation of the photoelectric effect (for which he won his Nobel prize) and described light as a particle that could act like a wave. This resolved the Newton-Huygens debate by showing that both were right, depending on which type of experiment one did.

My point of the long history is to provide an instance (there are others) where science locks into  hypotheses and are willing to accept contradictory evidence in order to hold on to the fundamental beliefs. Note that many of the continuously held hypotheses in the above history had been falsified for decades! New beliefs came about in the context of the paradigm - accounting for the benchmark theories and experiments that have gone before.

OK, I've read this several time and given it thought, and I appreciate that you indicated that this acceptance of unfalsifiable hypotheses was based more on constructed theory than evidence.  It's also cool to know more about the background particulars.  But you didn't answer any of my fundamental questions: how would one discern when doing this is reasonable vs. not, and how would you apply that to the social paradigm?  You seem to be declining to address the most fundamental question in this conversation, which is how we can determine which beliefs are reasonable and which are not.  It would help to know why this is done in some cases in the scientific realm but not in others, and how that could translate into the social paradigm -- and when it can't.

Obviously, it's not reasonable to arbitrarily accept unfalsifiable hypotheses -- I believe we call that "delusion" -- and it's not enough to presume all cases are reasonable just because some might be.  You understand this better than I do; can you explain the criteria as concisely as possible, and explain how they would translate to the social realm?

Thanks for the patience, btw.
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muon2
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« Reply #72 on: October 25, 2015, 04:33:58 PM »

Now it's my turn to be faced with multiple claims on my time. I appreciate the discussion, and hope you can be patient as well.
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Alcon
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« Reply #73 on: October 26, 2015, 12:16:09 AM »

Of course, thanks man!
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