The way you seem to be wording your posts almost looks like you are saying that since we can’t trust our senses, there is no reason to put any kind of filters on what we believe. I’m not sure if I have completely misunderstood you or what.
Not quite. What I’m pointing out is that there is no such thing as a position that is not based on belief, so contempt for belief in general (and belief in the specific, too, actually) is absurd. I don’t doubt my senses, not at all, nor do I doubt the law of noncontradiction. I just thing statements like “Religion is wrong because it’s based on belief, whereas science (or humanism, or whatever you want to put here) isn’t” are logically incoherent and promote bigotry.
Belief is an act of the will, whereas reason is a function of the intellect. Because of this, reason can’t do anything without belief, because belief fuels and ultimately composes it. Reason is not an action, but a method for action.
As for choosing your beliefs, filters are obviously necessary, but from the standpoint of reason, what filters you use and what beliefs you ultimately settle on at least appear arbitrary. From a neutral standpoint, I think “holistic” is a better word to describe how we form our beliefs, but it’s real real hard to argue with holistic. Like fencing with a puff of fog, you can cause disturbances, but usually all you generally manage to do is force it to swirl a little more for a few seconds before it reforms.
As the evidence mentioned is what I consider to be the cornerstone of a rational belief forming system I find forming beliefs (other than the axiomatic ones I am forced to form in order to learn anything) with a lack of evidence to be contradictory to my goals of knowing truth and avoiding error. The definition of ‘faith’ I gave in a previous thread was “believing with a lack of or insufficient evidence” I was told by all the theists that this wasn’t an accurate definition, but nobody gave me a better one, and the way they used the word fit in precisely with my definition. This might as well have been the “thesaurus forums” when they gave me different words for faith like “grace” “grace from god” “god’s gift” “somebody else can tell you more eloquently” but nobody gave any working definition.
Faith is an act of the will in which you assert that something is true because you feel in every bone in your body that it is true. This is not a work of the emotions, though they serve a part, but is rather a distillation of everything you have experienced, felt, thought, understood, thought you understood, half-heard, loved, hated, and felt joy for. Beliefs can be stronger or weaker; I can believe that my friend is going to meet me for lunch tomorrow and only be mildly surprised (or disappointed) when they call at the last minute to cancel. Or, belief can be almost impossible to imagine yourself without, such as the belief in the law of noncontradiction. Belief isn’t a matter of whether or not you have sufficient evidence, because you
never have sufficient evidence. A belief is something that you think is true without necessarily having specific reasons for believing, and is a baseline from which deduction can occur. I believe in the Catholic Church, but I
know that contraception is wrong, because it follows logically from my belief in the RCC; before I understood the direct chain of logic, however, I merely believed that contraception is wrong, trusting from my belief in the Church and my understanding of things in general that it was right.
Let me put it this way: beliefs are like logs floating on an infinite ocean. If I have more faith in a belief, it is larger and stronger, and if I have less, it can be as thin as a blade of grass. However, I don’t want a random collection of logs sloshing about, because they crash into each other haphazardly, and sometimes a few float away. So, I try to connect them to each other, placing the biggest and strongest as the keel and lashing all the others to it and it to all the others. Then, I start building upwards with the pieces of wood I have left over, eventually raising a mast and erecting a deck so I have a place to duck under when it rains.
At least, that’s how
I picture it. YMMV.
(con’t below)
I certainly don’t see think it is self-evident that this setup could not possibly create a complex self-replicating struct, analagous to DNA.
