Why Do You Believe?

[Alcon]

I don't believe that something can be created from nothing.  I believe there must be some greater being than I.  Whether or not that is the God I believe in is impossible to say.  It gives me comfort to believe in God and makes me at ease with whatever happens to me in the end.  Thats basically it.

Doesn't it strike you as a little contradictory to claim that "something can't be created from nothing, because that's not consistent with how the world seems to work" and then claim that God was something created from nothing?

Well it is certainly impossible to prove there is no god.

Few atheists would outright endorse the claim "it is certain there is no god"; most religious people, by most accounts I've seen, endorse the claim "it is certain there is a god."  Most atheists would instead endorse the claim "it is not reasonable to be certain there is a god."  In any case, "you can't prove this isn't true" isn't a particularly coherent reason to affirmatively believe something.

Our system of rational mathematical and scientific thought is based on hypotheses that can't be proven.

For example in classical geometry the statement "Given a line and a point not on the line, at most one line can be drawn through the point that is parallel to the given line." cannot be proved or disproved without introducing some other hypothesis that itself cannot be proved. The statement is called the parallel postulate (Playfair's version) and must be accepted as true to derive other aspects of geometry and mathematics.

In physics centuries were spent trying to measure the medium that carried light waves with no success. Einstein hypothesized that the speed of light was the same to all observers in straight line motion. This unproved postulate led to the development of Einstein's relativity and did away with the notion of a medium for light waves. Subsequent measurements of the effects of relativity didn't prove the postulate, but justified scientific belief in the unproven hypothesis.

In fact in the early 20th century Gödel proved that given any system of axioms there must be true statements about the natural numbers that are unprovable in the system. Essentially he delivered a logical proof that there there will always be unprovable hypotheses that are nonetheless true. Thus one must be prepared to believe in some unprovable hypotheses or choose to disbelieve statements that are true.

Yes, but in every one of those cases, there's some extrinsic reason those hypotheses are accepted above other consistent hypotheses.  The fact we accept some unfalsifiable hypotheses does not mean that all unfalsifiable hypotheses are equally valid or reasonable.  Certainly you're not trying to argue that all hypotheses are equally reasonable, so if not that, what?  (I feel like this is bordering on the same exchange we had in the vegan thread, and you never resolved my questions about how far, and to what purpose, you were drawing the bounds of your apparent shrugging subjectivism.)

[Alcon]

I don't believe that something can be created from nothing.  I believe there must be some greater being than I.  Whether or not that is the God I believe in is impossible to say.  It gives me comfort to believe in God and makes me at ease with whatever happens to me in the end.  Thats basically it.

Doesn't it strike you as a little contradictory to claim that "something can't be created from nothing, because that's not consistent with how the world seems to work" and then claim that God was something created from nothing?

I don't think many Christians would claim that God was created for nothing or that God was created at all but that God exists outside of time. That question seems to be attacking a position virtually no one actually holds.

Fair point on fact -- and I know that, so I should have phrased differently -- but why does that distinction matter?  The idea of "omnipotent entity existing outside of time" is just as unprecedented as "something created from nothing."

I mean, think about what this argument says logically

"There is no precedent for something being created from nothing.  Therefore, we should assume that it was created by a God that is omnipotent and exists outside of space-time."

How can you hold the former impossible and then endorse the latter claim with certitude as a result of rejecting the former claim?  It makes no sense.

[Alcon]

^

I don't really understand how arbitrarily choosing one answer, even because it's more pleasing, is necessary or meaningful.  Why not just say "this is a confusing question that doesn't seem to square with my current knowledge, and I have no reason to believe that either the simplest or most pleasing answers are true"?  Why not just...you know, not know?  It's not like you have to choose a side with absolute certitude.  

It's not surprising to me that people have intuitions about metaphysical truths.  It's just weird to me that so many people claim certainty about metaphysical truths, when often they don't even have a logically reason it's even likelier than alternative explanations.  Even if I thought one explanation was clearly likelier, I don't understand how I'd hop to believing it with absolute conviction.

"I know my belief might not be reasonable, but I know it's true" is just a baffling idea to me.  It's like arguing we're intellectually limited, but somehow magically, selectively omniscient anyway.

[Alcon]

My response was specifically to the quote I linked, but was dropped in your reply. It suggested that unproven hypotheses should not be believed. I disagree.

(...)

I believe that the human mind intrinsically lends itself to contradiction. Furthermore that contradiction is not necessarily a concern, since internal contradictions are unavoidable in a complete logical system.  

OK, then again: why hold any given belief over any other given belief, ever?  Is it entirely arbitrary and removed from empirical observation, or are there some unfalsifiable hypotheses that are more reasonable to operate on than others?  If so, why?

This isn't a pedantic question.  I recognize what you're saying about the necessity of unfalsifiable hypotheses, but how do we incorporate that without reaching a conclusion that all beliefs and ideas are equally reasonable?  Oftentimes I see this as a defense of believing unfalsifiable religious hypotheses, by why those, but not others?  The answers that apply to the mathematical examples you cited do not, as far as I know, really apply to religious hypotheses, which this thread is about.  I see this invoked to defend religious beliefs frequently, but I've never seen someone seriously explain how this extension doesn't defend all possible beliefs.

[Alcon]

The distinction matters because something being created from nothing is not merely something without precedent but rather something inexplicable in principle by our physical laws if one accepts that the universe is in and of itself intelligible (ie. each effect has a cause; if one rejects that idea then the logic stops making sense but that's not generally a view people hold). From there, one does not then conclude with absolute certitude that it was created by a God that is omnipotent outside of space-time but merely that it was caused by something outside of space-time. The God of metaphysics is an abstraction rather than a proof of the Christian God, who cannot be deduced entirely from logic in the absence of revelation, but the two are not inconsistent with each other.

Is existing out of space and time and being omnipotent and omniscient really more explicable based on our current understanding of physical laws?  I don't think "entity existing out of space-time" violates our observations about how the world functions any less than "entity that was not created."  The criticism I was making applies to both to my original misconstruction of this common argument and your accurate correction.

Pertaining to the question asked directly at the beginning of this thread, I don't think very many people actually hold their beliefs on this topic as a result of a logical proof. Instead I think they take their experiences and from those use inductive reasoning to formulate religious beliefs. Typically it is not until these beliefs are already formed, before people begin to consider deductive arguments from assumptions about the universe to explain beliefs they are already convinced of as a result of their observations about the world.

Yes, and the fact that many people do this process and come to completely different conclusions based on deduction -- and yet this doesn't affect the claims of certitude, somehow -- remains totally baffling to me.

Now, as opposed to your last sentence, very few people agree that their beliefs are not reasonable and most think they are consistent with the logical framework induced from squaring logical argument with them. The non-contradiction principle is widely accepted by both believers and nonbelievers alike. One can certainly argue that the reason why people hold their beliefs is unreasonable but that is a different question than whether the beliefs themselves are unreasonable.

The fact that a belief is consistent with observed reality does not make it reasonable.  Imagine if I handed you a deck of cards and you said, "the top card is an ace of spades."  Would that be a reasonable belief?  No.  You have no reason to believe the next card is an ace of spades; there are other, competing possibilities/hypotheses (51 of them) you have no sound reason to reject.  Even if the next card happens to be an ace of spades, that does not make your belief reasonable.

I don't know how to take your last sentence.  Either you are claiming that a belief is reasonable if it's substantially truthful (not necessarily -- like if the card is the ace of spades), or you're claiming that a belief's conclusion can be "reasonable" even if the logic behind the belief isn't reasonable.  I don't think calling the latter a "reasonable" belief makes sense.  Would you consider it "reasonable" if someone believed that avocados are heart-healthy because their astrologist told them that Aquarius is in the third house, and that makes the energy vibrations given off by green objects good for the heart?  That's not a reasonable belief.  That's an insane belief that's probably, coincidentally true.

[Alcon]

My response was specifically to the quote I linked, but was dropped in your reply. It suggested that unproven hypotheses should not be believed. I disagree.

(...)

I believe that the human mind intrinsically lends itself to contradiction. Furthermore that contradiction is not necessarily a concern, since internal contradictions are unavoidable in a complete logical system.  

OK, then again: why hold any given belief over any other given belief, ever?  Is it entirely arbitrary and removed from empirical observation, or are there some unfalsifiable hypotheses that are more reasonable to operate on than others?  If so, why?

This isn't a pedantic question.  I recognize what you're saying about the necessity of unfalsifiable hypotheses, but how do we incorporate that without reaching a conclusion that all beliefs and ideas are equally reasonable?  Oftentimes I see this as a defense of believing unfalsifiable religious hypotheses, by why those, but not others?  The answers that apply to the mathematical examples you cited do not, as far as I know, really apply to religious hypotheses, which this thread is about.  I see this invoked to defend religious beliefs frequently, but I've never seen someone seriously explain how this extension doesn't defend all possible beliefs.

It's an interesting way to phrase the question. I think the answer lies in the paradigm a person operates under, and I'll start with science since I know it best. To me a scientific paradigm includes hypotheses, observations, key pieces of derived knowledge, standard points of discussion and inquiry, and methodology to derive additional knowledge. Taken as a whole the paradigm is logically consistent, including the unfalsifiable hypotheses. Some unproven hypotheses are inconsistent with the paradigm, and these would fall into the category of those which are not believed. So not all beliefs in the field are equally reasonable.

I'm not a sociologist, but I believe there has been work on the application of paradigms to social science as well. I would think that a social paradigm should include relevant religious beliefs as hypotheses within that paradigm. As in the scientific paradigm the rationale for those beliefs would be their consistency with the overall social paradigm. As with science the social paradigm would provide a standard by which not all beliefs are equally reasonable.

As an aside for TJ, the statement that each effect has a cause is highly debatable in the world of quantum mechanics. The dominant view now is that some quantum effects (including some of those that underpin semiconductor electronics) do not have a cause per se, but are based on the probabilities of particular occurrences. The notion of strict causality at the atomic level does not fit into the current paradigm.

This is really interesting.  Can you elaborate a bit on how the social paradigm could provide such a standard?  I understand how the scientific paradigm might -- consistency with other observed phenomena -- but how would such a standard work in the social paradigm?

[Alcon]

Doing my best to sort this by topic to try to keep this contained.  Hopefully I didn't botch the ordering in the process.

***

The point in appealing to something outside of our space-time is not that is better matches our understanding of physical laws but as a statement that our physical laws are not in principle capable of answering the "uncaused cause" question. The argument rests on the idea that the physical laws are incapable of answering the question (ie. where did the universe come from) not because the laws are incomplete but they cannot in principle answer that question (incompleteness being another variety of 'God of the Gaps') because the problem at hand is to explain an uncaused cause whereas causality is one of the assumptions we use to determine the physical laws. People have postulated partial solutions to this problem (the origin of the universe) with multiverses and quantum fields in a vacuum but these partial solutions simply move the problem back another step and we're left, at best, with an infinite regress. (Which is the key difference between the misconstruction of the argument for God's existence from causation and the corrected one is that the corrected one avoids the infinite regress.)

But my point was that avoiding the infinite regress isn't necessary.  You can simply declare that, in the case of God, the infinite regress doesn't apply.  It is true that we operate under the assumption that everything has a cause -- but we also operate under the assumption that entities exist within space-time.  My point was that it's unsound to argue that all things must have a cause, because that fits our observations of how things work, and then to use that to argue that God must be an entity that exists out of space-time.  That inference requires asserting that, because one possibility (something without a cause) does not match our observations about how the world works, we should infer some other possibility (something out of space-time) that also doesn't.

(I don't want to overcomplicate things, but I recognize there's a distinction between "everything has a cause" -- which is 'substantiated' by our observations -- and "nothing exists out of space-time" -- which is instead 'substantiated' by our lack of observations.  However, the correct parallel is between the claims "nothing lacks a cause" and "nothing exists out of space-time."  If you think that distinction is important, I can explain why I think the correct parallel matters.)

***

It also depends somewhat on how you define 'reasonable', which turns into a semantic game. For instance believing the next card is the ace of spades is certainly more reasonable than believing it is the 17 of spades.

...

I don't think we're really disagreeing on substance here; I was merely pointing out the same distinction you are with this example.

It gets semantic at a certain point, but not at the point I was describing.  I think we can logically say the cut-off line for "reasonable belief' starts somewhere above a 50% probability that the belief is true.  It makes absolutely no sense to believe something is true, if the probability it's true is less than 50%, or less than or equal to the probability that some competing claim is true.

***

This example is distinct from religious belief because it contains a falsifiable hypothesis with probabilities that are known whereas religious beliefs contain unfalsifiable hypotheses.

...

A better analogy to religion would be a person giving their belief on what the next card is when that person thinks someone they think they know has stacked it. The situation has a lot more contingencies but more information to it than simply picking a card at random.

...

Level of certitude is an extremely difficult thing for people to grasp about something as simple as a prediction for who will win a sporting event and that typically has a predictable nature to its outcome from prior games. If we try to apply a probabilistic analysis to something like religion, we would be basically making up numbers or at best making very dubious assumptions about the likelihood of a particular belief being correct. Again, the vast majority of people simply don't think that way. They have experiences that they link to beliefs and tend to be very convinced they accurately perceived the experience and accurately interpreted it. Given the number of people and the nature of the induction process it's not at all surprising that we come to different conclusions (you meant induction not deduction here, right?)

I actually meant "deduction."  I just forgot how I was going to finish that sentence

Anyway, I must not have been clear, because you're reading my analogy (and overall claim) as being about probability.  Not really.  The point of the card analogy is merely that just because something is true does not mean believing it is reasonable.  Whether it's knowable (the distinction you point out) is not relevant to the analogy.  The point is that a belief can be non-contradictory with presented facts, and even turn out to be true (if it's knowable), and yet that belief can be totally unreasonable.  Why?  If you can't even explain why the belief is more compelling than all other hypotheses (as in the card analogy), it is not reasonable to believe it.  That's the case in the card analogy.  And that's all the card analogy was meant to demonstrate.

I hope it's clearer now that my analogy was not implying that I think all religious claims are equally compelling, which seems to be how you've taken it.  Like I said above, I don't think it's unreasonable to find a given religious claim more compelling than others.  However, most people's religious convictions go way, way, way beyond "I intuitively and subjectively find this metaphysical explanation of the world more compelling than other competing explanations."  And that's not because people don't know the difference between intuition-driven operating assumptions, and certitude.

Here's why it's really weird to me that certitude is so common.  You are right that most people assume that they accurately perceive and interpret experiences.  However, I also assume that other people reasonably believe they accurately perceive and interpret experiences, as well.  I don't think that others are secretly crazy or dishonest, and I doubt you do either.  It is not surprising, of course, that people come to different inductive conclusions.  Because experiences and processes vary, you'd expect even a few reasonable people exposed to the same stimuli to come to conclusions that are "outliers" in the larger group.  Like, if a big group of people observes a fight in public, a small number of people are probably going to completely misinterpret the events that occurred.  It's not surprising to me that perceptions and interpretations can vary.  It's surprising to me that perceptions and interpretations can vary so much, and yet certitude remain so widespread.

If a large group of reasonable, intelligent people saw an event and had an array of wildly different perceptions of what occurred, I wouldn't expect them to all maintain their interpretation with certitude.  Thinking that their interpretation was the most likely interpretation?  Sure.  Operating under the assumption that their interpretation was accurate, for lack of a more compelling interpretation?  Quite possibly.  Widespread certitude, in the face of many wildly different observations and interpretations from apparently reasonable, honest people?  Like I said, that would be baffling to me.

[Alcon]

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?

[Alcon]

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

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 .

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).

[Alcon]

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?

[Alcon]

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

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.

[Alcon]

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

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...

[Alcon]

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.

[Alcon]

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!

[Alcon]

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.

[Alcon]

Of course, thanks man!