جمع الأدلة والإيمان بالله (لارا بو… |موقع قفشات

l’m not sure that you’ve got this quite right. It seems to me that belief comes before even consciousness of it arises. She uses the example of the statement: “The Nile is the longest river in the world” as an example of a proposition she feels does not involve faith because she doesn’t care whether or not it’s true. While this may be the case, the assertion “The Nile is the longest river in the world” is testable, and whether or not it proves to be a true proposition depends on what we mean when we say “longest.” Either way, however, the idea of “longness” is a human construct—the only ones who can care whether or not it’s true are humans because such a proposition would only matter to us. This, however, is a proposition that holds no immediate consequence for our actions. You might as well say that you believe the sky is purple—if holding the belief has no practical implications on your life, that is you never have negative consequences from holding the belief, you have no reason to ever call it into question. But the belief itself is held regardless of whatever experience might tell you. Of course, this is as bad an example as her example with the Nile River because both depend on accepting the language we use as having a correlation to whatever internal states we’re experiencing. For a better example, let’s look at our faith in gravity. Now, she might want to say that I don’t have faith in gravity because I’ll never have reason to question a belief in gravity, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t hold a belief. Of course, in this case my belief arises out of instinct and then experience. Since the day I was born, I have never felt as though I were in danger of flying off into space. Indeed, it was never something I’d thought might even be possible until someone came along and said, “Hey, do you know why you don’t fly off into space? It’s because of gravity, this force that stands in relation to an object’s mass.” Up until that time, I never had to even wonder as to why I wasn’t flying off into space. Nothing about my experience could have caused me to think that this could be an issue I should worry about. And here’s the kicker—having the thing in which I’ve always believed given a name has changed nothing. Because someone named “gravity” and described what they take to be its mechanism, I have not been given any reason to call my belief into question. In fact, the only thing that could call my belief in gravity into question would be an experience that causes me to question it. And it is a belief whether I want to call it that or not because whether or not it’s true has real practical consequences for my life. In this case, the belief simply arises out of the ordinary work of the human brain. Even in infancy our brains are taking in the massive amount of new stimuli, arranging and categorizing using an innate logic. This is what allows us to form ideas, then develop language in order to communicate them. My tiny human brain has already begun to process distinctions of quantity, for instance. Then, at some later point in my development, my parents and others around me start giving me the names of the things my brain is already doing. I come to understand “one” and the idea of singularity, then I am introduced to its double, which is called “two.” Whatever the signifier makes no difference unless we actually wish to communicate the idea, which we apparently do. Which is why we argue when someone tells us that 2+2=5 because “what I take to be two,” when doubled, cannot equal “what I take to be five.” The logic of this is innate. We only have to learn the symbols that serve as representations in order to get along in the world with other people. I don’t need anyone to convince me that distinctions of quantity are important and have practical consequences for my life. What I need are other people to agree to use the same names I use and to represent them the same way when expressing themselves so that communication is possible. But doing any of the mental work necessary to understand math is only valuable to me because I already believe that distinctions of quantity are important to my life. Whether it’s the idea of gravity or distinctions of quantity, I have to already hold some idea that is then given a name for the sake of communicating the idea to others. I may have imagined being able to fly off into space many times, but my belief that I would never be able to do so has never come into question. In that sense, the belief has never been tested by a rational process—indeed, it’s never required testing. Even if I imagined that I could fly, I never believed that I could because my belief that I could not has never been in question. Nothing in my experience has ever caused me to doubt gravity. Even if you were to come to me and tell me that Newton was all wrong, that the mechanism that keeps us from flying off into space actually works because the electric charge between particles of air exert a downward force on us, it would still leave my underlying belief unchallenged because all you’ve done is substitute one name and explanation for the belief for another. Since this is the case, my belief in gravity has never undergone a rational process of any kind—that is, a process by where I test my beliefs to either confirm or deny them. This means that my beliefs are not-rational, or arational. That’s how it is for her example with the Nile. If she chooses to hold that belief, because it has no practical consequences for her life, it will never come into question—perhaps until she tries to communicate the belief to others who might then take it into question themselves. Religious faith is no different than any of these others. As we’ve existed in our lives, we’ve had feelings of things we didn’t have words for. Then someone came along and gave us words to express the amorphous ideas that already existed in our heads, the ideas themselves begin to take on a shape, but that shape is then defined by things external to ourselves—others give us the language to express these ideas (we might relate an experience to someone and they tell us, “Oh, you felt God working through you,” so you now associate that language with an idea to which you commit yourself). Now, if you believe in God, the only reason to bring epistemology into it at all is if you should have some reason to call that belief into question. If there are no practical consequences for your life other than good ones, then why do you need to justify your believe with any epistemology at all? If I believe as a matter of religious faith that Christ rose from the dead to walk the earth in the flesh again, then no amount of other people dying is going to shake that belief from my grasp—they aren’t Jesus. And since I haven’t met Jesus, there is nothing that could possibly call into question my article of faith. Is it something I accept against the dictates of reason—following Hume, I take that to mean, believing in something despite the evidence of experience? One could say that on the preponderance of the evidence, people do not come back from the dead, but as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve never actually met Jesus in the flesh, so what happens to other people has no bearing on what Jesus is capable of doing or not doing. Honestly, I don’t see the need to muddle epistemology by bringing faith into it. If you need to justify your faith, it is only because you think others demand it of you—either that or I have to conclude that you yourself have called into question your own faith and have sought justification. Either way, however, arguing from utility is assigning value to the belief after the fact, which is ethics and comes after epistemology. To examine the belief, you had to decide to hold the belief first. If you have no reason to call the belief into question, then there’s no need to rationalize it. You’re not going to go flying off into space, whatever argument anyone makes. And by conflating this kind of undisputed faith with assertions of fact that can legitimately be tested and contested by others, like whether or not the Nile is the “longest” river, whatever we take that to mean, is to muddy the epistemological waters. It’s the failure to understand distinctions like this that lead to people adopting absurdities like the idea that climate change is a hoax—they use rationalization to justify a belief the same way as is suggested here. The problem is that you’re talking about an article of faith that is untestable—you will never have an experience that should cause you to call your faith into question because you hold that faith prior to whatever other experience you have of the world. An assertion like “climate change is a hoax,” however is most definitely testable and contestable. I would really appreciate it if you would make note of this important distinction before the future gets any worse than present projections suggest. I mean, I usually don’t get so testy on YouTube comments, but this is why people joke about metaphysicians that they waste time arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

how can one knowing more be considered bad for one?

goood loooord. so many "ums." so annoying.

Seems this would undermine Pascal's wager.