Janus

I didn't say the belief in chi is true. The consequence is that they may become a better practitioner.

Beliefs can only be sensibly counted as fallible if they can potentially be shown to be wrong. Think of the Tai Chi practitioner who believes in the p...

Whether a faith or even a merely intellectual belief brings about spiritual consequences has nothing to do with its fallibility.

Yes, that's what I was referring to. It depends on whether the suffering is gratuitous or not. I don't feel particularly attracted to any Christian de...

Your irritations are a matter for you. Tears, mourning, crying and pain do not exhaust what suffering is. There is suffering involved in striving to b...

No specific mention of suffering here. Please specify what you think is debatable. By "promise" I mean "guarantee". There is no simple faith that one ...

Can you cite a Christian text that explicitly promises an end to suffering? Also Buddhism doesn't promise Nirvana, so there is no question of a wager ...

Faith cannot consist in infallibility; that is it's very point. Faith is neither fallible nor infallible, it is outside that context altogether. That ...

I can't agree that all religions promise that, and even if they did the promise is made in very different contexts. In Buddhism, for example, there ca...

So you do believe in God then? Do you also believe that your God-given reasonableness and rationality are infallible? Or might they not be compromised...

You are presuming that you know what it is for God to be reasonable and rational. This would require you to be in possession of all the relevant spiri...

It was in response to this. What do you think other religions promise such that we should take their wager?

Can you offer some examples of what other religions promise?

I haven't said that it is not good to be reasonable and rational or that anyone gets to decide what's good for God. The wager doesn't assume that reas...

It seems to me,that for you, the possibility of a good God has already been decided against, in which case, for sure, the wager could have no relevanc...

How can you presume to dictate as to what is "reasonable and rational" for God? If you presume God exists then you presume that He is good; otherwise ...

You are completely missing the point with an irrelevant quibble.

Trouble with that is, we don't know the Truth, or even if there is one.

The wager is in terms of what you believe God to be, not in terms of what he is; which is unknowable.The terms of the wager are that you believe that ...

I don't know; I can't answer from experience, because I remain untransformed. I think openness is necessary. Maybe faith comes in degrees ranging from...

Yes, I made this point earlier, that belief about God cannot be a merely intellectual matter. If your faith does not transform you, then it is not rea...

But I never said you should accept what I said if it is not intuitively obvious to you. I believe what I said is true because it is intuitively obviou...

Actually, I had thought that you had accidentally left out an "IF": " IF it is not something that I can confirm....". But now I see another interpreta...

Well, yes I was just allowing for our contemporary knowledge of there being many religions. In times where people only knew of one or two religions, o...

Other things that have been amply confirmed by observation can give you good reason to believe the testimony of others when it comes to empirical matt...

The argument as it is usually given is: P1. There are four possibilities: I don't believe in God and there is no God. I don't believe in God and there...

I mean to say that we give intellectual assent only to things we can confirm by observation or that we think we have good reasons to believe are confi...

You've got that wrong. You are claiming that at least one of the premises could logically be false, which would not make it an invalid argument, but a...

But sincerely believing in God cannot be a matter of mere intellectual assent, because for it to be a mere intellectual matter God would have to be th...

Because twelve is a small enough number to be visualized, either as three groups of four or four groups of three. If you can't visualize twelve then j...

It's not a matter of mere logical possibilities. The choice to believe or not is made in light of the possibility of (at least some if not all) religi...

I don't think Pascal's Wager is really dealing with "mere intellectual assent". What exactly could mere intellectual assent be anyway? Mouthing the wo...

I wasn't thinking of Aristotle. When we say the building is now different because a brick has been replaced by another, isn't it the case that we can ...

Is the building not formally the same, but actually different? Of course in order to be able to say that the building is actually different we must sa...

Does the formal identity 'Obama' signify a totality of processes from birth to death, or the entity that undergoes these processes?

What is it exactly we are talking about when we refer to the Earth?

No it is easy enough to visualize three groups of four or four groups of three, and to see that it equals twelve. Of course it's not possible with lar...

Not true. We can easily observe that three sets of four trees equals twelve trees, for example.

Since 2+2 = 4 is true either a priori or analytically, does it then require a truthmaker?

As long as what is what they name the Earth?

This may certainly be true of religious sacraments.

I agree with what you say. Logic is entirely dependent on intuition; whereas intuition is not necessarily dependent on logic. We may have profoundly t...

OK, fair enough, man.

As I understand it you are saying there are mysteries which can never be made intelligible, and that we ought not, on that account, become closed off ...

There problem is there are no answers that we are able to rationally demonstrate to be wrong (other than out and out contradictions) when it comes to ...

Any presupposition that consists in thinking that the instrumental or predictive efficacy of some hypothesis justifies it's being preferred in context...

What seems obvious to anyone all depends on how that one thinks about phenomenological observation. It's always going to come down to the question of ...

Sure, why should the physical nature not express or reflect the spiritual?

Of course directly shared experience might be nonsense, but experience is obviously shared via language or we would be unable to communicate effective...

Symmetry is one idea often associated with beauty, and equilibrium is one idea sometimes associated with goodness. As to "minimization of uncertainty"...