The unavoidable dangers of belief and believers responsibility of the dangers
Have to test out this argument here. It's a controversial one, but keep it to a rational dialectic, please.
UPDATED
Therefore, religious belief or belief of any kind that is of Belief A (Premise 1-5) will always, eventually, lead to hateful, dangerous ideas at some point in time. The responsibility is on all people who believe something without sufficient evidence, Belief A, and who is rejecting evidence in favor of the necessity of faith or comfort in faith/belief (Premise 2), to prove or put their belief through scrutiny and falsifiability methods (Premise 7) in order to end up with either Belief B or Belief C -Otherwise risk the certain causality (Premise 4-6) of dangerous belief that can cause harm, murder, terror, torture, rape and so on in the name of that belief, Belief A.
Therefore, religious or other types of belief that are of type A, should be considered unethical and criticized. The moral obligation should be to always uphold epistemic responsibility (Premise 7) and prioritize belief type B and C as ethical while condemn type A as unethical. This applies to all people for any belief of type A; religious, personal and in institutions, research and politics.
UPDATED
- No argument has ever been able to prove the existence of God or gods through evidence. Religious belief is therefore based on belief in something that is unsupported by evidence or rational deduction.
- Kierkegaard or Pascal presented reasons to believe in God not linked to the existence of God, but either through Pascal's wager, in which it's most logical to believe than not to. Or by Kierkegaard, to believe because of the belief itself is a way of life (in his case Christianity).
- Russel's Teapot analogy points out the importance of burden of proof. If you make a claim or believe in something, you have the responsibility to prove it first. You must do this before claiming it to be true or demand others to disprove your belief or claim. If not, you could possibly invent any belief you want, like teapots in space and conclude it to be true since no one has the means to prove against it.
- By Russel’s teapot analogy and according to premise 1-2; religion or other beliefs can be made into whatever people can think of. This opens the door for people with dark and twisted thoughts and ideas to make up any type of belief they want, which could consist of harmful ideas such as murder, rape, torture and other kinds of harm to other people and themselves.
- If there’s a possibility that hateful and dangerous belief-systems will be created, it has a high probability of happening over a long enough timeline.
- There is no such thing as personal belief since you do not exist in a vacuum, detached from the rest of society and other people. As long as you interact with other people and the world, you will project your personal belief into other people’s world-view and influence their choices. The only way to not affect other people is to isolate yourself, but as soon as you interact you are projecting your ideas into the world.
- Epistemic responsibility put a responsibility on the ones who make choices without sufficient evidence. To choose to believe in something that you have no rational reasoning behind or no evidence for, is to accept something as true, without evidence or rational reasoning behind. This, based on premise 6, can lead to you projecting beliefs into others world-view and influence other people's choices and ideas based on a belief that you have not falsified, hold to scrutiny, proved or rationally reasoned behind.
- Belief can be categorized into three parts: A) Belief without rational cause, a belief that is without evidence, accepted as truth and acted upon by the believer.B) Belief with rational cause, a belief that has rational reasoning and logic and which has gone through falsifiable reasoning as much as possible, acted upon with caution because it is never considered to be true.C) Scientific belief, i.e Hypothesis, educated guess based on observations, previous evidence, careful induction, partly researched, but never accepted or acted upon as true before proven into a scientific theory.
Therefore, religious belief or belief of any kind that is of Belief A (Premise 1-5) will always, eventually, lead to hateful, dangerous ideas at some point in time. The responsibility is on all people who believe something without sufficient evidence, Belief A, and who is rejecting evidence in favor of the necessity of faith or comfort in faith/belief (Premise 2), to prove or put their belief through scrutiny and falsifiability methods (Premise 7) in order to end up with either Belief B or Belief C -Otherwise risk the certain causality (Premise 4-6) of dangerous belief that can cause harm, murder, terror, torture, rape and so on in the name of that belief, Belief A.
Therefore, religious or other types of belief that are of type A, should be considered unethical and criticized. The moral obligation should be to always uphold epistemic responsibility (Premise 7) and prioritize belief type B and C as ethical while condemn type A as unethical. This applies to all people for any belief of type A; religious, personal and in institutions, research and politics.
Comments (114)
If you are born in some Mormon family, love or respect could be conditional upon accepting certain ways of doing things. You don't really need believe at all. You just need to act as if you believe, follow rules, otherwise you get exiled (let go).
Some Muslim households will even kill their children if they have transgressed an interpretation of religious law.
Religious belief is an empty justification for doing as you do, sometimes at great social cost.
It is only because of different competing values, by which society is ordered, that religious beliefs are registered as dangerous, or harmful.
It might be universally desirable to do no harm if we have the choice but a sense of "having the choice" might itself be a belief that is gifted to us and that we think we ought to gift to others.
The gift of free thought surely permits us to advocate for the devil in the same way God would advocate for his believers, by appeal to choice or fate.
It's about the belief that does not have evidence or logical rational arguments behind them. If you have a scientific hypothesis, its never promoted as any kind of truth or doctrine and requires evidence or rational logic in order to become a theory.
If your assertion is that there are scientific "beliefs" that exist in any similar way to religious or other spiritual ones and do not have the demand on them to be proven, falsified, tested etc. then I'd like to hear such examples. Because the critical difference here is that if you say that a hypothesis is a "belief" according to the argument above, you are essentially saying that religious or other kinds of belief that don't care for evidence or rational explanation is the same as how scientists treat hypotheses. However, scientists never act on a hypothesis, they know its unproven, they know they need to be careful with hypotheses. Religion or other spiritual belief do not, as pointed out in premise 2.
If you are going to equal scientific hypotheses and religious/spiritual/other beliefs that don't care for evidence at all, you would need to write out that counter-argument a bit more. It's not enough to just write "scientific belief" since that feels awfully like an argument fallacy.
These are examples of why my conclusion seems to holds up. And it supports the idea of epistemic responsibility.
Quoting Nils Loc
Which is why belief in anything that you cannot rationally back up can lead to dangers down the road. Personal belief does not exist unless you are in total isolation from the rest of humanity. As soon as you start to interact with others you will influence them and affect them in certain ways. Your spiritual/religious/other personal belief might seem harmless to you, but the causality of it down the line might build up something that harms people.
The competing values have their roots, sometimes harmless roots, which become harmful. It's not always competing though, like with honor killings.
Quoting Nils Loc
Can you back up the choice with rational ideas about what might be the best for other people? Because if you can argue, prove or rationalize something as true or logical outside of your conviction, it's not a belief that follows premise 2.
Quoting Nils Loc
But can you back up your thought rationally? If its only a belief and you start acting on it, projecting it onto the world, you are acting upon unsupported belief like in the argument presented.
I'm talking about Pascal's wager and Kierkegaard argument that belief is supposed to be without any evidence. This is the road most religious people take when arguing for their belief.
Quoting tim wood
Please form a better argument than "Nah". It's not enough. What is not working with the conclusion? Have you actually gone into depth with all the presented premises?
Need an example of what you mean.
Quoting Christoffer - accept
Quoting Christoffer
not sure what this adds - will withhold judgement
Quoting Christoffer
Challenge - Russels argument has nothing at all to do with rejecting evidence in favor of faith. Its sole purpose was to place the burden of proof on the person making the claim. If one is holding a view by faith that is in conflict with evidence that is just a fool. And fools do all kinds of things. In the argument, what Russel is saying is, if I make a claim that there is a teapot between the earth and the sun, the burden is on me to prove that, not on you to disprove that.
Quoting Christoffer
Challenge - I don't see how Russels argument has anything meaningful to say about what people say they believe - based on anything. The only thing it would say is the burden of proof for any truth claims they make is on them. People are capable of all kinds of evil, and can find all kinds of basis to justify it. Not seeing the direct or unique link between religious beliefs per se and the evil.
Quoting Christoffer
not sure what you are saying here - there is a surety that hateful and dangerous belief systems will be created, and they will be justified by all kinds of things, including religion
Quoting Christoffer
Ok
Quoting Christoffer
We are free to believe and think all kinds of things - why is the simple act of belief without proof something to be avoided?
Quoting Christoffer
Like this:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away
our this
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons[a] of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
I understand that religion, has and might well again cause real evil. But the causal relationship is, religion is a act of man, it is a human organisation, and evil is part of the human condition. I don't see you made any kind of case that says faith leads to religion that leads to evil.
That belief as a justified existence has been made by Pascal's wager and Kierkegaard's idea that faith/belief should exist because it isn't proved.
Quoting Rank Amateur
Essentially, it's in the same realm as my premise. Point being that if you do not follow the burden of proof for your belief, then anything could possibly be believed without demand for evidence.
If someone starts believing and following a belief of harm against humanity being good, if it's ok to reject evidence or the process (burden of proof), you can't argue for why this is wrong except when its too late.
Quoting Rank Amateur
The direct link is that without the burden of proof or demand for rationally explain the belief you have you are free to form whatever belief you want without anyone having the right to criticize it because of the freedom of belief we have.
Quoting Rank Amateur
I'm saying that if there's a possibility of hateful belief-systems being created because we have no demand on such created beliefs like, burden of proof, to justify that belief, it will over the course of a long enough timespan, happen, and people will get harmed.
Quoting Rank Amateur
Because it eventually leads to harm by distortion of truths. I think you take the premise out of the argument instead of looking at the premises as supporting the conclusion that summarizes why.
Quoting Rank Amateur
My conclusion is that faith/belief eventually leads to suffering and harm because of its ignorance of truth and evidence for its claims. You can't take good sounding parts of religious writing out of context as an example of something that disputes this.
Belief is neither connected to any current religions or religion at all really. The conclusion is about all belief. The point is that if someone has a belief and ignores the demand to justify that belief, it can lead to harmful behavior since it ignores the possibility that it might be harmful. It might not even be the person creating this belief that does the harm. The belief, as I mentioned about personal belief impossible to be kept personal, can influence and spread into harmful forms later in time.
If a belief is created and it does not care for truth or rational explanation, it has a great potential for creating harm. Therefore, it is unethical to hold on to a belief that isn't explained rationally or proven. That is the point of my argument.
How is this an example of belief? It seems you don't know what a hypothesis is? Or how it is used in science? A scientist does not act upon a hypothesis like it is the truth, believers of religion/faith/other does. That is the critical difference here. A scientist proposes a hypothesis with relevant supporting logic to why it might be, but never say "it is true", ever.
If you are going down the Descartes-road about not trusting anything but your own mind, then you can't even trust your own senses viewing those atoms so your example falls flat with that as well.
If you mean that nothing is true until you, yourself has seen it, that's just ignorance and ignorance of logic and evidence. Are you unable to write on a device that was invented because science proved things that enabled developing parts of that device? You didn't see scientists develop the internals of the device you have, you don't even know how it works or has seen inside your own device, so are you saying that you are writing on a device that is existing even though it's based on just a bunch of science-beliefs? Just because you didn't see any of it?
Are you talking about modern scientific methods with falsifiability and cross-checking? Or are you referring to outdated methods?
Also, for the example you put forth:
I'd like to hear a proper counter-argument to the ethical argument I made. If your point is that belief outside of just religion should be viewed in the same way, I'm totally with you on that, but that requires you to understand the difference between how science views a belief/hypothesis and how believers that won't care for the burden of proof, does.
The picture you linked could be a picture of anything. I could believe that it indeed shows atoms. How could I ever be sure without looking through microscopes? I might read some books, come to find it plausible, but it remains a belief.
Religious faith and belief, or other beliefs that are held without caring to rationally explain or have evidence for them are not the same things as scientific hypotheses, which are beliefs which are never acted upon as truths before proven into theories.
It is fundamental to science that a hypothesis remains as a thought experiment and not truth.
If you can't see or understand this difference I can't help you understand the argument and your misunderstanding of the argument cannot lead to a proper counter-argument to the argument I presented, sorry.
Quoting Tzeentch
You are making a metaphysical claim about the nature of perception itself. It has nothing to do with the ethical argument I presented. It is irrelevant. Please stick to the ethical argument and what it's about. If your way of arguing specific sections of philosophy with "how can anyone know that what they don't see is true", you are essentially making a nonsense argument.
If you want to talk metaphysics, present your argument in the metaphysics section of the forum, this is ethics.
I fail to see how this relates? My conclusion is that belief without rational explanation or evidence that support that belief, is dangerous.
Someone believes that vacines causes autism. It's based on someone telling them this based on a belief (which was the study that got refuted back in the 90's.). This someone, believe in this idea and ignores any evidence against that belief. This someone does not care to try and prove or rationally explain this belief and in doing all this, this someone's belief leads to their child dying in measles and spreading this further to other children.
The act of believing without caring for proving that belief killed the child and maybe more.
Someone has a belief in God. Someone else tells him that its Gods will to kill another person. The someone does not question god, because of his belief and kills the man.
These two are direct examples of my argument. But it also relates to dsitribution of belief that might become harmful. Like Nils Loc, earlier in this thread mentioned about cultures based on religious belief. There can be acts within these cultures that are downright brutal and murderous, but the belief wasn't invented by them, it was past down through generations. Therefore, belief has ramifications over time and I return to my conclusion, that belief without proof or rational reasons are unethical.
If you are talking about the purely metaphysical aspect of perception, you should go to the metaphysical section of the forum. This is an ethical argument I presented. Otherwise I can murder someone and just try and defend my actions in society with "how do the witnesses know that what they saw was the truth". A counter-argument like this for the argument I presented is nonsensical.
I don't see how the fact that they are never acted upon as truths before proven somehow makes those hypotheses special. A belief is a belief.
Quoting Christoffer
Another way of saying "If you don't agree with me, I think you're stupid."
*yawn*
Quoting Christoffer
I'm not. I'm pointing out that pictures prove nothing. I could show you a picture of God. Would that be proof that God exists? I think not.
Quoting Christoffer
How is that a nonsense argument?
You are making a straw man out of this.
[b]Hypothesis = an idea about how something might be, never acted out as truth.
Belief (religious, spiritual or convinced of a specific thing) = An idea without proof, acted out as truth.[/b]
If you cannot see the difference between those two, you are intentionally ignoring the differences to support your narrative. That's a fallacy.
Quoting Tzeentch
No, you aren't making any proper philosophical counter-argument to what I wrote. You are making a biased fallacy-driven case that isn't even close to proving what I said was wrong. You are just saying opinion, philosophical dialectic is not about opinion. So stop yawning.
Quoting Tzeentch
What does this have to do with the ethics-argument I presented? You are just babbling about other stuff now, focus on the argument.
Quoting Tzeentch
Because it has no place in the ethics section, it belongs in metaphysics. You grasp basic philosophy? If you mix everything together and just claim that you can't know anything, then there's no point in philosophy of anything. So what is the point of even talking about ethics? That's why your argument in here is nonsense.
If we were to discuss Descartes and his demon-argument under metaphysics we could have such a discussion, but this is about the ethics of belief. So do the dialectic properly please.
There's such a thing as proof in logic and mathematics. ...and questionably in matters of physics. But not as regards ultimate reality or Reality as a whole. So it's silly to want proof of God, for example.
Evidence needn't be proof. Evidence consists of some reason to believe something. There can be evidence on both sides of a y/n question. You may have your reason to believe that someone else's belief is correct. Without knowing all Theists, and all of their beliefs, and all of their evidence for their beliefs, you can't validly evaluate their evidence.
Then Russel was all confused. Religious faith is about the larger matter of what-is, Reality as a whole, ultimate reality. The matter of what there is in space is an entirely different sort of matter, a physical matter subject to such considerations of logic, mathematics, and the standards of science.
See above.
Michael Ossipoff
7 W (South-Solstice WeekDate Calendar)
...Wednesday of the 7th week of the calendar year that started with the Monday that started closest to the South-Solstice..
They're both ideas without proof, thus beliefs. That one supposedly is acted upon while the other is not is an arbitrary distinction.
Quoting Christoffer
You've limited your argument to religious beliefs. I suggested we add scientific beliefs as well.
Quoting Christoffer
My argument has nothing to do with metaphysics. It has to do with the nature of beliefs and how the world, including most people's understanding of science, is riddled with them. These beliefs do not fundamentally differ. Believing the man in the white coat on the television that calls himself a scientist is the same as believing the man in the church that calls himself a man of god.
So if I believe that killing my neighbor is a good thing. Because I cannot prove this to be true its silly not to kill my neighbor?
If you get caught up in a murder, it is silly to try and rationally explain your innocence?
The judge say you cannot use math and logic in order to prove why you are the wrong man?
Do you mean that we cannot prove or rationally explain anything in this world, that science haven't proven anything at all, that the technology that enables your quality of life came out of a fluke luck of the developers of the tech?
This is the kind of rationality and proof I'm talking about.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
The premise you are answering on is about Kierkegaard and Pascal's arguments for reasons to have faith without any care for evidence that it is true or rational. So I'm not sure what your answer is referring to here?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
This has nothing to do with the nature of belief and the ethics of it. So I don't see what this is a counter-argument to? I take it you are unfamiliar with Russel? He's being falsifiability, you know, the most important tool for doing science without bias.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
What does this have to do with anything?
It is this part of the argument that makes my argument
Related.
I know the argument your presenting inside and out.
You standing against religion
I'm saying that if your correct, science is a based on observations then logical concussions. Observations come from what you see, but what evidence do you have.
If this is not solved it counters your frist argument
Because it would make it that the reason there's no evidence be that we can't see the truth. Therefore the evidence may be there but impossible to find. This makes the rest of the agreement mean any believe may be dangerous or not, but we have no way to tell. If we have no way to tell we might as well hold whatever believe we think is valid.
The difference is the foundation of the ethics in this. To act like a belief is true versus understanding something is only belief and shouldn't be taken as truth is fundamental logic for this. How is this not important for the ethics of belief? And this is also why scientific belief is never called belief, but hypotheses.
You are essentially doing a fallacy by deciding preference of what is important and what is not in order to support your point. You haven't explained why this difference isn't important, you just say that it is.
Quoting Tzeentch
No, you suggest this because you seem to drive an apologist agenda. You want to add scientific belief disregarding the fundamental difference between the two. It's crystal clear that you intentionally disregard the nuances of the argument in order to shoehorn in something that is critical against science, but you don't understand the fundamental difference between belief claimed to be truth and a hypothesis that is never claimed to be true.
Quoting Tzeentch
This is a stupid fallacy of an argument with seemingly no knowledge of what science is or how it works. Irrelevant argument and you are talking complete nonsense with that kind of reasoning. It's close to populistic, anti-climate change crap from uneducated people.
Stop doing fallacies, its a waste of time.
You might want to look up Epistemic Responsibility first.
Quoting hachit
Not really, I'm making an argument against belief that is corruptable due to the lack of will to prove or rationally explain it. If you act upon your belief as being true, without proving or rationally explaining why it is true you are susceptible to a corrupted belief, be it your own, or a version of it, or someone corrupts it down the line when you influence the world around you according to that belief.
So even if religion comes to mind and probably is inevitable to be included in this, it's about the unethical ramifications of a truth claim to a belief that is not supported by anything but whatever you invent for it.
This can also apply to stuff like anti-vaxxers believe that vaccines cause autism.
Quoting hachit
How do you prove that vaccines work and don't cause autism? Some parents don't believe otherwise
How do you prove to your child that drinking gasoline kills you? Some (hopefully not) kid believes it.
How do you prove that honor killings within Islam is wrong? Some fathers and brothers believe it to be honorable.
Quoting hachit
Are you writing on a device right now that is the result of scientific research, theories, theoretical physics, engineering ideas etc? Things put together through deduction, induction, trial and error, research, falsifiability methods, cross-checking and so on?
Do you mean to say, that we cannot prove, research and rationally explain things and because of that form and change our world according to it? How then are you writing on a device that is the direct result of science and research?
What do you call that knowledge, research and science?
The extreme demand for defining evidence in simplistic terms or explanations exclude the entire scale of how rational reasoning, scientific methods and falsifiability work. It's ignoring the direct results of theories and ideas for which your quality of life is resting upon. This way, the everyday methods of rational individuals and scientists to explain something to the best of their ability as detached from their own subjectivity as possible, is the kind of "proving" I'm talking about. Because if you mean that there still is no way of proving anything, you wouldn't be able to write on the device you are writing on, since no one can't seem to prove anything.
In other cases, situations where its harder to get pure solid proof, it's the mere moral obligation to at least try and explain and falsify a conviction that you have that is the ethical route. My conclusion is that it's unethical to believe something and ignoring its validity or truth because that inevitably at some time will lead to harm, as per my premises describe.
How do you draw up ethical guidelines for society to work under? How do you prove that murder is wrong? If you believe that murder is right, is it ok to spread that belief, influence and get followers under it? Why is that wrong? It's a philosophical question in its own right, but in the context of my argument. If you can rationally conclude why murder is wrong, why do a belief like anti-vaxxers have, not need to rationally explain why vaccines are bad? Why do believers who won't care for proving or rationally explain their belief be considered ethical in any way?
Quoting hachit
The premise is still true, no evidence or proof exists of any God or Gods, which means that belief in God or Gods have no truth value whatsoever and should not ethically be an influence on society and other people.
It seems that you take the premises out of context or argue them as an argument in of themselves. Like the first premise, you cannot say it is wrong, because it isn't. The same goes for premise two about Kirkegaard and Pascal, it only says what they presented as reasons for belief.
If you are going to argue against a premise you need to argue against if it's true or not. The fact is, there is no evidence for God or Gods. If there were we wouldn't even have this discussion. So premise 1 is true. Fact is that Kirkegaard presented his reason for belief and Pascal presented his wager, there's nothing to counter here, they did it so premise 2 is true.
So I recommend taking another look at the entire argument. If a premise isn't true, point that out, but so far I've only heard opinions from people and attempts to discredit through fallacies, no real breakdown of the actual argument in a rational counter-argument.
Are you absolutely sure that your counter-arguments are rational and outside of your subjective convictions? That's what I'm after.
The premises are, as I see, still true. I may need to formulate them further in order to clarify better, but I fail to see anything really disputing them so far.
I'm not some person off the street. I know what it is . We are responsible for what we believe. There you happy with that.
I'm sorry I was unclear what I mean when I said You standing against religion but I have no better way to put it.
Knowledge, what we know.
Research, the method we use to find the truth, as defined in the postulates. (I'll get back to this later)
Science, the way we found works but it still can be false.
This was again unclear on my part. I'm saying that it is just as logically as anything else
When something has no postules it is definitely true.
Also I have a stance were what we see is your best way of making sense of the universe but it is not actually there. This explains why science works even if the conclusion is false.
That doesn't make me not strongly disagree with your last three premises (and so your conclusion as well).
Then why ask something about something that is known to you? Almost all my premises are based on previously established arguments in philosophy.
Quoting hachit
Yes, but there's a difference between knowing the thing you research might be wrong and ignoring it to be wrong accepting it to be true, which is what belief without rational explanation or proof is about.
That difference is the foundation of the ethics conclusion for this argument. (I may need to revise the premises and include this specifically).
Quoting hachit
It is the conclusion to the premises in my argument. Premise 1 is true, there's no real denying that. This means that there is no proven or supported truth in the God the belief is about. Just because you believe in God, doesn't mean it is true. It is an unsupported belief. My argument points to the ethical problems with unsupported belief as it will over a long enough timeline always lead to harm against others or the self in some way or another, not necessarily to you directly but generations after etc.
The causality of this is as far as I can conclude, statistically very probable.
Quoting hachit
Even though this is metaphysics, it doesn't really counter the ethical argument. The result of science is all around us. Theories, hypotheses, research and falsifiability have all developed the world and the knowledge that we have. Even though you argue that we make sense of the universe through our eyes but it isn't there, it doesn't really counter the reality of science that is fundamental for this argument.
And if you are doing metaphysics on that idea, post the argument for it under metaphysics. I'd like to see the actual argument for your perception without true reality-hypothesis. :up:
"metaphysics, it doesn't really counter the ethical argument. The result of science is all around us."
Your entire argument is dependent on the question can anything be known. Because if the answer is no (as I believe it is) it makes all believes dangerous.
Yes, you are right to say that a believe, may come violent.
Alright, let's break them down. I mean, I may need to revise them to clarify them better.
Quoting Christoffer
This is simple logical probability. If X has a probability of happening, then over a long period of time X will most likely occur at some point.
If someone has an unsupported belief that gays should not have certain rights. And there's a probability of this person influencing someone else who is later on becoming violent against gays and kills a person. There's causality in this that breaks epistemic responsibility.
Essentially, my argument is a form of version of epistemic responsibility, within the context of belief-systems.
Quoting Christoffer
Please elaborate why this is illogical? The beliefs you have influence the values, opinions and actions you take externally. You will project yourself into the society you are in, influencing other people. This means that the concept of personal belief, the common argument that "you are entitled to believe whatever you want" is flawed in its reasoning about how people interact and how your thoughts and beliefs affect others around you, even if you don't intentionally project them.
How do you think the epidemic of anti-vaxxers came about. It's because of how someone's belief spread to others. It's a great example of this argument.
Quoting Christoffer
Epistemic responsibility is a known idea in philosophy. If you haven't, check it out.
Hope that clears things up a little. But please elaborate if you still don't think they hold up.
No it doesn't, it depends on the common methods of deciphering if the belief you have has any truth value. If you disagree that there are ways to find out if what you think is true or not, then you are essentially disagreeing with any common science that has produced any results up until this point. You know that you can fly on a plane? That you can write on a device while traveling and communicate on forums like this, you know, science, that made that possible. These scientific methods didn't need everything to be known because that isn't the factor for the ethical claim of this argument.
Like you believe there to be one cookie left in a jar in the kitchen, but you can't check so you lay out the evidence you have, when you bought the cookies and when you last ate, how many you took. You cross-check and falsify with as much data as you have about if you might have taken more cookies at a later time. Then you inductively reason on how many are left; one cookie. The thing to remember is that the method itself is the key, not if you were right. You took every possible way of figuring out if your belief was wrong (falsify) in order to come o a conclusion, then if possible (look in the jar) you prove it definitely.
This is light years away from the belief in, typically, religion, where belief doesn't require any rational reasoning, proof, deduction, induction, falsifiability and so on. It's totally corruptable.
If you want to corrupt your belief in the one cookie left scenario; You skip all the deduction and you believe that there are ten cookies left because you want there to be ten cookies left and you ditch any attempt to figure out how many there are left and you never check. Then your spouse goes into the kitchen and complains that there are no cookies and you continue with saying that you can't see what she is seeing so you still believe there are ten cookies. This is as flawed as a point of view could ever be by a human about the surrounding world. Essentially, this is what unsupported belief is and it's much more dangerous than getting in a fight over the number of cookies left. Because unsupported claims/beliefs about the world can influence others. Like if your belief has you wanting to restrain gay rights; that will have an effect on the community and it could eventually lead to some dark outcomes.
In order to understand the argument on a deeper, you may want to skip straw manning it.
"Epistemic responsibility put a responsibility on the ones who make choices without sufficient evidence"
So how do you get sufficient evidence without a postules. If there are postules there is room for doubt. ( postules are an assumption). So if you can prove that science is correct without need for a postule I will agree with you.
Is your counter-argument that if there are any doubts to the conclusion of trying to falsify a belief you hold, then you don't need to falsify or try and find evidence for what you believe?
Because the entire counter argument you have is built upon proving that if you can't 100% prove something you don't need to do the scientific methods at all.
This is a very binary way of looking at this argument and flawed in actually countering my conclusion, since the conclusion isn't dependent on the deduced conclusion being perfect.
You essentially ditch rational thinking if that rational thinking isn't 100% accurate in its conclusion. It's essentially also like saying that because science doesn't know the entire solution to the universe with its unification theory, then we should just throw all science out the window. You are writing on a computer which is probably filled with technology that came out of science that had a lot of doubts during research, however, they did not ditch that and "believed together the computer"
But we have science and this science has doubts and works with those doubts, but the methods of reaching conclusions with the least amount of errors do exist and those methods should be used to uphold Epistemic Responsibility.
Epistemic responsibility is something you can read about more if you want and the validity of my argument for ethics philosophy still stands since your counter-argument here really doesn't counter it's conclusion at all.
But I would argue that it did not need the science to be 100% correct.
- If you believe whatever you want and that ends up killing someone, you had the responsibility of testing that belief in order to avoid the consequence.
- You test your belief and you have doubts, but arrive at a conclusion that was not your initial belief, the man lives. You took responsibility for testing your belief with facts and rational reasoning.
You don't need to reach 100% truth, it's the method of testing belief and not just believe that is the conclusion really. The responsibility is in trying to disprove yourself until you are as certain as you can of the right choice or idea. If you are wrong, at least you can then change. Unsupported belief doesn't work like that, it's simply about believing something and accepting it.
This is where my argument comes in. If belief is so easily corrupted since you are never testing it (falsify). There is a probability that it will eventually and close to always end up in negative outcomes for you, others or people later in history.
Because of this, the conclusion is that belief, because it's so prone to be corrupted in some form or another, is unethical in comparison with living by epistemic responsibility. Belief is like pulling the ring out of a grenade, believing its a dud. Being responsible is evaluating the most possible outcome and not pull the ring. One keeps the grenade safe, the other might explode or it may be a dud until later someone else gets blast to pieces.
If there is no such thing as personal belief, then there is no such thing as projecting it.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster shows that that is not enough for warranting certainty in belief.
Unfortunately, this topic uses the term "belief" in an unnecessarily limited scope.
Och, och. An apologist agenda? You must not presume so much. Perhaps then you'd be a tad less insufferable to discuss with.
Quoting Christoffer
This isn't the core of the argument.
What I'm proposing is that science, to the degree that it hasn't been replicated by an individual, is pure belief. Belief in words and pictures. The individual may believe these words and pictures based on the authority he projects on a man in a white coat. One may observe consistency and therefore come to find these beliefs more plausible, but until one has done the actual experiments themselves, it is still just a belief that the man in the white coat is telling the truth.
Quoting Christoffer
Calling things fallacies doesn't make them so. It's quite easy to call everything one cannot find an easy answer to a fallacy, but it's hardly impressive.
Believing the priest in church is no different from believing the white man in a coat on television. There is literally zero difference.
Quoting Christoffer
Would you say that it's a logical induction that the probability of harmful belief and harmful consequences of belief is very high over a long enough timeline? Meaning, if we don't care about epistemic responsibility, we will always have the rise of some belief that leads to harmful consequences since there is no responsibility of explaining or testing that belief against any form of rationality.
Quoting tim wood
That is not the conclusion. The conclusion is that belief without rationality behind it eventually leads to negative outcomes. If someone believes something that at the time is harmful, but influence people around them and them, in turn, evolve this belief into harmful forms, the irrational belief by the first person is what caused the harmful form it took. Also mentioned in premise 6, personal belief is an illusion because we cannot hold personal belief at the same time as living with others without projecting the result of that belief onto others. So the causality is there, however "personal" someone's belief may be.
Quoting tim wood
In what way am I confused in my argument? A belief in God is unsupported and susceptible to corruption. The same goes for Anti-Vaxxer belief that vaccines cause autism. None of them have any rationality behind them and they don't care for any evidence or rational argument in support of the belief.
If you have evidence, then it's not really belief anymore, right? Then you are following epistemic responsibility. You don't have evidence for belief in God or gods and you don't have evidence that vaccines cause autism, so why hold on to those beliefs when they can be corrupted and lead to negative outcomes. This is my argument.
Quoting tim wood
I fault people for rejecting evidence and not caring for trying to falsify their belief. If any evidence is there, it opens up the belief for scrutiny and if that review of the belief is ignored, it breaks epistemic responsibility. It doesn't matter what the evidence is, it matters that you test your beliefs, otherwise you open the door to spreading misinformation, manipulation and the dangers of corrupted beliefs that might lead to dangerous outcomes.
The point is that unsupported belief that you ignore testing is, per my argument, not only irresponsible but also potentially dangerous.
Quoting tim wood
Is the formulation grammatically flawed here? (I'm not a native English speaker)
The point is that if you agree that harm, harmful behavior, murder and hate are ethically wrong, then you would agree that belief without rational support or proof for that belief is also wrong since the probability of such unsupported belief leading to negative, harmful and dangerous outcomes is very high over a long enough time period. Therefore it is ethically wrong to hold a belief without support for that belief.
If that summery doesn't work help me out with formulating it.
There is no such thing as personal belief because everything you hold personal gets projected externally and therefore it isn't personal belief anymore. I see no flaw in that logic?
Do you mean that "belief" in my argument is limited? Essentially here's my definition of different beliefs:
A) Belief without support: You do not care for proof, rational support/argument but accept this belief as true.
B) Belief within science, i.e a Hypothesis: You care for proof, rational support/argument in support of your hypothesis, but use it in thought experiments to try and find such support for it, you never accept the hypothesis itself as true before support exist to do so, i.e scientific theory.
C) Belief with support: A general beilef without it being a scientific hypothesis, i.e personal belief but still not accepted as truth unless enough support, rationality or proof exist. You believe something, but accept that you might be wrong and always point out that you might be wrong if you externalize that belief. If that belief has enough support but isn't a proven fact you hold onto it along the line of epistemic responsibility.
In case of A, you risk negative and dangerous outcomes, per my argument. In case of B and C you minimize it and follow epistemic responsibility as best you can. A is unethical because of the risks it can lead to, B and C are ethically sound.
You haven't done a proper argument, you either intentionally or unintentionally confuse what philosophy you are discussing here. You mix metaphysical ideas with ethical and use counter-arguments that fail to stick to the ethical aspect of this argument.
Quoting Tzeentch
You are not talking about science but pseudoscience. Pseudoscience gets involved in my argument without the need for putting "science" in it. Because pseudoscience is per nature a belief without proper scientific methods. But you seem to mix proper science with psudoscience in your description of science as a whole. But a scientific hypothesis is not pseudo science, it's an educated guress based on rational argument about something. A pseudoscientist would take that educational guess and present it as scientific "fact" while proper science never accept it as truth, only a stepping stone to finding out a truth.
The fundamental difference is that "belief" as I argue being dangerous is when it is unsupported by logic, rationality or evidence, meaning, a hypothesis that is handled as just that and never truth, doesn't break epistemic responsibility. If you believe something and know that you don't have anything to back it up with you can hold onto it but be clear to others that it is unsupported. Then you aren't breaking epistemic responsibility since you are not acting upon the belief as truth and you aren't projecting that belief as truth to others.
Quoting Tzeentch
But it is a fallacy if you simplify my argument before answering to it. If you reduce it to a binary position in order to more easily put forth your counter-argument you are essentially making a fallacy, you understand this right?
Quoting Tzeentch
This argument lacks any complexity to the reality as it is. The priest is all about unsupported faith. The man in a coat on television could be a pseudoscientist and in that case the same, but if he's a true scientist in his field and he is presenting a study that has been falsified into a scientific thoery, how can you say that there is zero difference? This is why it's so hard to take you seriously, because this type of argument is the same as anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers hold.
And it falls down further as epistemic responsibility applies to all people, not just the man in the coat on television or the priest. This means that when you watch the priest and when you watch the man in a coat on television, it is your epistemic responsibility to check that they have the proper authority on the presented idea, meaning, does the priest have rational support for telling people they need to pray to the spaghetti monster or else die? Does the scientist present answers that have proper scientific papers behind it and not just pseudoscience.
The responsibility to deny belief that does not have support is not "others" responsibility, it's every single person's responsibility. If all people follow it, no one would believe in anything that does not hold up to cross checking and peer review.
Faith was never a door, faith was the result of trying to explain the unexplainable, corrupted into ideas with less relation to rationally explaining the unexplainable, later corrupted into fairy tales that have little to no relation to that initial unexplainable event and in the end corrupted into a tool of power for institutions. Faith still pops up, every time someone with little to no knowledge tries to explain something unexplainable and instead of proper research fall to the comfort of believing something they invented in order to make peace with the horror of the unknown.
Faith, religion etc. has nothing to do with what it says it does. It's like using the bible to prove the content of the bible. Faith analogies like that adhere to religious morality principles, which are outdated in my opinion and easy to corrupt in order to gain power over a group of people that have little knowledge to rationally explain the unknown around them.
There are no good or evils. There is only knowledge, rationality and balance between harm, empathy, and well-being for all which lay a foundation for our ethics. And it does not need to be corrupted by religious ideas with no foundation in the actual reality around us just because it's more comforting for the mind. Morality is hard work, being a truly balanced good person to the best of one's ability cannot be boiled down to easily followed ideas as per religious doctrines. It needs to be thought about daily, meditated on. And this complexity should be a virtue.
The sloth of mankind should not dictate the parameters of ethics.
I'm talking about the belief in science of the average person, so I'm not talking about scientists who have carried out the experiments themselves. Call that pseudo-science if you will. It doesn't matter. It is a fact that most people's understanding of science is completely based on belief.
Quoting Christoffer
Because in both cases, unless one chooses to verify the claim themselves, one chooses to believe (or not) the words of either a priest or a scientist. One may have good reasons to believe these words, but can one be certain? Only if one does the experiment themselves and comes to the same conclusions. Until that happens, one is doing nothing other than believing the words of a person they deem trustworthy. The trustworthiness of such a person is fundamentally uncertain, and the nature of his findings is as well until one replicates the experiment.
How does one discern a "true" scientist?
Of course, but as my argument points out, epistemic responsibility has nothing to do with specific institutions. It is about every person. If you choose to believe in some idea presented to you, you have the responsibility to figure out if it is true or rational, if not you break epistemic responsibility. This is about ethics for all people, not institutions or figures of authority.
Quoting Tzeentch
You don't have to do the experiment yourself, you can fact-check if the study and science have support in peer reviews and falsifiable scrutiny. There's a reason we have scientific methods. If you do the science yourself you will only confirm or deny by one check. This is why hypotheses take time to end up as scientific theories. Scientific methods are relentless with this and it's your responsibility to check behind the curtain before believing in anything.
As I said, this argument is about ALL people acting by the conclusion of the argument. You have, for some reason, changed my argument to be that of institutions and figures of authority rather than every person. My argument is for a core morality on the nature of belief for everyone, not specific people.
Quoting Tzeentch
Because they do not say truths without a scientific theory and they never assume a hypothesis as truth. A true scientist acts according to scientific methods. If you cannot distinguish between a true scientist and a pseudoscientist you might need to read into the scientific methods and how they form hypothesis and theories as well as interactions between different studies and over time.
How do you discern what is a cup? If you take away the handle and make a hole in the bottom, is it still a cup? If you take away scientific methods and the ethics of doing scientific research, is that a scientist? No, that's a pseudoscientist or an amateur without education into proper methods. Just like the cup isn't a cup and cannot hold its liquid, a pseudoscientist cannot hold a rational idea without the proper properties of what makes a scientist a scientist.
I'm talking about persons. But if one has to figure out whether his belief is true or not, one has to do the experiment, and after doing that experiment one would no longer be believing, but knowing.
Quoting Christoffer
Peer reviews and fact-checking without doing the actual experiments yourself just shifts the belief from one thing to the other. If you read peer reviews or read about facts online, one is back to believing words and pictures again.
Quoting Christoffer
I'm talking about belief and how it is fundamental to human understanding, including many people's understanding of science. I'd say it touches at the heart of the subject you're presenting.
Quoting Christoffer
That may be a theoretical 'true' scientist, but how does one discern one in real life? Lets say you see a man in a white coat on television telling you things about science. How do you determine whether he should be believed?
No, they need to check the peer-reviewed material and look at falsifiable results. Standard methods for a conclusion. Because only doing the experiment means you only have one result.
Standard methods of science counter your idea that you can only know by doing the thing yourself. It's why our standards of science today are vastly better than before the 20th century. We have excluded the subjective contamination of results.
Quoting Tzeentch
Now you are back in metaphysical land. Stop straw manning about science. You know well how science works. Because you are saying that facts that we have actually built technology and quality of life upon cannot be, because that science was presented in papers. You know that the device you are writing on is the result of science that has gone through peer reviews, fact-checking and other parts of the scientific process. All people involved with making this device took these papers and used it to create the parts of the device you have. If that was only belief your device wouldn't work.
Your point is irrelevant to the ethical conclusion of my argument. Because the point of my conclusion is that belief in anything should be checked by the person believing them.
Are you saying that it's more ethical to not check if your belief has any truth merits? Or are you saying that it's more ethical to just believe whatever you want, regardless of consequences and without any demand of checking that belief?
Which is more ethical?
Quoting Tzeentch
I'd say you are making metaphysical philosophy right now and do not look at the ethics of my argument.
Because if we are to go down your line, then how do we prove anyone is guilty in court if anyone could counter it by saying; "this is only belief, we can only know if the person is guilty if we had been there for ourselves".
Of course, as a metaphysical claim, the lawyer would be right, but are you saying that we should decide the innocence or guilt in that court based on the metaphysical reasoning and in doing so make all ethical evaluation irrelevant?
Because, ethics philosophy needs a form of foundation. We cannot jump back into metaphysics to counter everything with Cartesian-like arguments about that nothing is for certain. The ethical conclusion I made in the argument is all about never accepting a belief that hasn't in any way been put through a rational argument, scrutiny or evidence. To say that peer reviewed and falsified evidence in science still is belief when just looking at the result on those papers does not counter my argument... at all.
Quoting Tzeentch
Does the man have a name? Does he present a claim with logic? Are you able to look him up? Are you able to search for those who criticized his claims and look into the logic of their criticism against the logic of this man?
How do you determine? By not being a lazy-ass and just accept everything around you, instead look into the information behind what you are presented with. This is essential in epistemic responsibility. You can choose not to do it, but that's what I call unethical since you are believing something without trying to falsify your own belief and that can be dangerous, just like with anti-vaxxers.
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No, I said only that there isn’t such a thing as proof in matters of Ultimate-Reality, Reality as a whole, all of what-is, or God.
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Proof is for verbal subjects, such as the logically-interdependent things and events. You can’t show that words and verbal arguments apply to Reality. That’s all I meant.
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No, of course not. I neither said nor meant any such thing. Logic, mathematics and science are of course valid and useful within their legitimate range of applicability. …the logically-interdependent things, but not Reality itself (…or at least you can’t prove otherwise.)
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You spoke of belief without evidence. So I pointed out that you don’t know that all Theism is without evidence, because you don’t know all Theists, their beliefs, and what they regard as evidence for their beliefs. Remember that evidence needn’t be proof, but is merely an indication that is taken by some (but not necessarily by others) as reason to believe something.
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So my reply was a direct answer to what you’d said.
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Quite aside from that, faith isn’t about evidence, and neither do you know what every Theist’s justification for faith is. For the many diverse Theists, there is evidence &/or faith.
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Is some it valid or justified? Because you haven’t spoken to all Theists, then I suggest that you take the suggestion of Dunning and Kruger, and just admit “I don’t know.” There’s nothing wrong with admitting that, instead of attacking what you don’t know about.
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You could say “I don’t know of evidence, or of reason for faith, for Theists’ beliefs.”, and that would probably be a reliably correct statement.
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How right you are!
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I wasn’t interested in the ethics. You stated some Atheist premises, and you told why you think that certain moral/ethical conclusions follow from them.
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I wasn’t interested in the moral/ethical conclusions, but I commented on your Atheist premises.
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However, because your premises are questionable, then of course that casts doubt on your conclusions.
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So yes, in that way, what I said bears on moral/ethical conclusions.
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Your conclusion drawn from faulty premises is dubious.
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That’s wonderful. Falsifiability is a good standard in science and the metaphysics of logically-interdependent things. …as is parsimony and the avoidance of unnecessary brute-facts.
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Materialism doesn’t do so well by those standards, but that’s a topic for a different thread.
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It has to do with when I posted that message.
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But, 3 minutes after I posted the passage that you quoted above, I corrected it by removing the words “…of Gregorian 2017”.
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So, it should read (as it does in the current corrected version):
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“…Wednesday of the 7th week of the calendar year that started with the Monday that started closest to the South-Solstice.”
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The added phrase “…of Gregorian 2017” is part of another, different, version of that year-start rule, a somewhat wordier arithmetical version that I don’t bring up when brevity is needed, as in the brief explanation of a signature-date.
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Michael Ossipoff
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7 Th
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Thanks, alright let's see if this one is better:
Therefore, religious belief or belief of any kind that is of Belief A (Premise 1-5) will always, eventually, lead to hateful, dangerous ideas at some point in time. The responsibility is on all people who believe something without sufficient evidence, Belief A, and who is rejecting evidence in favor of the necessity of faith or comfort in faith/belief (Premise 2), to prove or put their belief through scrutiny and falsifiability methods (Premise 7) in order to end up with either Belief B or Belief C -Otherwise risk the certain causality (Premise 4-6) of dangerous belief that can cause harm, murder, terror, torture, rape and so on in the name of that belief, Belief A.
Therefore, religious or other types of belief that are of type A, should be considered unethical and criticized. The moral obligation should be to always uphold epistemic responsibility (Premise 7) and prioritize belief type B and C as ethical while condemn type A as unethical. This applies to all people for any belief of type A; religious, personal and in institutions, research and politics.
Quoting Christoffer
Even if one were to assume that by doing such things one would acquire knowledge, not many people do this. Let alone for every single belief they hold. In other words, a lot of what people believe to be scientific knowledge is nothing more than belief. Such beliefs can be false and even dangerous and should therefore be added to your list of potentially dangerous beliefs. This has been my position from the start of our debate.
Quoting Christoffer
I know my device works, but how it works is an entirely different matter. I could obtain a plausible idea about how it works by reading, etc., but would I know for sure? No. Not until I did the experiments myself. There's nothing metaphysical about this. It's fact. A lot of what we think of as knowledge is actually just belief. Beliefs that may turn out to be right, but beliefs none the less.
Quoting Christoffer
This is a problem that any judicial system struggles with. One can never be certain about events that happened in the past. Video images prove compelling evidence, but ultimately are falsifiable. How often aren't people convicted to crimes they didn't commit? It happens every day. Why? Because people had beliefs about that person that turned out to be false. In the judicial system it is a calculated risk. The law simply accepts that sometimes it makes wrong decisions and convicts innocent people. It doesn't make the belief that an innocent man is guilty any more valid, though.
Quoting Christoffer
As far as I know, we are still talking about whether people have science-based beliefs and whether they should be added to your list of potentially dangerous beliefs.
Quoting Christoffer
Measuring the claims of scientists to one's own sense of logic is rather fallible, unless one is a scientist themselves.
Finally, a point of order:
Quoting Christoffer
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And:
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Followed by:
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For the love of god, man. Practice a bit of self-reflection every now and then.
That's why I am of the strong opinion that knowledge in fact-checking should be a primary thing in school.
Quoting Tzeentch
Read my new version of the argument above. I do not include the word "scientific" because then it could be twisted into seemingly deem science as only belief. But I mentioned belief as three types and if type A is within institutions and research it applies.
Quoting Tzeentch
The example with the device was about putting all science under such a divide that we only have proof or we have a scientific belief that is placed in the same category as religious belief. Many of the results of hypotheses in science can be found within your device, meaning you can't put a scientific hypothesis in the same category as religious belief since a hypothesis demands rational reasoning behind it.
This way of binary thinking makes no sense for this argument and as such you are grasping for straws to counter-argue without even actually look at the argument presented, which is an ethics argument that you can't counter by inventing a super-binary view on different belief-systems, just to make your point.
Quoting Tzeentch
Yes, but your binary argument means that we shouldn't even have a court and attempt at trying to prove who is guilty or not. And if you disagree with this, then what is your counter-argument to the argument I presented?
I argue for always trying to prove your belief, it's not about being right it's about attempting to prove and in doing so exclude all belief that has no rational reasoning or proof behind it, since that belief eventually lead to dangers.
Quoting Tzeentch
Read my updated argument above, that is the argument this is all about. If you have objections or points, derive it from there.
Quoting Tzeentch
If we educate children in how to fact-check everything around them, be critical etc. they will have the methods. And the attempt at fact-checking what you believe is more important than if you are right. The problem is belief without any attempt at trying to fact-check or hold it to scrutiny.
Who would you say is the more ethical of these two?
1. A man who is not a scientist and aren't that educated in fact-checking, but still attempts to ask himself if he is right in his belief and look into if it seems correct in following this belief.
2. A man who believes something and doesn't care to check if it has any truth to it, doesn't care to fact-check or listen to anyone who challenges that belief?
It's about a basic level of behavior that is not a virtue in society at this time. And in these times, when people hold the act of having an opinion with more virtue than the act of trying to be right.
This is an important ethical inquiry.
Quoting Tzeentch
For the love of god, man. Practice keeping to the argument without cherry-picking points to complain about that has no real relation to the argument at hand.
Do you know what a fallacy fallacy is? If so, stop making such a point list, it's arrogant. I'm trying to debate my argument with people who don't seem to hold to Socratic methods and they pick fights with stuff that rubs them the wrong way rather than keep their eye on the argument presented. To complain about the quality of answers to such arguments is to essentially complain about the initial counter-arguments. Had you been more precise in your counter-argument, with references to points in the argument it would have been easier. I even asked for a proper dialectic in my first post.
Pascal said a number of times that the "scandal" of the Christian narrative overturning a particular rational deliberation was a reflection of the human condition that "fit" the phenomena better than other models.
Kierkegaard went further in that direction by developing the idea of a limit to psychology in regards to illuminating the crisis of being a single individual.
Both writers argued from the basis of evidence. They were putting "rationality" on trial using reason. That is not the same as saying "belief is meaningful in itself." If that was the case, why bother with all of that?
In any case, from their point of view, "you" are the one who is epistemologically irresponsible.
The point of that premise is not about dissecting their points, but to illuminate on alternatives to belief in which you might even be agnostic, but you believe anyway.
The premise is part of different perspectives on reasons to have faith.
Quoting Valentinus
Are you directing this at me specifically? Because in that case, I think you've misunderstood the entire point of the ethics argument I've made.
Anyway, I have updated it now due to some comments and some people's misunderstanding of it. If you can look at that point once more and maybe do the Socratic way of helping me modify it so that it gets to the premise point instead of you ridiculing it?
I am not ridiculing your argument.
I read the update.
I don't agree with one of your assumptions because your description does not square with my experience of those texts.
I put the "you" in quotes because it is not about you.
If my observation is not interesting, just forget it and carry on.
No, it is of interest, maybe this far I've seen too many objections without any relation to my actual argument, so I'm a bit on a defensive side. Though I knew belief and religion always rubs many people the wrong way, I feel there are a bit too many apologists on this forum who have another agenda than philosophical discourse. I've seen it plenty of time in the personal inbox of this forum.
Which premise (I presume the one about Pascal and Kierkegaard again?) is it you have a problem with and why? I changed it to pinpoint closer to their ideas. As I understand Kierkegaard, his leap of faith is about taking that leap because faith relates to something unknowable and cannot be reached without that leap. I do not criticize it in this premise, I criticize how people use it to justify not needing to prove some belief, even though it doesn't have to be about specifically God. They use ideas like leap of faith as a "cop-outs" to get out of any reason to explain themselves. Be it a distortion of his ideas, but I've seen it, even if that recall is anecdotal. Pascal's wager is also on point with this premise, people use it to justify not needing to explain their belief in anything. They simply use the wager to argue that there is no other reason not to believe what they believe and therefore they don't need to explain themselves.
So I'm referring to the use of these ideas, it's not a critique of them in their entirety.
The premise's point is that people use ideas like these to justify their unwillingness to prove or explain their belief. This is the premise's point. Maybe Kierkegaard and Pascal might be wrong examples, but I've seen first-hand people using them specifically. So, since you seem to have read them a bit more in detail, you could maybe give me some more insight into what's gone wrong in that premise?
For myself, the idea of being responsible for what is happening now is the most interesting thing.
Whether that happens through the register of religion or something else is not as interesting as the idea by itself, that individuals influence what is happening now.
So, how does one get to that place?
I don't know if we can so categorically say that religious faith is a bad thing. Religion has been a cause of many atrocities but they also kept the flame of morality burning until philosophers took the responsibility of studying it in earnest. In fact I'd go so far as to say that moral theory arose from religion, faith based as it is.
I'm more with Sam Harris when it comes to moral, in that we can find parameters around moral that does not have anything to do with the reasons found in religious text. At the same time there are some obvious truths about what not to do in a society with people within these religious texts, like "thou shall not steal". To say that this idea derived from the religious text seems like an after-thought on moral theory when the idea itself does not need religion to be found sound, as a moral thing to do.
I agree that without religion it would be hard to keep morality in check throughout a history where people needed to make sense of a world that didn't make sense. But I think that as a contemporary argument, with the knowledge we have today, it has lost its reason for existence and is so inferior that it would more likely cause harm than do good. Even when trying to do good, because it's so easy to find different perspectives today, when a parent tells their child "do this" and they ask "why?" and that parent just tells them, "because I say so", this can lead to a fierce counter-reaction, even later in life when that child gets knowledge of the thing not needed to be done as the parent asked. Such unwillingness to explain or justify their belief by the parent, religious or otherwise does no good for the child, both then as an adult.
I would argue that as a sense of calm, meditation, pillow of comfort towards the complexities of life, especially for people who lack the intellect to examine their own ideas, religious belief can be a positive effect. But it can also lead to those people hiding in that comfort and never interacting with the rest of the world, ending up in a negative position both for themselves and others around them. So I think the problem lies more in that we haven't figured out how to find comfort in the meaninglessness of life outside of religious belief.
We need more than just a moral system outside of religious moral theory, we need an entire framework of living without God that keeps our sanity and empathy. This is essentially what Nietschze feared, that we would fail to create such a contemporary framework and everyone would instead become narcissistic assholes. Well, safe to say that he was right about that thing in a if we look at the world today, but he was wrong that it would collapse our society. The most peaceful nations with the highest quality of life are the ones with the highest level of atheism, primarily because they truly separate the church and state. The US, for example, doesn't really have God separated from the state. The president needs to be a believer in God, at least on paper, so that's how corrupt that "separation" is
I think there's a good reason to move away from religion altogether. To create a new foundation for the entire society that is based on rationality rather than doctrines. That realize the long term dangers of unsupported belief and its effect on people.
This is what my argument is about, that the belief itself is causing anti-intellectualism, causing pain and suffering because it focuses our attention on wrong things and distort reality to make monsters out of people. It's also the reason why people like anti-vaxxers keep popping up.
Why do these people hold onto their belief and dismiss everyone's counter-argument and all the evidence around them? It's not only because of cognitive bias and a lack of rational intellect. I think that religion has taught us that personal belief is sacred and that we can believe whatever we want.
I think this is wrong. We always affect other people with our personal belief and that's why the anti-vaxxer movement grew and became a danger to all children. The fine balance, however, is to find a way to steer people into thinking "correct" without going Orwellian 84 on society. It's not about thought-crime, but "thought-virtue".
To make unsupported belief to be unethical and supported belief to be ethical, we have a foundation of thinking about everything that will always focus people on trying to be right rather than just believe. Instead of teaching people that their belief in their own and their religious ideas are a good thing to have, show them that it is wrong to hold on to a belief that is unsupported because it can affect many people down the line, even if you can't see that causality at the moment.
Instead, teach children to think critically, have foundational teachings in school to be that of how to rationally think about things. How to examine your own thought and belief. We don't teach children to think for real, we just fill them with knowledge and leave them to figure it out by themselves or let parents do all the teachings of how to understand life.
It's flawed. That's why my argument demands unsupported belief to be unethical because it will eventually lead to negative outcomes, maybe not for you, but someone else, sometimes even whole societies and nations. Epistemic responsibility should be a virtue for all and unsupported belief should be a sin.
I would say that epistemic responsibility is the first thing. That is a virtue to follow in the now. That responsibility demands that you do not make choices lightly and you are responsible for bad outcomes if you didn't think them through. But per my argument, that would mean that if you believe in something that you cannot support rationally, you are breaking epistemic responsibility and therefore you are responsible for negative outcomes of that. I would also argue, as I do in one of the premises, that if your belief affects people into doing bad things you are responsible for spreading that belief. Just like if someone is confusing someone into murder.
Supported belief has a lower probability of distorting reality for you and others, and is, therefore, the ethical choice. Unsupported belief has a high probability of distorting reality and could lead to negative outcomes for you, others around you or influence people after your death to do things according to that belief. It's unethical to be the source of such causality. You cannot know the causality, but you can minimize the probability of it happening.
This applies to all belief, not just religion. My example is anti-vaxxers who by justifying their belief in defending personal belief while not caring to rationalize their belief according to evidence, spread their ideas willingly or unwillingly to others susceptible to those ideas. This has caused almost eradicated diseases to come back and threaten the lives of children or even kill them.
If we destroy the idea that "personal belief" is sacred because it rather intentionally or unintentionally has a high probability of causing negative outcomes when that belief lacks rational reasoning; And make epistemic responsibility a virtue while condemning belief that lacks rational reasoning, we have a system of ethical thinking that at a large scale has a positive effect on society and people.
It may sound complicated, but it's really about changing how we handle day to day thinking. If we accept that current morality is positively limiting us and our freedom in thinking so that we function better towards other people instead of harming them, then we can also positively limit our way of handling the freedom and concept of belief in order to prevent harm as a result of distorting reality with that unsupported belief. We follow common morals to the best of our ability, like: not killing, not stealing, not harming others. We can therefore also follow epistemic responsibility as a moral guide towards our handling of knowledge in life, not accepting an unsupported belief that could distort our and others way of looking at reality.
For me, that is a responsibility of what is happening in the now.
Point being?
No, it demands examining your belief instead of accepting it as truth without reason.
Quoting papaya
What does this matter to this argument? I see no relation
Perhaps if you try to answer the question, you will see the relation.
I repeat:
do you believe your mother and father are your mother and father and can you evidence this?
More importantly "evidence" is mixed up with and confused with "rational deduction". 2 completely different concepts - ask Columbo or Poirot for clarification
I'd still like to see the OP respond to
do you believe your mother and father are your mother and father and can you evidence this?
This has no relation to the argument. This is an ethics argument. Make your point clear please.
I prefer you to make your counter-argument clear. Stop being intentionally difficult. This is philosophy.
Surprised you didn't make that simile!
Not sure what you mean here, it seems clear, there has never been any clear evidence or rational reasoning behind the existence of God. That's the premise, meaning there is nothing but faith and belief behind the "existence" of God.
What is the actual problem with the premise here? What is not clear? Is there evidence for a God you mean?
Quoting tim wood
What is your objection? What is the problem with the conclusion? Unsupported belief is unethical, supported belief is ethical, that is the conclusion.
I'm seriously interested in your points, here but I'm not sure if you are criticizing out of fear for the conclusion or by the logic not holding up. I want the logic to be solid, it's part of a moral theory.
This isn't a clear counter-argument. What premises or what about the conclusion is problematic. You are too vague in your criticism.
I ASK AGAIN AS AN EXAMPLE - do you believe your mother is your mother and your father is your father, and what is your evidence? please do not evade the question
What is the point of this question? Make a counter argument that has a relation to the argument presented. I cannot evade what I do not understand as related to my conclusion, ok?
Quoting papaya
I understand you are new here, maybe you don't get the rules of this forum?
Stop trolling and do the discourse correctly.
You still need to be clear on what premises you are referring to or in what way you counter-argue the conclusion. You cannot be vague, that is trolling.
Quoting papaya
This is irrelevant to the argument.
Quoting papaya
Irrelevant to the argument.
Quoting papaya
You are answering an ethics philosophy argument, not metaphysics. You are also not clear on how it relates to either premises or conclusion for the argument presented.
Make your case clear in relation to the argument presented.
Banned user - Goodbye
In case of premise 1, I might need to add the definition of the classical concept of God through Christian theology or theology in general. Maybe even add a new premise to generalize irrational belief.
The point is that there isn't a conclusion that can be supported by any evidence or rational argument. I've seen many trying on this forum and throughout history, but they do not apply with real-world science in mind and they always jump from their logical conclusion to an assumption instead of ending at the actual conclusion. I.e God is the unmoved mover, which is an assumption about the unmoved mover, which could just be a very high dimensional rock since we don't know anything about events before Big Bang.
You see what I mean here? The argument is about irrational belief which distorts reality for the self and others, intentionally or unintentionally since personal belief is an illusion of keeping belief to yourself. Your writing now is an example of this, in which you point to a personal belief and in writing it out you are projecting this personal belief into the mind of others. If someone reads what you write and this influence their concept of reality you have unintentionally pushed a belief that has no support in evidence or rational arguments (a personal concept of evidence or rationality is not valid in proving God).
This is in no way critique against you, just to be clear. I'm just making an example.
Quoting tim wood
And this is the problem that I found unethical in the world because it distorts people's reality. Irrational belief is not a healthy foundation in society and because personal belief is an illusion, we cannot just accept that some are able to divide their personal belief from their rational ideas since the personal belief will eventually be expressed vocally or through behavior and choices.
This is why I argue for epistemic responsibility or the form of it in which people need to move away from defending their irrational belief and accept it as irrational while keep questioning ideas and never accept what doesn't have good support in evidence or rationality. The argument shows how irrational belief is dangerous and how rational belief (type B and C) should be held up higher than type A. There is no priority in the world today, which might be why people confuse personal belief with rational belief and proven truth so much, even on this forum.
See past that, I relate to the argument I made as I ended that segment with that it's not an attack.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, it's work and that is what I'm doing, therefore I've modified it since the first post was written, according to the objections. This is part of a larger moral ethics piece I'm working on.
But as most arguments aren't really deductive, isn't this an inductive argument? Isn't "all/some/no P is/is not Q" strictly for deductive forms? Even if it is, also used in inductive arguments?
Quoting tim wood
What is your conclusion on personal belief based on these three points?
Quoting tim wood
I would categorize a belief in God to be irrational, type A, since it does not have rational or evidential support, i.e unsupported belief. Since God hasn't been able to be proven, no one can claim it to be proven. If personal belief is that God is proven through a personal logic that cannot be applied outside your subjective reasoning, it is not supported belief, it is an irrational belief.
How is this a personal opinion on it? Personal logic doesn't apply to outside logic. The logic is, God hasn't been proven to exist, personal belief in God and any personal reasoning about it is strictly subjective and therefore is personal belief unsupported by external rationality and evidence.
This isn't about proving Gods existence, it's about defining personal belief that is either unsupported or supported, rational or irrational.
Quoting tim wood
I agree and I think I need to revise the first premise in some way to include a better definition, I'm of course working on this. But is God a teapot? Is it an ocaen beach? Is it my neighbor? The purest definition of God in language is, of course, neither of these but a sentient entity that is responsible for creating the universe, the world, and man. We can of course use dictionary definitions as well, which doesn't really change my argument: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/god
However you define "God" it is still based on an unsupported, irrational personal belief about something not proven to exist. If your personal definition of God is your neighbor and that you rationalize like this: My neighbor is God, My neighbor can be observed to exist, therefore my neighbor exist and since my neighbor is God, God exists. However, this isn't how language defines "God". Using the possibly infinite, personal interpretations of words as a defense against the first premise seems, therefore, like a form of circular counter-argument, because if anything can be defined as anything, then we cannot form any communication or understanding of anything when changing definitions always alter everything, even arguing that definitions alter arguments.
Quoting tim wood
How do you define God? (not proving, but how do you define God)
Quoting tim wood
I think the problem with the premise is that it rubs religious people the wrong way and forming all sorts of defense mechanisms against the God-premises. The argument is about belief, any sort, religious and otherwise and the conclusion is not about proving Gods existence or not, which some seem to believe. However, there's no evidence for a God, if there was, why hasn't society accepted it? Because some doesn't accept the evidence? What evidence? In order to actually counter argue that first premise, you need to show that it is false, i.e that God exists and therefore it is false. If the premise is false because of interpretations of God is almost infinite, then how can anyone prove the existence of God when no one can define a definition of God in language? It seems to me that the first premise is true because for it to be false, the existence must be proved first and if proven only by personal logic and not external, it doesn't make the premise invalid.
Maybe it's formulated wrong, but the point of the premise isn't really false.
I don't think those questions are asked in any problematic way, those were questions to you, not an argument. By saying "no", you are actually disagreeing with psychology, how people influence behavior and others intentionally and unintentionally. So saying no is a bit irrelevant, since the premise which this connects to has support and isn't up for an opinion on the matter. This is why I think some criticism doesn't really work since many seem to disagree out of opinion and not the actual premise.
Quoting tim wood
Quoting tim wood
Quoting tim wood
Quoting tim wood
The problem with all of this is that people invent personal interpretations of the term "God" and use that to counter any type of use of the term "God" within an argument. So to propose that no one can use standard definitions of the term, the definitions that are common within language, you can claim truth to any argument and distort the actual communication that is established. Like using the ontological argument to reach the first cause of causality, in which people claim the first cause to be God by using a distorted definition of the term as it is used commonly.
It's like me saying that a table is not a table for me, I define a table as a fire extinguisher so if someone is trying to convince me that a regular table as everyone else defines it is a normal table I will dispute that it isn't because of my own interpretation of language.
This would mean that any defined things in language cannot be used in arguments since people can dispute them by redefining words as they seem fit.
"God" as defined in common language, refers to a sentient entity, spiritual or similar, which is responsible for the creation of the universe.
That is the common definition in our language. If you define God as say a teapot, it doesn't matter for the premise. Because if, within the ontological argument, the first cause is an inter-dimensional rock of a specific material that caused the Big Bang it's not God, it's an inter-dimensional rock of a specific material. So, if we, through science, solve what was before Big Bang and it turns out that it is just an inter-dimensional rock that caused everything, no one would call that rock "God", even if everyone before it, who agreed with the ontological argument proving God's existence, called it that. All those people would then change their focus onto something else where there is no evidence at the time, and call that "mystery", God.
What I mean by this is that it becomes irrational to have such a wide definition of God since you would change what it is based on the situation. When the inter-dimensional rock is proved, the first cause is no longer "God for all those who wanted to prove the existence of God through those arguments.
So in the premise, to use "God" is through the standard definition. If you have the opinion that "God" is a fire extinguisher in order to dispute the premise, that is a bit absurd.
I also find your strict definition of how a premise should be written in an inductive argument to be not only limiting but not really correct either. Not every premise in every argument needs to be formulated like a modus ponens. I might need to rephrase them to better make their points, but as with the questions I asked above, which you answered "no" on, the truth of them doesn't come out of opinion, but out of truth in psychology research, so the premise of behavior influencing others is based on scientific logic, so if disputed you need to dispute the results in psychology. The premise is true.
Consider these definitions:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/ded-ind/
So the problem you have with the argument seems to be that you have your own definition of the term "God" and that the first premise doesn't apply to your own definition?
I think you are avoiding the questions themselves. It feels like you focus too much on the semantics here and don't look linguistic pragmatic of the text. But let's rephrase them as an actual argument:
Therefore, regardless of the belief, it will eventually influence other people even if it wasn't intentional.
Quoting tim wood
Psychology is an empirical science and science is a better measurement for truth than anything else. The truth, in this case, is that the above argument is based on logic in behavior, it's basic psychology. You can pretty much take that argument and try and falsify it with as many scientists in the field as you can and I doubt it will break. But even so, you need to counter it with something more than just dismissal.
Quoting tim wood
You answered no to them and therefore you deny basic psychology. You are therefore essentially denying results in science and it would require much more than just "no". It seems you want to have a dialectic about my argument, but I cannot just go by a "no", should I just take your word for it when I have support for the claim? The premises of the above argument are true, with support in science. How is that sophistry?
Quoting tim wood
You mention this, but my counter to that is that they don't, it's a normal counter to argue that God is so undefined it can't be used like this, but God is always a sentient creator at least, and further down the road it gets more attributes depending on the religion. Even in pantheons, there's always the first one, the creator. In some cases, there's an event, but no first cause arguments focus on those religions since they would imply an event as the first cause and therefore render the argument not usable (but probably more true) for trying to prove God. There are no real ways to define God in any other way that isn't a sentient being. If you remove that definition, it could just be a rock and it would be irrational to even name it God. God is pretty defined by everyone who uses the word, of course, different as well, but not in its prime definition, a sentient being, a creator. And even if a religion has Gods appearing after an event that was the creation, it has even less deductive arguments or proof for their existence. However you turn it , God is pretty defined as a sentient being, a creator.
But I get your point and it might need to be rephrased since the premise obviously stirred up confusion.
Quoting tim wood
If definitions of God is anything other than a supernatural sentient being, why call it God? That opens up to calling anything God, my coffee cup is God. But the premise points to no evidence or argument in support of God, so even if your definition is different it is still valid since there are no arguments that can conclude with "God". All arguments or attempts at proving God ends up with a result where the one doing the argument slaps the word "God" on top of their conclusion, they are all flawed. Therefore however you define "God", the premise about there not being any argument or evidence for God still holds up. In order to prove that premise false, you need to actually prove that there is support for God and not that it's a coffee cup.
So, the premise is about evidence for God and there are none, why is that false? Since however you turn it, using God as a definition about something, whatever it is, is a belief that is unsupported. I.e the premise points to belief in God without proof. If this is not true as a premise, why is it false? Because people define God so differently? No, God is always a belief, there is nothing that supports God as real.
So would the premise work better if it's phrased like this:
Old
No argument has ever been able to prove the existence of God or gods through evidence. Religious belief is therefore based on belief in something that is unsupported by evidence or rational deduction.
New
No argument or evidence has ever been able to prove the existence of a God or Gods, regardless of definitions for what God is, since God as a concept always refers to a concept outside of conclusions or the evidence at hand. Religious belief is therefore based on pure belief in something that is unsupported by evidence or rational deduction.
Quoting tim wood
But here's the problem, calling something that actually exists, a dead object or just plain causality or whatever as God is distorting everything to such a degree that no one can ever talk about God in any way or form since everyone has their own definition of what God is. If I started using definitions that we have in language, to refer to other things, like calling a plane - a car, a chair - a plant, a person - a dog, I would distort communication because of personal preferences of language. Like Wittgenstein pointed out: the meaning of a word is out of its use in language. If you start calling God something else than a supernatural sentient being, you are breaking the definition as it's used in language. But it's also according to my new version of the premise a definition that doesn't have a correlation with what you apply it to. Let's say that you call causation or entropy God, that is unnecessary since causation is causation and entropy is entropy. Is my friend God if I call him God instead of Bob? Can I use that as a counter-argument to someone using God in an argument? You can't use God in the argument because I define Bob as God, therefore your premise is false? It ends up as an absurd critique of the actual point of the premise and I would assume that Wittgenstein would have agreed with me on this.
Quoting tim wood
But you are still defining my argument as a deductive argument, when it is an ethical inductive argument about how we ought to act around the concept of beliefs.
Inductive arguments do not demand categorical statements in the same way as deductive arguments. They still need to have valid premises and from what I gather you don't think the first premise is valid because you have your own definition of God, which per Wittgenstein, breaks meaning out of language.
If textbook definitions, common definition, common use in language etc. define God as a supernatural sentient being, possibly a creator, that is the meaning and definition. Otherwise, Bob is God.
Quoting tim wood
But my conclusion is a "should" conclusion. It's an "ought to" conclusion. It doesn't say that people "must". I conclude a result of the premises in support of the actual inductive conclusion that was to prove reasons on why not to accept an irrational belief of any kind and instead focus on evidence and proving ideas and beliefs you have. The actual conclusion is suggestive:
Quoting Christoffer
I think it would be better to break down the actual premises, what is wrong with each etc. Not that you don't like, but actual problems, like what is unclear, is the validity of each in question and why. Inductive arguments do not need to have premises written in categorical statements, but they need to be true. Like as we have been talking about, the first premise is not about definitions of God, but that the concept of God, any definition of God is unsupported by evidence and arguments, therefore God is a belief, regardless of its subjective definition. This is true, it can only be false if God had actually been proven to exist. So, as inductive premises, what are the problems with them?
This all falls apart when we notice that all 'rational' beliefs can be traced back to unprovable axioms that we take on faith, such as the Principle of Induction.
Religious beliefs can be as rational as non-religious ones. They just use a slightly different set of axioms.
If one insists on ranking beliefs in order of 'worthiness', one will have to do it by looking at the axioms. One way to do that is to observe that some axioms are accepted by all people. The Principle of Induction is one. We might then claim that the only reasonable beliefs are those that are derived from the minimal set of axioms that is believed by all humans. That would rule out religious belief, but it would also rule out many other beliefs that most people are very attached to - such as the belief that there are other consciousnesses (anti-solipsism).
That's why I think it's a doomed and unhelpful exercise to try to categorise beliefs based on 'rationality'.
There are other and better ways to oppose beliefs that one finds harmful (and only a minority of religious beliefs are harmful anyway).
No, they were based on irrational beliefs and a form of similar religious followings of their leaders that you can see within religious groups, there was nothing atheistic about any of it. If you look at how they close to deified their leaders and how they followed their irrational belief you will understand that it has nothing to do with atheism. My argument is also focusing on irrational belief as a whole, which means it also includes things like eugenics and fantasies about social structures without any insight into psychology or sociology.
My personal opinion about the idea that it was atheism that caused these mass murders is that its pure nonsense and without any real insight into how these regimes formed, what doctrines they built their society upon and the irrational ideas that they lived under and ruled by. It's often used to disparage atheism whenever someone brings up how religious beliefs has caused harm during thousands of years.
Irrational ideas without foundation in evidence or rational thought will always be the root of any mass murder. I recommend that you actually look into these events during the 20th century, they acted out far closer to religious forms than any atheistic ideas. Charles Manson and his followers are closer in form to how Hitler and the Nazis acted out than any atheistic groups of people.
So, in what way is your comment any counter-argument to my argument? What is irrational belief is irrational regardless of form.
Specific actions taken by individuals or groups can be evil, and often ideological beliefs are used as justification for such acts. Rarely on review are these justifications the unique, major or even the real motivation, they are just the best excuse.
Without even going into a premise by premise argument, it fails because
If a group of people jointly share a belief, And some of those people do good, and some do bad, it is illogical to assign the bad to the belief.
You point turns into many murderers like chocolate ice cream, therefore chocolate ice cream causes murder.
Such statements always disqualify any commentator in my eyes. If Stalin and Mao had been ardent Catholics leading explicitly Catholic regimes (or Islamic regimes) I'm guessing you'd be more than happy to offer this as evidence of the evils of religion. Which you will now deny of course, further discrediting your analysis. Seen all such dodging a billion times, bored to tears by it.
The argument is about beliefs you think is true, as per my A-C belief types. Type A is irrational belief which you think is true without anything to back it up. Type B and C are beliefs which you know is not proven, but you think they might be true. The difference is that with these beliefs you act with caution, you tell them with the disclaimer "it's only my speculation" or "it's only a hypothesis". Type A, however, is "This is the truth", without anything to back it up with. Such beliefs are not good or bad, but they influence and distort society over a long period of time.
My point is that you can have type B and C beliefs, but never type A, which should be considered unethical as it distorts people's ideas of truth.
Quoting Rank Amateur
All belief of type A should be considered unethical, regardless of origin or use.
Quoting Rank Amateur
No, I think you misunderstand the conclusion of the argument. What my argument points out is that Type A beliefs should be considered unethical since they distort truth over a period of time. If people believe things and do not care to understand that they are beliefs, they become truths for them, just like with anti-vaxxers going into cognitive bias and claim truth in vaccines causing autism.
It doesn't matter if some do good and some do bad, all belief of type A eventually lead to distortion of truth and may result in bad things happening. There is no reason to have, act or live by type A beliefs.
I think you should read my argument in detail again, this feels a bit straw-manned.
But you treat atheism as something with doctrines and rules to live by, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what atheism is. You compare it to religion in the way that these regimes took "ideas out of atheism and applied to the terrors they acted out", which is impossible because there are no doctrines or teachings within atheism, as it isn't based on anything like that.
It's such a misunderstanding of atheism that I see time after time. The idea that atheism is some religious doctrine to follow. Communism and Nazism have nothing to do with atheism, that's pure nonsense.
How can you attach atheism to these regimes? In what way did atheism cause them according to you? I'm genuinely interested in how you make that correlation without straw-manning the concept of atheism or applying attributes to atheism that does not exist.
The basic point of the argument is to distinguish belief that we take for truth without evidence or support. What I mean is that this argument is primarily an inductive argument for the most moral way to act around the concept of belief. If irrational and unsupported belief eventually leads to a distortion that is harmful, directly or indirectly, it's not ethical to hold on to that type of belief. Type B and C are beliefs that we primarily know are beliefs.
The difference and the basic moral act is to always move away from type A beliefs and hold onto type B and c, since we then always treat them as beliefs, we know that we don't know they are true, we know that they might be, but we would never act on them as truths.
This applies to more than religion, like for anti-vaxxers beliefs which are supposed, in their eyes, to be for the greater good, but if they had treated their fears as unsupported and in need of verification before they acted on them, they would not be responsible for the return of almost eradicated diseases. They all act on a type A belief.
So in religion, there's nothing wrong with the belief specifically, but the risk is that they influence society with their religious belief; that the consequences, even after their death, is a distortion of truth and reality for other people who then act out with harm.
My point is about how we treat belief, that we don't have a good line drawn in our heads about what beliefs are unsupported and what have support or at least that we know are beliefs. If we always had in mind that it's immoral to keep unsupported belief unchecked and act out by such unsupported belief, we would treat beliefs much more rational and always know them to be beliefs instead of through bias distort our irrational belief into truths. The different types reflect this; type A as belief that we accept as truth without evidence or support and type B and C as a belief that we know is only belief and in need of further support.
What? Atheism is just not a belief in God or any supernatural things. That's the only thing it is, what you apply to it after that is your own invention, which is the problem.
Quoting Jake
Atheism is just a denial of the existence of any supernatural elements or God/Gods. You cannot blame atheism for the ideas that people had which led to these things.
The fundamental difference here is that religion HAS TEACHINGS that becomes a basis for ideas, ATHEISM HAS NO TEACHINGS. This is fundamental.
You are making a causation does not mean correlation fallacy because you don't seem to understand the basic concept of what atheism is and what it is not.
Quoting Jake
This is your own definition and you call out atheists as being stupid not to understand their own atheism. Really? Are your online encounters with atheists and your own ideas about atheism the definition that is true?
Quoting Jake
What does this, what so ever, has to do with your attack on atheists and atheism? Atheism is just the absence of belief in any supernatural things or God/Gods. Nothing more, nothing less and what you do with that, if you are an atheist, is by your own responsibility.
Quoting Jake
What are you talking about? It appears that you don't understand the basic concept of atheism.
What is this lack of belief based on? What is it's source? How does the atheist arrive at this lack of belief? It didn't just magically pop in to existence out of nowhere, right?
This is why it seems so hard for theists to grasp the concept of atheism. There's no source, there's just no belief in God or the supernatural. Do you believe in unicorns? If not, what's the source? Why don't you believe in unicorns? Did that lack of belief just pop into your head out of nowhere? Do you see the irrationality of asking that question?
You try so hard to find evil in atheism and this is what at least I find scary about theists way of reasoning. Maybe that's why my argument is about making irrational belief unethical.
Quoting Jake
You keep doing it, warnings, threats of "dismembering my atheism". It's anti-intellectual theist preaching and by my understanding, it's against forum rules.
Ah, so your lack of belief in a God just magically sprang in to existence out of nothing. It's a miracle!! :smile:
You have a belief that people are born into this world, growing up with a belief as a primary starting point and then move over to atheism. Without anyone imposing religion and religious belief onto you, you will not evolve a belief in God or the supernatural. Outside influences always determine your core values. You learn things, you do not learn no things. You learn to follow a religious belief, you do not learn not to follow a religious belief.
Once again the fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of something absent. You imply atheism as something, it is the absence of something.
You do not learn there is not a chair in your room, you either learn there's a chair in your room or you don't have a chair and it's not part of your room or your perception of the room.
The chair doesn't exist, it's absent from both your idea of there being one and your experience of it. You don't learn there's not a chair in your room. Just as you don't learn to have faith in supernatural stuff, that faith is that chair, it's not there and you don't have it. You come in contact with others who claim there to be a chair in your room and it's just irrational in your perspective that there would be a chair in there.
Then there are those, like you, who claim that someone made me not think there's a chair in my room. And also claim that not accepting there to be a chair in that room is responsible for evils in this world. It's absolute nonsense.
This is religious preaching and not tolerated on this forum. The rest is just an insult to my intellect and ad hominem that's directly out of line.
Quoting Jake
You seriously aren't following forum guidelines now. This is evangelistic spamming.
Quoting Jake
Stop spamming