Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
Pretty simple syllogism, but the proselytizing on this platform by "believers" runs rampant in the constant defense of fallacious arguments. But know this... all of you who do require reason-based thought, have a severe lack of faith in God.
Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought.
A logical argument for God is an attempt to provide reason-based thought.
Therefore using reason-based thought for God is necessarily a showing of a lack of faith in God.
Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought.
A logical argument for God is an attempt to provide reason-based thought.
Therefore using reason-based thought for God is necessarily a showing of a lack of faith in God.
Comments (246)
Well said! Without faith, we go nowhere, and without reason, we cannot find the way!
That's one way to view it. Another is to convince others who do not have faith why they should. If I could present a reasonable argument that persuaded a person to eventually have faith, that's pretty useful if I think my own faith is right.
Faith is personal. Arguments are for others to join your outlook on life. Faith alone rarely convinces others to join your outlook and so you need argument beyond faith.
Faith if it is defined as "complete trust or confidence in someone or something" is necessary otherwise humanity could not reach the current stage of achievement in many fields of science, mathematics, philosophy, and spirituality. That is true since a person cannot be an expert in all fields so that is when the faith given the definition becomes important. Faith is also important at the personal level when we want to achieve something or become certain about things using reason. As I said: Without faith, we go nowhere, and without reason, we cannot find the way!
Pitiful. Bad philosophy - not really philosophy at all - low rent psychology. I'll tag it as an example of religious bigotry because you claim to understand religious doctrine you don't know anything about. Beyond that, your characterization that religious proselytizing "runs rampant" here is ridiculous. Almost everything that gets posted about religion here is low-quality anti-religion polemics, although most of it is better than this.
This makes a lot of sense.
Can you point to examples? I do notice them from time to time, but I don't see them 'running rampant'.
Pretty sure that's the exact definition of proselytizing...
See above.
I know what "proselytizing" means. My comment was on your "runs rampant" claim.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Based on this definition, it's you who are proselytizing here.
Continued defense of illogical arguments because "people don't get it [because OPs poor logic]" is basically a bump, and a way of just re-preaching the same illogic.
I didnt defend any arguments, I only attacked yours. As I wrote
Quoting T Clark
Here is your chance to show us Im wrong. Provide a summary of specific relevant religious doctrine. Prove youre smarter than Thomas Aquinas.
Never said you did, was clarifying that arguments aren't for proselytizing. I clarified that people here defend illogical positions because "OTHERS DONT UNDERSTAND" not because their own logic is flawed... that style of defense is hollow and just re-preaching hollowness.
Quoting T Clark
You mean prove myself smarter than Aristotle's Prime Mover?
Do you want me to point out why arguments from presupposition that begs question are bad? I mean, at least make it a presupposition that doesn't beg any questions...
The only presupposition Ive made is that you dont know enough about religious doctrine to make a meaningful statement about it.
... you asked me to overcome Aquinas, not you. That was towards Aquinas. Hence why I responded to your quote "prove you're smarter than Aquinas" with that...
Even if true (I don't think it is), so what? As Daniel Dennett points out many (most?) people believe they ought to believe "believe in belief" in order to benefit socially or psychologically even when they "lack faith".
Quoting MoK
I think you (and others here) confuse "faith" (i.e. unconditional trust in / hope for (ergo worship of) unseen, magical agency) with working assumptions (i.e. stipulations); the latter are reasonable, therefore indispensible for discursive practices, whereas the former is psychological (e.g. an atavistic bias). "Without assumptions, we cannot proceed ..." is evidently true, MoK, in a way that your "faith" claim is not.
Which "religious doctrine" is mentioned in the OP or is being discussed in this thread?
I agree with the spirit of your argument, with what you are trying to say. But I think you draw too stark a line inside the mind of the person who would believe in God, and who would also be a reasonable, reasoning, logical thinker.
If someone says they base their faith on the soundness of some logical syllogism, they aren't doing the faith thing, and they are probably working off a faulty syllogism as well. There's where I agree with you.
But that said, I don't agree the faithful person must not be using their reason when they assert they believe in God. We can't escape our reason. It's always there in every syntactically correct sentence. If I "know" God, I must employ the same epistemological processes as knowing math or empirical things.
The faithful person just has other experiences, other objects, which, like empirical objects, can't be proven to exist by logical syllogism.
I don't think anyone, in the history of philosophy, has ever proven any object must exist through any syllogism. This is the reason after 3000 years of our scientia, we still have to ask the first question about all of it - what exists?
Maybe Descartes was onto something when he realized "I am" can both be known as knowledge while it simultaneously was happening ontologically, while "I am thinking" was actually (ontologically) happening. So he did fashion a demonstration of sorts (not a syllogism) that proved the existence of an object as known. But unless you knowingly conduct his little demonstration for yourself, he hasn't proved the existence of anything besides himself to anyone besides himself.
We can't prove by logic that anything exists.
This is why I agree with the spirit of your post. I don't like Anselm's and Aquinas' and Descartes' or any arguments purporting to demonstrate the existence of God. They can be shown invalid and/or unsound.
But you said: "Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought."
Another translation of this sentence could be "You have to be crazy to believe God exists." Because I don't really know what "belief without reason-based thought" means.
As a non-sequitur, assume some man walked on water, pulled say, a guy named Peter, from drowning, to walk with him on the water, then he was destroyed on a cross to death, and buried, and then... rose from the dead and said to Peter, "I am God, trust me," - whether you or me believe any of that actually happened, for Peter, faith in God at that point is sort of reasonable, logical conclusion for a person having those experiences. Right? So to say "faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought" may not be logically necessary, and for Peter, is ontologically false (because what they hell else is he supposed to think while he is still wet from walking on the water with Jesus?) Maybe he was hallucinating the whole thing - that's a better empirical explanation - but you can continue to use reason to come to conclusions about an object like a man walking on water, or a God, or a hallucination, and so must Peter.
So the phrase "without reason-based thought" is a nit I would pick here. I see your point overall, but I wouldn't say it how you said it.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Exactly, we aren't just robots with calculator minds. And we need to have faith in our senses to navigate crossing the street, and faith in our logic to navigate a conversation.
Exactly, so believe... no need to try and to hide behind rationalism. That's my point, not everything needs to be. I firmly believe more than one mind can occupy a body... I dont give a fuck what others believe about that...
Why do you what warrants your belief? And what difference to you/us does that (un/warranted?) belief make?
Quoting Fire Ologist
:up: :up:
In the context of this discussion and for precision's sake, we shouldn't use "we ... have faith in" where we don't have grounds to doubt makes more sense.
This one:
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Now that weve clarified that, lets go back to your original response.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Thats not the question on the table. The issue being discussed is whether or not use of reason in arguments for God undermines the credibility of faith.
This isnt a very fruitful discussion. Ill give you the last word.
What he expressed was Pauline doctrine.
Like it.
We do have faith becomes
We do not have grounds to doubt .
Puts a bit of a negative spin on it, but if it is more precise to you it still works for me.
This highlights the difference between using the word belief which aligns with faith and using the word grounds (or in the negative, no grounds to doubt) which aligns better with knowledge.
Again, big picture, you already made your point. But now, if we want to draw the distinction between believing and knowing a bit further, we have to refocus on the distinctions between the object believed in, versus the object known of; we cant draw a distinction just between believing and knowing anymore since have faith has been supplanted by do not have grounds (to doubt or otherwise).
Now religion (pure faith objects, fairies and gods) becomes theology, the rational and exposition of objects believed in (fairies gods) as if they were objects we had no grounds to doubt. Now reason is applied to faith objects.
But again, theology never leaps to philosophy/science. We cant prove gods or fairies exist.
Unless we someday can make a tool to measure the difference between believing in God, and knowing what God is.
And again, whether any of these objects actually exist or can be doubted, or must be doubted, whether they be named Gods or streets or cars, whether they exist at all, the ontology of it, will never be proven at the end of syllogism. Thats my little contribution here. Arguments for God and arguments for that car that almost hit me crossing the street, ultimately are all useless as proof of anything ontologically.
Telling you about my experience in the street, or walking on water, on an ontological level, is another conversation, than a conversation demonstrating how the logic between all the street happenings and all the god happenings is logical.
We always take something, some thing, an object, for granted. This taking for granted, is what I meant by faith when I said I have to have faith in my senses.
Something needs to hit us in the face before we might ever ask whether we believe or we know something or face or hitting.
If you have faith that your spouse will not cheat on you, does proper faith require that you [I]not[/I] understand why they would not choose to cheat on you?
Argument, discourse, proofthese are all means of understanding. "Believe that you might understand." "Faith seeking understanding." Etc.
The assertion that faith precludes understanding, or attempting to understand, seems odd to me.
Certainly not according to most Christians through most of history. Consider: Faith and Reason or Philokalia.
St. Paul thinks the existence and glory of God is manifest in the signs of creation:
Romans 1
[I]
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
[/I]
Minds and words intersect at more than just language and communication. As Quine puts it in Pursuit of Truth: "in psychology, one may or may not be a behavioralist, but in language one has no choice..." Words are made with individual letters and accents that tyrannize the rhyme and rhythm of their form and flow. Their meaning in a community of words is ultimately determined by several factors intrinsic to the word, its definition superficially changed by external factors. And every word has its own set of forces behind it that triggers a set of total receptors in the brain.
I had perceived this quite some time before I even started delving into Nietzsche, let alone Deleuze, whom details that every mind has a set of total forces in possession of it... one can reflect and ruminate upon something from a different set of "total receptors" (total forces) just as one can approach a problem from a new total set of receptors that make up a different perspective. Normally these changes are gradual, and a when another person finally notices and declares "you're a completely different person than you were when we first ...!"
Well, one can learn to do this at a much more rapid pace. One can master such a skill, just as they can master self-abnegation, as self-abnegation is the first step. It's not that you are identified with this other, but you don the mask of its forces. Especially after getting acquainted with Schizo Analysis and Rhizomatic Thought mastery is relatively simple.
Thats right. Hes saying positing a logical credibility to an argument for God undermines the credibility of faith for that same God.
I think arguments for the existence of God can only impress those who already believe in God, because they are not clear (and I think, ultimately fail).
Mind you, I believe in God. But I believe in reason too, and my reason tells me my reason cannot deliver existence in some other object. Its like reverse ontological proof that my ideas are not the things they are ideas of, and anything that is reasonable in syllogism is, ontologically, my idea, not some other things, such as God.
If I know the earth revolves around the sun and can prove it, and if you previously believed the earth revolved but did not know how to prove it, now, with my great syllogism, what you believed is what you can prove. But Ive not shown you that the earth exists, or revolving is actually happening.
People see that proof (about objects) as obviating the need for faith. But faith is faith in the existence or truth of things, whereas logic and reasoning is about how truly existing things relate to one another.
Not even Descartes, who proved at least one thing existed (himself to himself), not even he proved anything else existed.
The answer to this is not that Anselms proof is a logical perfection of God as syllogism - it is that we need faith no matter which object we pick up to fashion proofs about. Faith (will) is essential not only to finding God, but to following a reasonable argument, whatever objects that argument is about. We dont prove things exist; we prove things about existing things we already chose to believe in, or as the more empirically bent put it, we already posit as an object of knowledge.
Fair enough, I see your point now that you're less ambiguous with it other than "prove you're smarter than." I'll ruminate over it and get back to you. But know what will likely come is a deeper nuance of my perspective that bridges with yours because that's currently already underway, but it will take time to express. It will likely be in the realm of something like why Nietzsche considers science a morality of resessentiment for most practitioners rather than people truly passionate about it.
I almost never use the word faith. I have a "reasonable confidence" in things, not a faith. People try to use faith to describe things like crossing the road: faith that you will get to the other side. Catching a plane: faith that you will survive the flight, etc. Nonsense. These are examples of a reasonable confidence based on the real world knowledge. We can demonstrate that planes exists, we know there are pilots who are trained to fly; we know that most planes make it to their destinations. When it comes to god we don't really have this kind of knowledge. And faith is problematic since it can justify anything at all. The faith a Muslim has that Allah is the real God and Jesus a mere prophet is equal to the faith a Christian has that Jesus is god and Allah is false. I remember some racist Christian South Africans telling me that apartheid was god's will and they had this on faith. How do we determine the validity of one faith against another?
Nice.
It is traditionally held that Paul believed that faith is a gift from God. This scripture is interpreted as saying that:
"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." -- Ephesians 2:8-9
I could lay out more sources to show this. Do you need that? It's pervasive in the Pauline texts. His own faith was by the grace of God. He believed that was true of everyone.
Rubbish.
Crazy is a deep end of that, from Foucault's Madness and Civilization pg 78/79:
"Christian unreason was relegated by Christians themselves into the margins of a reason that had become identical with the wisdom of God incarnate. After Port-Royal, men would have to wait two centuries-until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche-for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason... Further: Christ did not merely choose to be surrounded by lunatics; he himself chose to pass in their eyes for a mad-man, thus experiencing, in his incarnation, all the sufferings of human misfortune. Madness thus became the ultimate form, the final degree of God in man's image."
No, this is the Pauline doctrine. You're saved through faith by the grace of God. You Catholics need to read the Bible. :razz:
That's (maybe) a definition but not a "religious doctrine".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Understanding is knowing. It's why all great leaders are natural psychologist.
Exactly the human spirit is the rope between two opposites faith and reason...
Though I suppose I could have clarified "absolute" faith. The more you require reason and knowledge for God the less faith you have.
My brief look into what Pauline doctrine is doesnt indicate it is primarily related to reason versus faith. Clearly, my understanding of this entire issue is not substantive, but to be fair to myself, I dont think @DifferentiatingEggs is either. He should be able to clarify whether or not I am correct in that understanding.
Christians have been arguing about this among themselves for 2000 years. I doubt you and @DifferentiatingEgg Have much to offer.
You dont. Its not your job. Many Christians dont consider it their job either.
Wise choice of word.
There is no mental act without reason based thought, without intellect, in the mix. So it is rubbish to talk of a mental act like faith or believing without reason based thought.
I think the confusion here is thinking knowledge is more powerful than belief. For example, we can believe the car is in the driveway, but once we look and see it, we dont have to merely believe it, we can know it more certainly and dont need faith or belief. But thats also rubbish.
It is belief that is the more powerful of the two. It is belief that moves us to act, that empowers us to stop deliberating or reasoning among the things we know, and actually act. We consider what we know using reason and just before we act upon that reason and knowledge, we make a judgement, and that judgment is a choice, namely, that weve seen enough, weve done all the logical calculations necessary, weve judged between what we know and what we do not, and now we finally believe enough we can cease that whole merely mental process, and act.
Knowledge is what minds think about, what they know; believing is what minds are actually doing, judging, finished thinking, and understanding. Faith, knowledge, understanding are different moments in all of our chosen acts, and what we believe is behind everything we knowingly do.
We dont know something strong enough to act on it; we know something well enough that we can make arguments about it and syllogisms about it, but when we believe something, when we judge the argument concluded, and just say therefore x we are pointing to what we believe, as now demonstrated in the syllogism we merely know. When the syllogism is sound, we still say we believe there is nothing more that needs to be said. Once we have the conclusion, once we have the belief, weve already judged and dont need any more arguments.
And we can strip knowledge from our actions, or act with little knowledge, and no certainty of what is behind the action nor where it will lead; but at the moment of acting, regardless of any knowledge, always our actions follow the moment of belief. We take the plunge based on our deepest convictions. We must believe what we do, what we say we know before there could ne anything we would testify to as what I know.
Belief is more essential to our lives than knowing. Belief is like our testament to knowledge.
So to tell a person who believes in God they might be jeopardizing their faith-based belief by seeking logical proof, or that logical proof replaces and usurps this belief, is like telling me the fact that I trust my wife must mean I dont really know her (or. I know her without reason based thought or something), and if I really knew my wife, there would be no place or need for trust anymore.
One more point here - we dont prove existence. Anselm and Aquinas, God bless them, didnt make the proof they hoped for. We take existing objects and we prove things about them. The substance of the proof is in the motion from premises to function/relation, to conclusions. The conclusion, like the premise, is all based on if there exists . All first premises that start with There exists start from belief. If starting from what we merely know, we need to start If there exists . So a conclusion like therefore x exists has forgotten it was based on if.
I probably needed to spend a lot more time on this but you should see my two or three points here.
If you chop down my reasoning, I might still believe my conclusion anyway. But if you also show a better reasoning, and new object for me to understand, to adjudge there I see it, I might actually change what I believe.
Nah one end of the spectrum is Faith, the other is Rationalism. I believe the mis understanding is on your end. It's a sliding scale. The more of one you need the less of the other you require.
Everything is on a scale for you. Very rigid, linear thinking.
If I say slavery is right because I have it on faith and you say, no, I have it on faith its wrong - we arrive at space where we uncover the shortcomings of using faith as a justification. Faith isnt a reliable justification.
As for it not being my job. It sometimes is.
If Im in a country where people are voting on positions that are socially awful based on faith as a justification, then I believe I have a modest role, where possible, to explore how reliable this approach is. In fact I have done just this with a couple of Christians at work and to their credit, they gradually came around to a different view.
Quoting T Clark
Which "Christians" have been "arguing about" which "this"?
fyi A dozen years of Catholic schooling and an honor student in religious studies and church history throughout high school, I'm sure I haven't forgotten all of (the) catechism(s) or even some Patristic & Scholastic "doctrines" yet. :halo:
So what are you talking about, TC?
Which is not to say "faith is irrational" and "faith does not involve understanding," even from the standpoint of Evangelicals. St. Paul, like St. Luke, doesn't think we do [I]anything[/I] entirely on our own; it is God in whom we "live and move and have our being" (Acts 17). Hence, Paul often describes people doing things, and then God doing the same thing to them, in reciprocal pairs.
The traditional reading of that passage is that "being saved" is "not your doing," not necessarily "having faith" (some have faith in the Gospels through signs and wonders, yet "blessed are those who have believed and not seen" John 29:29).
What you are putting forth is a common Evangelical reading, but it isn't a common thread until 1,500+ years later, and is obviously a minority view today. The "faith" in question is also often taken to be the faith of God/Christ as well (e.g., in Orthodox readings). Even if one accepts Sola Fide, this does not necessitate that faith is the result of a sort of supernatural, arational autopilot. Such a view shows up only in the Reformation (since it only makes sense given a modern nature/supernatural distinction) and has always been a minority view.
The OP has a view of faith that is only consistent with an austere sort of fideism. This has been far from the norm in Church history, although it has always been a minor thread. It's certainly far from the norm in the largest denominations both historically and today. It might be the norm in the most vocal set of Anglo Protestants, but even there I think this is probably not actually the case.
I will put it this way, apologetics, the reasoned defense of the faith, has been part of Church History and among the main works of many of its great saints and doctors pretty much from the Apostolic Fathers on. If "Pauline Theology" means abandoning a reasoned defense of the faith, then "Pauline Theology" was largely lost to the world for thousands of years until recovered by people who spoke Paul's Greek as a second, dead language, who apparently understood what he meant much better than native speakers who were learning from people taught directly by him or his close successors.
The more I know/understand that my wife won't cheat on me the [I]less[/I] faith I have in her? This seems bizarre to me.
This would imply that I have more faith in friends I have just met and less in those who have stood by me through thick and thin.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is the official Catholic view:
"Again, it is evident that this "light of faith" is a supernatural gift and is not the necessary outcome of assent to the motives of credibility. No amount of study will win it, no intellectual conviction as to the credibility of revealed religion nor even of the claims of the Church to be our infallible guide in matters of faith, will produce this light in a man's mind. It is the free gift of God. Hence the Vatican Council (III, iii;) teaches that "faith is a supernatural virtue by which we with the inspiration and assistance of God's grace, believe those things to be true which He has revealed" Catholic Encyclopedia
"Faith is a gift of grace. God not only speaks to us, he also gives us the grace to respond. To believe in Revelation we need the gift of faith." Archdiocese of Minneapolis
"Faith is a gift of God which enables us to know and love him". (ibid)
The above is also Pauline doctrine.
Yes, that is not the same thing as what OP is saying at all. The Catechism has an entire section on the role of apologetics. To claim the Catholic Church thinks doing apologetics is a sign of lack of faith is frankly absurd and demonstrates a total ignorance of the topic.
The Church runs a number of discount philosophy programs precisely because they see this as important to spreading and defending the faith.
The main issue Paul dealt with in his religious work was the salvation of the Gentiles. He believed Jesus offered the way for Gentiles to become beneficiaries of the Covenant. He basically established Christianity outside the Jewish community. His thoughts about faith and works were related to that.
Btw, this is my favorite Pauline scripture. When I was young, this was all of Christianity to me:
"If I speak with the eloquence of men and of angels, but have no love, I become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbal.
"If I have the gift of foretelling the future and hold in my mind not only all human knowledge but the very secrets of God, and if I also have that absolute faith which can move mountains, but have no love, I amount to nothing at all.
"If I dispose of all that I possess, yes, even if I give my own body to be burned, but have no love, I achieve precisely nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2
So you're admitting that the Pauline doctrine, along with the official Catholic view is that faith is not through reason, but by the grace of God?
Faith is relaint on faith alone... Faith = Faith. When was Faith equated to Knowing? I don't know of any meaning of the word that suggests knowing.
Just because people here are used to their two to three quarters faith acting as absolute faith doesn't mean they're correct about Faith... Most "Christians" today aren't even 3/4ths Christian...
"Faith" there is the theological virtue of faith, which does not seem in line with OP's usage.
This is the section on faith in the Catechism:
It depends on what you mean by "through reason." Reason in contemporary thought is often restricted to nothing more than demonstration and computation, the means by which man moves from premises to conclusions. However, reason is sometimes still used for the intellect, i.e., the rational part of the soul or nous. Faith is not achieved through reason, but neither is it unrelated to it.
The "light of faith," illumination, involves the nous, and the regeneration of the nous. The attainment of understanding and spiritual knowledge (gnosis) is a key element of the spiritual life. However, illumination is not an "achievement" of the nous, but something that happens to the nous, although the cooperation of man is often deeply intertwined in this. Progress towards theosis is generally seen as involving ever greater degrees of understanding, certainly not its absence. As man is deified there is a greater and greater coincidence of the divine will and man's will, joined in love, but this could hardly be a free, self-determining movement if the intellect remained ever blind to the Good sought by the will. Love/Beauty was generally related to both will and intellect (Goodness and Truth), which is why the great text of Orthodox spirituality is titled "The Love of Beauty" (Philokalia).
Apologetic arguments were generally seen as removing barriers to faith, not instilling it. St. Thomas is, of course, not the official philosopher of the Catholic Church, being one doctor among many, but he is as close as you can get. In the Summa Contra Gentiles he has a chapter titled "Why man's happiness does not consist in the knowledge of God had by demonstrations." Nonetheless, he spent an immense amount of time on such demonstrations because they are not without their purposes and merits.
Perhaps a disconnect here is the modern tendency in Anglo-American thought to consider knowledge as a type of belief, that which is justified and true. This would imply that all knowledge is had through justification via demonstration and inference, moving from premises to conclusions. Yet the Patristics and most theologians following them see noesis as superior to discursive reasoning (although the latter may sometimes "set the ground" for the former). Illumination involves knowledge, but not that had through discursive argument.
Even St. Augustine, Calvin's main inspiration, dedicated significant efforts to apologetics and philosophy as well. Faith here is not will as uniformed by intellect. Hence, the credo "I believe that I might understand."
One of things in your previous post that gave me pause was this:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If by "Evangelicals", you mean Protestants who support missionary work, that's exactly the population you'd look toward to find a real, full-bodied Christian rationalist. This is where the ridiculous "clock-maker" thought experiment comes from. This view is in direct contradiction to the views of Paul, which was that faith is a divine gift. This is the view of the Catholic Church. They see reason as compatible with faith, but it is by no means the source of it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The human intellect is supposed to be a reflection of the second emanation of the One. This supports the Pauline view that faith does not arise from any work exerted by the mind. It's just part of the functioning of the mind.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The understanding involved here would be mystical in character. The One becomes the Two. The Two becomes the Three. The Three becomes the Four, which is the One. In comparison with this, logical arguments only offer half-truths. But we are here a long way from the concerns of Paul, which was my point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes. Reason is considered to be compatible with faith, but not its source. It appears you're going to hold fast to the wrong impression about the Pauline doctrine and the official teaching of the Church. I'm disappointed in you, but you're certainly welcome to your view.
This is not the issue at hand. The OP claims that making religious arguments based on reason is inconsistent with making them based on faith - as he wrote "...all of you who do require reason-based thought, have a severe lack of faith in God." In my response I suggested that if he understands relevant Christian positions on the subject, he should provide more detail. If he can't do that, he should keep his trap shut.
Quoting Tom Storm
Your approach seems like a useful one. Do you think your coworker's willingness to have reasonable discussions about their religious beliefs is a sign of lack of faith? When I said it's not your job, I meant you don't have to judge their actions and beliefs by their standards, you can hold them responsible for what they do based on your own understanding. To your credit, you've chosen to go beyond that.
Thanks for the explanation. I asked my question because I don't see how the positions you describe are relevant to the issue at hand - to quote the OP, "...using reason-based thought for God is necessarily a showing of a lack of faith in God."
Here are some early Christian examples. First - anti-reason, from the Bible:
Then pro-reason, from 415 ad:
Let's not take this any farther. I'm clearly not a Biblical scholar. Just as clearly, you aren't either.
If someone refused to believe until they had a good argument, that would demonstrate a lack of faith, pretty much by definition. Just indulging in argumentation doesn't show a lack of faith. So you're right.
Nothing I've said is at odds with the official doctrines of the Church. I certainly didn't assert that "reason is the source of faith." I said explicitly that "faith is not achieved through reason." However, it involves the intellect and understanding, and faith is not contrary to work on external proofs.
This is right in line with the Catechism:
This seems clearly at odds with:
Particularly if "reason-based thought" is taken to mean understanding tout court, and not merely demonstration. To say that "x is not y" is not to say "x requires the absence of y."
Let's revisit the OP.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
And you've affirmed that
Faith is above reason. Those who require reason in order to believe are demonstrating a lack of faith. The OP is expressing the Pauline doctrine along with the official teaching of the Church.
Au contraire, the argument has two premises inconsistent with doctrine (see the Catechism above).
Faith does not require belief without reason-based thought. One can have both. Indeed, if "reason-based thought" is taken to mean "understanding" then it is a fruit of illumination, not contrary to it.
"Using reason-based thought for God" is consistent with both faith and a lack of faith. It does not necessarily demonstrate a lack of faith, else St. Augustine, St. Thomas, etc. would all be examples of a lack of faith.
"The assent of faith is 'by no means a blind impulse of the mind'"
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Believing, not knowing...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Submission to faith... a faith that happens to run parallel to reason, just as male and female are parallel antagonist...
You realize all your quotes are about the difference between Faith and Knowledge/Reason...
No it doesn't.
The above sentence is great because the author obviously forgot that paradox "this sentence is a lie." Because his faith was stronger than his knowledge about Truth and its paradoxes... Also a showing that Faith doesn't seek understanding... otherwise author would understand Truth is Enmeshed in Deception... via Paradox.
And knowing is not an act of the intellect?
Consider I Corinthians 2:
Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For "who has known the mind of the LORD that he may instruct Him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
Did they "obviously forget it?" Most philosophers throughout history did not think the Liar's Paradox demonstrates that truth can contradict truth (i.e. that LNC does not obtain).
Apparently, you know more about how to instruct Christians on their own faith than St. Anselm.
You've got to be kidding me. He's clearly saying that if you require argumentation for belief in God, you lack faith.
The Pauline doctrine and the official Church teaching is that faith is a gift of God. It is not obtained through reason.
Read what he wrote. His view is traditional.
St Anselm was very well aware that faith is not based on reason.
So, St. Thomas's Five Ways demonstrate a lack of faith and are contrary to Church doctrine?
Faith not being obtained through reason does not imply: "Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought," nor that " using reason-based thought for God is necessarily a showing of a lack of faith in God."
Yes, that's the first premise, which I labeled "true/consistent with doctrine." Others follow that are false/inconsistent.
I feel like you're not even reading my posts since you have interpreted me as dissenting to a premise I specifically affirmed and also interpreted a post containing: "faith is not achieved through reason" as somehow claiming that "reason is the source of faith." You also seem to be asserting "reason is the source of faith," as my position over and over, despite my specifically clarifying with: " I certainly didn't assert that "reason is the source of faith."'
Indeed, what's the point? Anselm is quoted in the Catechism: "faith seeks understanding," to which replied "no it doesn't."
You're returning to a point that, as far as I can see, no one has made in this thread.
Just because two things are an act of another doesn't mean you can equivocate them... unless you do so under the umbrella term, which is a hybrid of a multiplicity...
Like Pooping and Thinking... both an act of the body.
Not exactly, a quantum of force cannot actually be weaker than it is... you and T Clark have made me consider my perspective a bit more, and what I'm coming to is that ... but say St. Thomas's Quantum of Force in faith is already this grand mountain... we can say his Faith is still as strong... but say instead of St. Thomas being 100% faith-based, he's 60% Faith and 40% logic and perhaps a lack of clarifying here has caused all sorts of equivocations, perhaps of myself even... due to the quantum of force not actually being lesser... just because a persons intellect may be divided in a 60/40 split doesn't necessarily mean that because a persons thought moves to 55/45 split that the quantum of force behind faith grew less... but that the quantum of force behind reason grew more...
there IS a nuance to it... so for some people a quantum of force of faith may not be phased by reason...
Not a blanket quality for all or even most though...
If he required any of that for belief, yes, it would show a lack of faith.
I'll tell you a secret about mysticism. As soon as you stop trying to be right, you'll feel God's presence. It's pretty cool.
Me too.
Its because faith isnt the opposite of reason.
If you made the two opposites Reason and No-reason or Irrationality, then faith or belief would represent the judgment of where one was standing in relation to those two poles.
Faith is not opposite reason; faith/believing is opposite having no opinion or not judging, or not yet ready to act - if we have to create a continuum to understand the concept of faith.
If we do a long complicated math problem, spanning several pages of calculations, and check our work twice, all along trying our best to use only reason and logic as only they can ensure the math problem is addressed, we can now separately adjudge the problem is complete, correct, and the answer is valid and sound. We now KNOW the answer, because we now BELIEVE we have already checked our work and know how to use reason, etc. Belief is an act, at the moment of judgment.
It takes knowledge, or some knowable object, and consents to that objects existence.
This is how one could make sense out of faith alone bringing justification, while faith without works is dead. Having faith is the work of knowing - it is an act of judgment not the mere result of the process before it (be that process a reasoning through an argument, or experiencing the transfiguration). So sola fide points to the act of consenting to the conclusion of the argument - by grace we only need the conclusion and dont need the premises and the reasoning processing among them. But the nature of the conclusion here, that Christ is God, and Christ gave his life for his friends. So if you say you have faith but would not give your life, then you do not know faith, you do not have faith, faith is dead. The key epistemological point being, you do not KNOW faith if what you know isnt an act, an acting, a believing, like walking on a path takes judgment, not the science that might be behind it that judgment.
Yall in that Dialectical thought of antithesis of values...
Also
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It seems Bizarre to you that the more you know your wife won't cheat on you the less faith you have in believing that she wont? You don't even comprehend what I'm saying with that example.
So everything you believe in is a known fact? If I know my wife won't cheat on me then it's no longer a question about faith... because it's known.
It's bizarre to me that you equivocate beliefs with knowing...
Just because I believe I have the biggest penis in the world doesn't mean plenty of others don't dwarf me in reality.
Knowing I have the biggest penis in the world entails something completely different than just believing I do...
I can make shit up about you right here on the fly and believe it...
Just because you fall into the trap that Christians are like "your belief is your personal relationship with God" doesn't mean you know God...
Do you collect Faith or Intelligence in war? For the purpose of knowing the plans of your adversary?
After a scientist has faith in his work and makes a discovery... and can recreate said experiment...sorry but... it's no longer faith but repeatable knowledge...
He no longer needs faith it will work... he knows it does work...
The reason a Christian feels faith is knowing is because they attempt to relay every perspective through the "womb of being"... "faith in God is knowing cause God is everything."
"NO I KNOW MY WIFE WOULD NEVER CHEAT!" *He shrieked in despair after hearing the news that she did just that* Well obviously there was a gap in the knowledge... that gap was faith... that the man lied to himself about there being a gap in knowledge...
A large dose of knowledge makes the certainty of faith FEEL and APPEAR like knowledge...Hence St. Thomas thinks "nor can truth ever contradict truth." His gap in knowledge (faith) appears to him as knowledge... sadly the truth of Paradox were far before his time, and something he willingly ignored, probably to maintain his faith that truth never contradicts itself... I don't know, I can't ask him, so I suppose I will just have to have faith in my opinion that he willingly ignored the truth of paradox so he could say "truth never contradicts truth"
Hume's Guillotine
Quoting Fire Ologist
Diff - you havent addressed the above on your scale of faith versus reason based thought.
So when you are believing, knowledge and reason are absent? And when you are knowing, belief is absent? Is that how it all works in your view?
So basically we end up with knowledge on Paradoxes and Knowledge on St. Thomas, to make an "educated guess."
But if I got to ask him, and fill that gap... well, I would know then wouldn't I?
All the moving parts of my analysis are right there.
I know.
I dont know.
I have faith.
And I act - namely, express an opinion.
So since you have faith in your opinion are you saying you didnt use reason here? There is no reason for your opinion?
Know how counting cards works?
Even a 5% margin of error is requires great faith in a machine that RPMS 10000 times a minute...
So you have some knowledge all along the process, more or less cards counted.
And so you are saying that faith (maybe in an extreme blind form) includes zero knowledge (zero cards), whereas knowledge (like certainty or truth) is based on all the cards.
And so I take it you think that everything you know and say is part knowledge, and part faith, unless you think you have all the cards?
I am just trying to understand your response to what I am saying about believing aligning with judgment and action (will), and knowledge aligning with math, reason, step one, two three, like counting cards. I need two scales if we are looking for sliding scales. You keep referring to one scale to account for all the moving parts.
Basically I'm saying you either have absolute faith in something everything less than absolute faith brings some knowledge with it.
Having absolute faith in God requires nothing more than belief. Having faith doesn't even require routine or doctrine...
But does that also mean you either have absolute knowledge of something and everything less than absolute knowledge brings some faith with it?
So all of us scientists who admit we do not have absolute knowledge but have to live our lives and make our theorems anyway MUST mix in faith to do so. Is that right also?
Though, to be fair, the mischievousness in me wanted to say "No" to create absurdity...
One thing that occurs to me is that very few believers come to a position on faith.
People invariably have reasons for their faith in a particular version of a particular god. When Ive spoken to Catholics, evangelicals, or other faith-focused Christians about this, their reasons for believing are often articulated as: Its the religion of my family, friends and community. or Its the religion of my culture. In these cases, faith is more of a post hoc justification rather than the primary driving force. If a persons religion is the only expression of meaning and the numinous they have known since birth, their belief is shaped more by enculturation than by an independent leap of faith.
For those who come to a religion later in life - it's usually through a critical experience or through meeting new friends who aid in a conversion experience. Then too, the faith comes later.
Im doubtful that faith functions the way many suggest. It often seems like a post hoc claim used to end discussion. My grandmother, a fundamentalist from the Dutch Reformed Church, put it this way: I came from a Godly house and cherish the belief of my ancestors. I have faith. To me, this translates to: I was taught to believe something, and I have faith that the beliefs Ive held since birth are correct because I was taught they are correct.
But you can say that about just about everything, in particular language. Indonesian children don't generally speak English as their first language because they are encultured to speak Indonesian. Is it surprising that most religious Indonesians worship Allah? If what you call an expression of meaning and the numinous is a common human experience, which I think it is, I would expect it to vary from culture to culture just like everything else.
Quoting Tom Storm
As I noted, that's true of everything. Does that undermine the value and validity of the cultural expression of a common human experience?
First off, I'm sorry it took me so long to respond. Your post slipped between the cracks.
If I understand what you've written correctly, it makes a lot of sense and I find it very helpful in dealing with this kind of issue. I hadn't thought of it this way before. I think you're saying that what we call faith when it comes to religion is a way of knowing we use in all aspects of our lives. You call it "will." I would probably call it "intuition."
Let me know if I've missed your point.
This sounds like knowledge (science/reason) has to be on a different scale than a faith would. Otherwise you couldn't "place faith IN science"; some faith is already in there. If faith/belief and reason/knowledge are all on opposite ends of the same scale then you don't place faith in science, you reduce science and increase faith, or you reduce faith and increase science.
So this is just a muddled way of equating faith with not-knowing, and a muddled way of equating reason with knowledge. Your using faith as the antithesis of reason, but talking about faith like it's the antithesis of knowledge.
I get the scale of reason versus faith - but maybe this is imprecise, and they aren't on the same scale.
If reason, faith and knowledge are more complicated and just different, one may be able to place faith in science (your phrase now) or faith in God, as the distinctions would allow one to be reasonable about objects of faith or objects of science or any posited things. We can wonder if reason itself is reasonable for instance.
If you want scales, I see the scales are:
knowledge/knowing ---- ignorance/questioning,
reason ----- absurdity/irrationality
believing/faith ----- denying/no faith
(minding intention ---- mindless passivity, should probably be here, but we aren't wondering how reasonable or religious a rock can be, nor what someone who is intoxicated makes of a math problem or tree elves - mind can be everywhere on all scales).
If you don't know something as you know the conclusion of a syllogism, you can still believe or deny it. That's where the objects of faith come in - believing something you don't know. But you can use reason to shape your belief just the same as using reason to shape your knowledge - or absurdity to shape either. There is such a thing as bad science, as using reason to argue for an object of knowledge and just being wrong. Reason might stay reasonable despite erroneous facts causing the wrong conclusion.
In order for you to keep faith and reason apart on opposite ends of the scale, you could never tell whether your knowledge was reasonable, or it was not-knowledge, and you could never tell your faith was absurd. And the "scientist" would just be another word for "the person who says what they think", like a religious person, or an ignoramus. Maybe that is what you are saying - we are all priests and scientists and ignoramuses' bouncing between knowing reasons and un-knowing irrationality (you call faith). But then we are all as guilty of the same bad faith you accuse of Anselm and Aquinas, sound logic or not.
Or maybe you are saying the only thing worth saying is absolute knowledge and given our predicament (utterly blind to absolute knowledge) we are all liars, some version of a mad priest, lying to the extent we ever say "I know". Again, why pick on the "faithful" then - as they are the same as you, somewhere in the middle of the same scale.
Quoting Tom Storm
That's what I was pointing to when I said we have faith in our senses when we follow them to cross the street. I put it the other way and said reasoning is never entirely independent of believing. Reasons and the logical connections we make between them, the reasoning, is either a blessing or a curse that our mental activity is never entirely independent of, including the activity of believing something regardless of how well we might know it.
Quoting T Clark
Yes - it's all hard to say so maybe I'm making sense and maybe I understand you. But yes, knowing anything involves believing something, and it involves reason. It's one package. Faith allows us to know things our sense experiences may resist, or faith may allow us to assign meaning to things that may mean other things to others as well, but we are still using reason, and concepts, in minds, like any act of knowing does.
And no worries on the response time. I cannot case a stone on that one either.
The real friction between reason and faith manifests later with Protestantism, where salvation by faith alone and the absolute authority of the Bible were stressed, over the kind of rationalist spirituality that characterised the Scholastics.
I think people have the right to have faith in whatever they want provided that the faith is the subject of constant criticism by reason.
Quoting Fire Ologist Perhaps for some, but not me. I can understand why the religious type lie to themselves about faith. It's a prominent feature of their thought so they want it to count for something more. Faith in faith.
Quoting Wayfarer
Could be the case a few influenced my decision, but I never care to ask someone their religion because it's something that matters 0 to me. But I feel like a lot of people think because they have faith in faith they think it's knowledge. They find it some form of reasoned knowledge... the more knowledge you have of something the less faith you have in it because the more you know...
A scientist doesn't need to have faith in his model after showing it works...he knows it does.
Bet most the religious here serve themselves not their God...
Brcause their knowledge of themselves is greater than their faith in their God.
"God thinks and I obey?" More like "I think and it obeys," after the death of God...
I thought you were trying to say something for Christians who are just people lying, so saying something about people in general - sifting the faithful liars from the reasonable folks like yourself. If we can all just resort to not for me then why are you bothering to say something for all people in the first place?
Not for me. Conversation ended.
We weren't having a conversation, as I never said this once nor implied it... and it's the foundation of all your chatting here.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Read Genealogy of Morals 10, you'll learn the difference between you, and I, and even Nietzsche, it's why you gravitate to the objective...and also why you'll never be able to really love Nietzsche, you love your bad interpretation of Nietzsche. Though...perhaps I'm wrong and am only exaggerating. I don't know absolutely, so I require a certain faith to say that...doesn't mean Im any less adamant...
You know what such a statement does allow for though? You to prove me wrong. Faith motivates beyond despair... and that's a beautiful thing. Absolute knowledge is objective... Wasn't there an amateur physicist lately who remodel classic physics? Just cause a model works, doesn't make it the only one.
If you want to change my evaluation, then offer something more.
Not less...
Like T Clark and Count Timothy offered me enough thought provoking material that did alter my evaluation.
I did admit there was some ambiguity due to the simplicity of my syllogism, such that it's easily equivocated.
The more nuanced understanding is the quantum of force behind faith isn't necessarily diminished just because the % between faith/knowledge about a particular topic shifts in percent towards the gradiant of knowledge. It means the percentage of reliance on faith decreases, but not necessarily the quantum of force behind faith decreases.
Wandering off into the mountaintops again
You made the objective statement faith precludes reason.
Bonehead.
What I said is faith is not knowledge, it's not reasoned based thought. Unless you consider bad reasoning reasonable. Faith is belief not knowledge. You just can't accept that faith is little more than that...
Spewing logical fallacies for the existence of God is just faith based preaching... aka proselytizing. And it shows an attempt to rationalize faith into knowledge. You're too much of a bonehead to realize that your faith counts for little in a discussion on knowledge...
So you have faith a Unicorn is real... cool. Now you try to rationalize the Unicorn and project it as objective truth... well Objective Truth is absolute knowledge dumbass not may be this...
An argument to prove the absolute truth of God means you're no longer interested in faith but proving the actual factual...
You're too dense to understand that though... because you think faith is knowing... your relationship with God is 100% faith. Unless you yourself are God, but then we're changing the definition I'm using, that is consequently, we aren't God...
This is how faith works...
JUNG (from Nietzsche's Zarathustra pg 38&39):
Faith is always a formula but it's not knowing... Christians happen to like to lie to themselves that it is knowing... it's literally simply what they say about faith... thus its faith in faith.
Hence St. Timmy says truth never contradicts truth because God is good. That not knowledge, that's him spewing fallacies wishing his faith was knowledge... thus something in him desires his faith to be more real...
That contradicts your whole opinion.
I thought logical fallacies, identified only by using reason, had nothing to do with faith.
Try again.
Jung is right. The point he is making is epistemological/pshychological. But that point is, it is always objectively wrong to assume X is nothing but this.
Im not going to get into the weeds with someone who says they know what I think already and supports that observation FireOlogist is nothing but this with my opinion.
No it doesn't we can see your bonehead understanding of my opinion is nothing even close...
Pretending FAITH IS KNOWLEDGE IS A LOGICAL FALLACY DUMBASS...
Using knowledge to show faith is a fallacy or your argument relies on a leap in logic has nothing to do with the identity of faith...
Dialecticians... :roll:
When a person continually defends fallacy and reasserting leaps in logic... IE FAITH... They're proselytizing... because they're asserting Faith as Absolute Objective Truth...
Something like energy is never created nor destroyed is, I think, is an absolute truth, (unless someone has recently discovered a way to overturn that law, dunno dont really give a shit about the law to keep up with the lore surrounding it.)
Quoting Fire Ologist
That's all you can do. Even your shit interpretation about Nietzsche...
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
You're too much of a bonehead to prove me wrong is all.
Hence you detatch...
T Clark and Count Timothy were cunning enough to force a reevaluation.
Well then spewing logical fallacies cant be just preaching
So which is it? In your fallacy spotting opinion.
Thus converting faith into knowledge via trying to rationalize it means you're trying to rely less on faith for your outlook...
Not exactly a bad thing... overcoming oneself in their opposite and all.
I knew the dialecticians would get butthurt though.
For you? Even though I have no faith you want to see what Im saying, kind of like you know I dont see what you are saying? Well ok.
The scale you built in your OP put faith on one side and reason on the other. But more precisely you meant faith on one side and knowledge on the other.
So the main point Im making is that reason cannot be on that scale if it is to be the vehicle that moves somebody from one side (not-knowledge, or faith) to the other (knowledge).
If you see that, thats enough to show how the faithful and the knowledgeable both need to avail themselves of reason if they are to make pronouncements, posit arguments supporting knowledge, or preach something.
Your whole post was a shoddy insult. Rubbish was an appropriate response.
So you asserting that reason is other than faith is true, but you missed the point that reason is other than knowledge just as well.
This is analysis of what you said and what you appear to think, as close to your language as I can make it.
From what I can tell, faith and knowledge do not belong on the same scale; they are wholly different things and exercises. Both use words to be expressed and so both use reason (like any wording requires a reasoning), but knowing my wife will never preclude trusting my wife. I cant trust what I dont first know. Trust and faith speak is wholly other than knowledge and ignorance speak.
And none of this thread is very Nietzschean because, Nietzsche didnt defend his thoughts and arguments - and wisely so,as that takes a reification of reasoning and knowledge, and yirlds right and wrong speak. Thats why I noted above, if you are so sure you know me and Nietzsche, why do you bother?
You dragged Nietzsche into this. In my opinion, he would entertain neither your opinion nor mine, at least not for this long.
Last word, is it possible to you for someone to know Nietzsche deeply (as you do, and I mean that) and also disagree with him? I think, if you are honest, you would say no, that once you see the lies that Nietzsche uncovered there is no returning to the false zombie state those lies spawned - you are too fully enlightened to disagree with Nietzsche.
I think Nietzsche was one of the top five most important philosophical thinkers, and that, on many conclusions, just like the others in the top five, he was talking out his ass.
Most people only talk out their asses. Even one truth sets one apart greatly. Nietzsche had quite a few truths. But not enough, and citing him doesnt help your argument with me.
I highly doubt you have 0 faith. That's just your clumsy handling.
You didn't even attempt to understand my perspective. You're grounded in your own.
Emotional handling. I guess I see a glimmer of hope. So point taken.
The fuck more do you want?
Evaluations come through faith and knowledge. Just because you gain knowledge doesn't diminish the quantum of force behind your faith. Just means the evaluation has less reliance on faith. But how much faith do you need to know that in decimal based math 1+1=2? None.
But if I say 1+1=? And you say 2... you're taking it on faith that I'm in decimal based math not binary. Because you believe, rather than know, I'm talking about decimal based math.
If I said no it equals 0 then you wouldn't have faith that it equals 2... you know it doesn't because I'm using binary to equal 0.
Because I've established a necessary truth about my outlook...
Conclusions from valid and sound arguments do precisely the same, establish a necessary about an outlook.
Thus it takes some aspect of faith and converts it to knowledge... if it's logically valid and sound... all arguments for God aren't...so it's the case no conversion is actually achieved...
The attempt however points to a desire to convert belief to knowledge because the person feels knowledge is more substantial than faith, at least in the regards of the argument...
Aquinas and Thomas both show us that they had more of a desire to move God to a realm of absolute truth, rather than a belief...regardless of the quantum of force behind their faith is. They're really just proselytizing with fallacious arguments. Trying to make God something more concrete...
Im sitting here chilling to Quine, if Fire Ologist was here he'd be in another chair chilling legs up, kicked back. We're not here with guns to guts and swords to throats...
Im chillin. I think we are getting somewhere. Will get back to DifferentiatingEgg shortly.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Note - My comment was about fdrake, not you two.
Im going to do my best and say where I agree with what you are saying.
Sound valid arguments establish a necessary conclusion. 100%
Lets call this knowledge.
Assertions can be posited not as conclusions, but just as premises, like if X . We dont need a reasoned argument to identify an observed premise. Lets call an assertion that is not a conclusion of a reasoned argument, a belief (or an article of faith). If someone removes the If and just asserts there is X and is unable or unwilling to give a sound valid argument to support that assertion, they are not providing knowledge and we can call this a belief.
Im fine with all of that.
Next, when Aquinas and Anselm were arguing for the existence of God, they were attempting to make logical arguments. They werent doing any preaching; they werent talking about their faith; they were trying to say the God they believed in was also the entity proven to exist at the end of their syllogism. I think they failed.
And with all of that said, I think we basically agree.
But you didnt say it like that, and in the process, I think, you are misrepresenting reason and faith, and their relationship to knowledge, and you misconstrued the motivations of Aquinas and Anselm, and you implied that it is contradictory for someone to believe something (make a simple assertion) and be reasonable at the same time; you made it seem like reason can only be found at the end of a syllogism and that no one who was reasonable could possibly take God as a premise or conclusion. I disagree with all of that.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
See, I dont think we have any knowledge of, nor do we need to raise the issue, of what Anselm or Aquinas desired. And you say they feel knowledge is more substantial than faith - all if that is irrelevant to the part of your argument that I agreed with. And I think its bullshit.
I also think think faith has been an imprecise word here. You are talking about knowledge, belief and reason and their relationships to assertions (premises, syllogism, conclusion, preaching). And I agree with some of how you line them up.
But comparing faith to reason (as opposites) is like comparing reason to beauty; its just not necessary or necessarily logical, and possible nonsense.
Dont get me wrong, faith versus reason is a simple catch-phrase that has been expressly around since the enlightenment (and I guess Anselm and Aquinas). I get the popular soap-box point. I agree with that part of your point.
But if you arent careful, as I am trying to be by distinguishing faith from belief and belief from knowledge, and knowledge from reasoning, you end up making muddled statements like Anselm was just preaching and that faith by necessity is unreasonable.
If, by the sum total of faith you mean the belief that God exists - then yes, Anselm was trying to replace belief with knowledge.
But articles of faith are more like a premise. They arent something we conclude. We just know. Like the fact that my wife loves me. I just know it. I could never create a syllogism that shows therefore wifeys love for FireO exists. Does any love exist? What is love? Well when it comes to what I know, to what is reasonable for me to say, my wifes love for me exists. Faith belongs as a word in those types of conversations, not analyses of reasoned knowledge versus unsupported beliefs.
Anselm and Aquinas blew the argument. I havent heard anyone ever make an argument that, by force of mere logic and words, proved anything exists. You can doubt you are reading this right now! You cant prove existence, but you can be logical and reasonable about the things you believe exist. Anselm and Aquinas were trying to move one of those things from the asserted belief column to the asserted logical conclusion column, yes. But even if they succeeded there would still be vast oceans of faith needed to know God, like knowing another person takes.
And everyone doesnt have to be nuts to know the baby Jesus. Just some of us.
I was just trying to show no parental supervision needed here, in case a mod thought they needed to step into Fdrakes shoes.
I agree...ultimately
It's like Morality. It doesnt matter what you think in your head. It's what your body does, your arms and hands, your legs, feet, your face, your eyes your voice, your feelings. The pursuit of "Morality," spends so much time on ideas; distractions and detractors from the real thing/Truth; instead, seeking truth in what goes on in the head about truth. Its not our ideas about killing. The idea of killing comes up in many forms. Why and where do we think we can draw precise lines? It's the body killing; the movements of limbs or teeth, and the feeling. Yet we focus on endless debates about the thought. Like mathemeticians we tangle with intention, motive, mens rea, justifications, right and wrong, and think we discover truth in our calculations. If it feels good to kill, a feeling triggered by, and covalent with, natural feelings of the body we call compassion, pity, mercy, survival and bonding, then its one thing; if it feels like anger, jealousy or fear, its another; if it has no feeling because the body, in its motion just stumbled or happened upon killing, its neither.
I think the debates about God are the same. Its a distraction from God to look for It in our thoughts. Thoughts are made up and, ironically, imprecise, not just subject to our prejudices, creations and whims, but constructed by them. As much as we convince ourselves that logic and reason are pre-existing truths, we argue and cannot agree about even logic and reason. Because we construct even logic and reason, they cannot uncover ultimate truth; if nothing else, at least that should apply to ultimate truth about God. If there even is a God, It has to be found with the body. We call it faith, but its not some scriptural directive, duty or virtue that we need to pretend to have (the sad mistake most of us invariably make despite our best intentions). Its an actual, and real biochemical feeling in the body. And if its the Truth [about] God that we're after, that'sthe only place we'll "find" it. Only that feeling ultimately matters in our search for any truth concerning God.
Of course, that's not to say that thoughts don't trigger the feelings. Fair enough, they have their place for us humans, burdened and blessed with Mind. But ultimately thats not where we find truths about things like morality or God, or even reality and whatever the real self is, for that matter. As distressingly anti-philosophical as it is, the ultimate truth is a feeling.
I know what you mean, and I agree, faith which claims to have such revelation into some otherworldly superior reality is not supportable.
But maybe, it seems like another domain, because it's in another, so-called domain; but its not really another domain; its the real and singular domain, where there is a natural body that feels; only we humans are so sucked in to the "fixtional" domain of our collective constructive imaginations , that we make-believe something out of what we really simply, physically feel. The feeling is soon enough "ignored" or displaced, by a make-believe, labeled (today's manifestated version of endless dialectic), because it is so alienated from the physical feeling, as something so outside of our constructions, that it must be Other. And from there we build our Babel of philosophies, getting further and further from the truth, that once crisp feeling we happen, now to vaguely call faith,
Tragically, the human body, the animal of nature, is the domain we ignore/are ignorant of. Not just re god, but always. And as for God, we take a real human feeling about something in Nature, and we settle vaguely on q thing labeled as faith. But only in the make-believe endless trials of the dialectic, are we so called choosing to believe it, and requiring tools to structure a place to settle/believe; tools like reason, and as you say, many other external influences, all of them filtered in, and taking shape, as constructions building over the truth.
We feel it. Just because our ideas are constructions, doesnt mean it's not God we are feeling. I can't help but feel that it is. Not in any grandiose sense, but in the sense that we all do. We wouldn't be discussing it if we didn't feel it too. And those that don't feel it, build their antitheses upon our consensus. And I ignore the feeling as much or more than you and build my stories. Nevertheless, i do think everything we think, departs from the feeling, and in its departure alienates the truth of god as a
human feeling.
But that is precisely what revealed truth means. It is the entire meaning of the Bible. It doesnt mean you have to believe it.
Quoting Tom Storm
For secular philosophy.
And for many believers too. The fact that faith can support or reject slavery; support or reject misogyny; support or reject war; support or reject capital punishment, etc, etc, tells even the faithful that faith is unreliable, since it equally justifies contradictory beliefs. The only faith which one cant undermine like this is a faith that a god exists. The moment you drill down into what your faith is justifying, you end up in belief quicksand. Or some kind of faith competition.
Fair enough if that's faith is revealed truth in the bible (and i know you agree you dont havd to believd it), but can't faith be explored beyond those boundaries. Are you suggesting no discussion about faith is meaningful without first adopting the definition that it is a revelation of something otherworldly?
You sure?
What do you think I am saying?
If it helps, I am not saying that faith in god is true.
If two theists say they have faith that god exists there is no real problem between them. (Expect perhaps which God they have faith in). But any two Christians, for example, can agree on this aspect of faith with no real issues.
The problems for religious folk begin when they encounter people who use faith as a reason for bigotry. Then we come to the problem of whose faith is accurate or whether faith has any utility at all.
As I wrote of religious faith -
Quoting Tom Storm
Not at all. Discussion can be meaningful but revealed truth is essential to it.
You're absolutely right though, about the idea that faith can support anything. Because faith isn't a method for coming to a belief, it's not a method for figuring out what's true - it's more about maintaining a belief. And you can maintain ANY belief with faith. So it's weird that it's treated as a virtue in itself.
Well, it's weird until you realise why these communities have to treat it as a virtue...
I'm still watching and judging.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've always been curious about revealed truth and faith. There's definitely a phenomenological angle you can take on it. You have a world transforming, singular, experience that reconfigures how you see everything. It's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't do much to establish a claim as it's not a move in a game of reasons, it's premising a new game. The best you can do with it is expect others to play along.
The justificatory consequences isn't the most interesting angle the above IMO. I think it makes more sense to grant that revelation is necessary for faith, and that it principally is a reconfiguration of one's world, and see what that means about the divine when taken at face value.
A world transforming, singular, experience aligns the nature of the divine with the perceptual. What you see is what you now believe. In effect, the reinterpretation is a way of seeing the same world another way, like whether a Necker Cube goes into or out of a page. Though it's odd to give faith in the divine a privileged, prior status with respect to reasons for that, as other such aspect shifts are declaratives and can in principle be refuted.
eg "The Necker cube goes into the page" is a statement of the form "The cube is on the page", you could refute the former by showing that the latter holds true. I thus don't think carving out a unique space for faith based on divine revelation is particularly coherent. It undermines its own phenomenology, as a reconfiguration of belief based upon perception.
Although whether one has, or is, an immortal soul, might be rather more significant than an optical illusion.
Pretty easily... define love then move to make the syllogism, if you need to make a syllogism to define love then do that also...
Something like:
P1: All people who consistently act with maximally positive interests, deep care, loyalty, and affection towards another person loves that person.
P2: FireO's wife acts with maximally positive interests, deep care, loyalty, and afrection towards FireOlogist
C: Therefore FireO's wife loves him.
Quoting Fire Ologist
You mean like N did with Z?
Just because I don't detail my differences with Nietzsche doesn't mean we don't have them. I am Dionysian at my core. My first philosophy teacher noticed this and with a mild prophetic vision said that I would love him. And I do. That aside, Nietzsche is, but, one band of intensity within me.
What you said touches on something I read earlier about diaquotation and how it brings truth to something much simpler of a notion to what the sentence actually states vs all the mumbojumbo. Like my OP is kinda poorly written in the disquotational aspect. BUT what I mean, is a bit more nuanced mumbojumbo... to me, at first, I believed the OP directly states my deeper understanding but it did a pretty shitty job.
Quoting fdrake
I think a better example is the duck-rabbit drawing. Is there a way to refute the correctness of the perception of one or the other figures? Doesnt the basis for determining whether a particular interpretation of an image is an illusion itself rely on an interpretation?
That's certainly true for your example, but your example is atypical. When you see a mirage in a desert that looks like a body of water, and then you arrive at where you thought the water was and it's just a pit of more sand, is it merely another "interpretation" that there isn't really water there?
I'm not sure it's right to call duckrabbit an "illusion" anyway. It's an illustration that was designed to look like a duck, and designed to look like a rabbit. Is it an illusion to perceive an illustration to be illustrating an object that it was literally designed to illustrate? I mean in a sense all illustrations can be argued to be "illusions", but that's trivial, I mean in a non trivial way - why is it an illusion to see a duck in duckrabbit?
Your argument fails under an equivocation fallacy. "Logic" references deductive (syllogistic) and inductive arguments and pragmatism. That is, even if you believe reliance upon a syllogism for God's existence is proof of lack of belief in God, it does not follow that any reliance upon reason (in terms of informal or pragmatic bases) amounts to lack of belief in God.
Your argument leads to an absurd result, suggesting that a logical basis of any type eliminates a meaningful belief in God (and it seems you define "faith" as the only way to have a meaningful belief in God). For example, if the ancient Hebrews believed in God because they observed 10 plagues, water from rocks, splitting of seas, and manna from heaven, they lacked faith, and therefore didn't have a meaningful belief because they relied upon empirical evidence? Is it not logical to rely upon such things?
I've been thinking about this (faith = intuition) a lot since we started discussing it - I realize that may not be exactly the way you see it. It caught me by surprise. I think it's such an obvious connection that I wonder why I haven't realized it before. In this discussion we see people who don't believe that faith is a valid way to know anything. I've been in many discussions here on the forum where people say the same thing about intuition. I feel like a door has been opened with your help.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Though once something becomes absolutely true via syllogism I believe they convert a part of the quantum of force behind faith into knowledge... necessarily lessening faith.
However if the syllogism is fallacious then it's not really absolute truth... and we can show Thomas and Aquinas are both fallacious arguments for God... and thus they don't actually convert faith to absolute knowledge.
But the fact remains that some part of them yearns to take God from the realm of faith to knowledge... thus something inside of them in unsatisfied with their faith...
If someone sees a duck or a rabbit, and there are no lines on the page, they are wrong.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. The same goes for any claim, do you mean to suggest no claim can have its correctness judged? How can you possibly be correct?
Yes. Some beliefs are more significant to people than others. This remark says nothing about the phenomenology of revealed truth.
I think that's a good way of looking at it. I'd like to discuss this issue further, but I think it will distract from this discussion. I plan on starting a new one to go into more detail.
Quoting fdrake
Sure, correctness can be determined within the framework of intelligibility provided by an interpretation. But all interpretations ( language games) change, and there is not way to determine which language game is more correct. There is no meta-interpretation.
Except for that claim.
It isnt a meta claim, its an enactment, an awareness of being ensconced within a discursive set of practices
That translates to "a thing which was said".
Every single thing which is said has those caveats! There's no extra information in the post-phenomenological gloss you provided. You've either got that you can generalise truths about all speech acts - which you're doing, and in terms of invariant deep contextual structures may I add - or you can't, and what you're saying is false.
You could be doing something that seems sus to your wife, and because (fake example follows) she's been cheated on in the past, her intuition is that you're cheating on her...
When you're really just planning some awesome for her.
Quoting fdrake
The basis of phenomenological and post-phenomenological thinking is that the starting and ending point of factual and and ethical analysis is the present , and the present of time is a complex structure which includes within the immediate now a historical past and anticipatory future in which the past arrives already remade. The problem realists have with this thinking is that they place the identity of the now before difference, Existence is self-identity to them, and change is also conceived in this basis. As a result, any utterance about there beyond nothing outside local contexts of meaning creation is read as a statement of identity, an in-itself fact about change that appears self-refuting on the face of it. It is inconceivable that a meaning can in itself expresss itself own transformation, an event of transit, being the same differently. The worst of it is that the implications of post-realism appear horrifyingly nihilistic because all that is glimpsed is contradiction, incommensurability, arbitrariness, skepticism and anything goes relativism. What is colossally missed is the fact that the positions which are being so completely misread do not attempt to deny the achievements of the sciences, dont attempt to refute them , but leave them i n place and burrow beneath them to reveal their underpinnings. In so doing, they dont leave us with skepticism , relativism and arbitrariness , but with a profoundly intricate, intimate and enriching ground for understanding how meaninful relations to our world
works.
You said you admire Matthew Ratcliffes work. He is not necessarily in the postmodernist camp, but his thinking is not far removed from it, and doesnt seem to be compatible with yours on the issue of the relation between truth and interpretation. I could demonstrate this with a close focus on where he is going with his
project, and what it borrows from phenomenology and Heidegger.
Quoting flannel jesus
And where how do you arrive at your identification of a
scene as a sand desert? Is this not also an interpretation? The way we recognize a scene depends on incorporating the meager input from what is in the immediate surroundings and filling it in with expectations from memory. Those expectations organize the scene in particular ways , which is why we can be fooled by an illusion. But if I interpret what someone says to me one way at one point in time, and then think back to what I heard and realize I heard what I expected to hear and not what they actually said, was this mistaken interpretation an illusion? if so, then the fact that I interpret a film or novel in changing ways as I return to it over the course of my life a matter of clearing up an illusion?
Quoting Joshs
You are aware of how many universal statements and definite statements about the essence of things are in this articulation of the radical contingency of everything, right?
"The basis" - as if there is one.
"starting and ending point" - as if there is a necessary duality between the two in any interpretive arc.
"is the present" - a single predication of an entire discourse which is impossible, even though you're ascribing it to an interlocutor's speech act {a reaction to their interpretation of discourse"
"is a complex structure" - this predication occurs over every discourse at every time and imbues it with
a complicated, transtemporal and transcontextual predicate. This is what you're denying your interlocutor the ability to do the sentence before.
I won't do the rest.
The problem fdrake has with this thinking is that it's utterly totalising despite pretending not to be, and can't be articulated without reducing every aspect of human comportment to a single existential-discursive structure. It's everything it claims not to be, all the time. The utter hypocrisy of the perspective is nauseating. Everything mediates everything else, "there is no ontological distinction between discourse and reality" {because the distinction is a discursive one}. It's The One with delusions of being The Many.
The proof is in the pudding, the stranglehold these soft realisms {really, discursive irrealisms} have on academic perspectives in social sciences makes it prohibitively difficult to do research requiring methodological innovation. It ends up totally isolating the disciplines that use this methodology and creating fiefdoms. People default back to broadly structuralist flavoured constructivism when they actually need to get shit done policy wise, because you can actually interpret operational variables and talk about causes {yes, unqualified causes, not mediated causes} with caveats in that framework.
It's utterly stultifying. The particularising nature of the methodology, in practice, just reminds you to do mediation analysis, then tells you you can't isolate causal variables in the wild. Everyone knows this.
Edit: and I like Ratcliffe because I get the impression he is not a stealthy reductionist of the material to its alleged existential genesis. He's a phenomenologist of disrupted bodies, and that's to his great credit.
Again - relativises the subject by categorising it as belief. The question was not whether one believes it were true. For the purpose of the argument, suppose it actually were true - put yourself in the position of one who believes it is. This is intended to convey its non-contingent nature. Were it true, it would be something of absolute importance, not one among other of a shifting web of 'faith convictions' and 'beliefs'. It would be as urgent as the requirement to breath.
Quoting Joshs
Speaking of convictions.....
It seems to me you're describing a psychological difference, rather than a perceptual or epistemological one. Like it's a core belief. It is, and they're often revised. Just with more pain. The possibility of a crisis or faith, a greater understanding of it, a rediscovery, evinces the non-necessity of its content for its believer. It is not essential to them, they believe it is essential. Or if it is essential, it's the same flavour of essentiality as one's upbringing or deep seated beliefs. Treated as partially constitutive of the subject, but revisable.
Yes, I can see how it would seem like that. But again, we're no closer to the sense in which religious revelation purports to connote insight into the unconditioned.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Learn by doing, I would suggest. That would be quite a challenge, although one which at least some Christians seem to exemplify.
Unconditioned meaning foundational to perspective?
Maybe, but is faith the right word - is "reasonable confidence" a better term? The problem is anyone can say they have revealed knowledge of something - but why should we accept such a claim? It's inherent to theism that people can have revealed knowledge. It's not inherent to atheism as I understand it.
As an atheist, I would say I have heard no reasons to suggest that god is a useful concept. It seems incoherent and does not assist my sense making activities. Some atheists think they "know" there is no God. I'm not one of those.
Wow. Interesting.
Aka Nietzsche's foundation for Amor Fati from the Gay Science 276. Aka even if it doesn't bring you to love them, it will move you in the direction in which Nietzsche details the superman becoming a reality... to overcome your destructive and divisive animal nature, in suffering with them from them by simply looking the other direction "und mit ihnen an ihnen leidet." Faith of faith isn't faith, but "faith of a sort..."?
SO let's check out the consequences of this view.
Belief is holding that something is true. One can believe that something is true for all sorts of reasons, or for no reason at all. Rational folk will try to believe stuff that is true, and so will use arguments and evidence and such, and ground their beliefs.
Faith is more that just holding that something is true. Faith requires that one believe even in the face of adversity. Greater faith is had by those who believe despite the arguments and the evidence.
So those with the greatest faith would be the ones convinced by logical arguments that god does not exist, and yet who believe despite this.
The most faithful will be seeking to disprove that god exists.
Make of this what you will.
Cunning reversal, they are the faithful that overcome themselves in their opposite? To inciting to higher and higher... Nietzsche would be very proud of this from YOU of all people Banno.
If you like. You were born with some of that irrational faith. You can't live without it.
You have to take something as granted, yes. That's a long way from what is involved in faith. One can review what one takes as granted, but to review what one takes on faith is to breech that faith.
I think it's a key term which has to all intents dropped from philosophical discourse. That it was arguably last sighted in Hegel, with his depiction of the Absolute, but by then entangled in prolific thickets of arcane scholarly verbiage that overgrew its actual meaning.
There's a journal article I've found, The unconditioned in philosophy of religion, Steven Shakespeare, Nature, 2018 (open access). I've looked at it, but not a lot of it stuck - maybe I'll take another look, although it is developed in a direction I didn't much understand or like. But it is at least an attempt to conceptually separate 'the unconditioned' from the almost-inevitable tendency to say 'oh, you mean God', with all of the implications.
But my intuitive sense is that the difficulty for all of this is that the unconditioned is as a matter of principle beyond the scope of discursive thought (meaning, to all intents, out of bounds).
I'm sorry, but I'm not an admirer of Nietszche. It probably puts us in different worlds, but it can't be helped.
Unfortunately, that wasn't hard.
Well no wonder the paper is hard to read.
So much the worse for Nietzsche, then.
That you of all people put on Nietzsche's mask is a "win" for me.
The syllogism itself took less than 60 seconds of pondering... but look how much conversation it's drummed up. I don't care about it being perfect... and in the process I've learned things. I already addressed that it was an ambiguous syllogism that allows for tons of equivocation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not a meta-conviction, a contingent enactment of sense that must be reproduced continually if it is to apply beyond the moment of its utterance. At this moment I anticipate no meta-interpretation that can coherent be applied to anyone. Put differently, I am aware in the moment that i proclaim no meta-interpretations that my own thought produces a slightly new sense of what I already meant to say. i can then apply this thought to other persons in other times and come up with a similar but not identical conclusion. As long as a I continue to affirm my conviction (the same differently each time ) concerning everyone everywhere, from my situated contextual vantage , I will repeat that conviction. Do you see the distinction between this process of repeated contextual variation and re-verification , and a meta-proclamation of context-independent truth? The latter doesnt take actual, lived time and history seriously, but tries to subordinate them to a supra-temporal abstraction.
I see it, but I believe it is pointless, in a way, sisyphean. But then, my meta-philosophical stance is oriented around the possibility of a cosmic philosophy, that is, a philosophy that situates the reality of human existence in the context of the cosmos.
[quote=Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, Thomas Nagel]Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Platos metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. [/quote]
I realise we'll never be on the same page in any of this, but I appreciate having an intelligent person to explain it to.
Erm... that's the Christian mythology of Sisyphus not the Grecian... I would perhaps place my faith in the Grecian perspective of the myth...that is Sisyphus is a Greek Noble who lived to the Grecian ideal of Eu Prattein and became a demigod of his own ideal... for outsmarting Zeus and Thanatos.
Sounds like you made up your own religion.
Hey Enoah. So lets collapse the dualism. Mind IS body. We live inside the illlusion.
If we collapse it all back together, we can call the illusion reality just the same. Now, like our thoughts were the illusion and the feelings were reality, the thoughts are the feelings (bodies) and illusion is reality (or reality is illusion).
This is how I come to see that knowledge has less power than belief. Belief is what we act on, its what we do - the verb believe - and when we most deeply believe something we already trust it so completel, saying we know its true (like some conclusion from syllogism) sounds weak or hallow, like something we dont have to act on. Faith and belief are where power flows. Knowledge and simple thoughts are in the mix but lose power and solid form when divorced from belief.
:up:
Yes, it's a strange sort of dogmatism, sometimes manifesting as the dogmatic presupposition that everyone who disagrees is necessarily a dogmatist. I honestly don't think this would bother me so much if it was put forward in a straightforward manner. Yet it's an area of philosophy where things seem to often be put forward in as abstruse a manner as possible.
It actually reminds me of debates in esoterica. Anyone who disagrees cannot possibly have truly fathomed it, and of course it will prove near impossible to show what "truly fathoming" the doctrines entails.
That's probably a better way to look at it. Although again, this will really depend on how one conceives of "faith." I feel that disagreements here often stem from people using the word in quite different ways. Classically conceived, the fruits of the light of faith are generally taken to produce the highest level of understanding, as opposed to assent in the absence of understanding (noeises being superior to dianoia) . On this view, the two might not be so easily separable because both involve the actuality of the intellect and, in the end, the same Logos.
That aside, a common distinction in modern philosophy is "faith in" and "faith that." Faith in others is not reducible to reason, but can certainly be aided by it.
For example, I've had some employees I've had a great deal of faith in. They were great, very diligent. But they liked to go over their work with me, and so we'd run through things step by step. So then, I knew everything tied out, that it was correct. But I certainly didn't lose faith in them through this process, even though it gave me ample, rational evidence that their work was correct. I suppose then one way of putting it is that "faith in" ties to a person, and not to any particular facts.
Perhaps this is also easier to see as respects practical reason. Often, we are not able to get anything like remotely decisive conclusions vis-á-vis moral reasoning. Yet we might have a good deal of faith in certain moral principles.
make-believe, not (epistemic) belief.
Quoting Tom Storm
For some g/G is a fetish (of the gaps), for others it's a placebo (anti-anxiety), and for many it's (the) "big Other" (e.g. conspiracy thinking, superstition) ... but it's still the case that too few of us have outgrown these (self-crippling) crutches.
Well, splitting the baby Yeshua, I know that every g/G of theism only exists in the minds of believers, but I'm agnostic about nontheistic "divinity".
Quoting Banno
Like e.g. Tertullian, Eckhart, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Wiitgenstein, Tillich ..?
:smirk:
Quoting Banno
:100:
There is no 'Christian mythology of Sisyphus', it was a Greek myth. Sisyphus was described as the cunning and deceitful king of Corinth (Ephyra in early sources). While he was a ruler, he is not depicted as a "noble" in the sense of living up to an ethical or heroic ideal but was often portrayed as a trickster and an archetype of human cunning and defiance. Unlike figures such as Heracles, who underwent divinization (apotheosis), Sisyphus was punished for his defiance rather than rewarded, that punishment being condemned to rolling a boulder endlessly up a hill, only to have it roll back down again. That's what I meant by the reference. Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus recast him as a heroic figure as an embodiment of human resilience and defiance against absurdity but I never found it persuasive.
Ye pull back the curtain and there'll be either a person or a statue. Some prefer to expect a guy, some stone
???
Camus simply does what Nietzsche does repackage Christian psychology with the Myth of Sisyphus. Absurdity is the secular notion of Sin. Still not the Grecian notion. There was no bad conscience, ressentiment, or responsibility in Sisyphus's day. That is fundamentally a Judaeo-Christian morality. We don't have to imagine Sisyphus as happy. He was a Noble who exemplified Eu Prattein. We know he's happy. Thus we know it's not punishment. Because activity = happiness.
You gotta look at the situation from the Grecoan Ideal... not yours. Step outside your reification of the Sisyphus story that's been passed down via Christian scholars...
Do you think Santa Clause is big in Iran?
I referenced the Greek myth. Let's see what the Brittanica has to say:
'The scene of fruitless labors'. And how, precisely, does this map against 'happiness'?
No? Why? Different Values? Ah...
Apply here...
He was popular for his excellence. Weird that a thief and trickerster would be popular vs infamous... because those were virtues then.
Hannah Arendt discusses this at great length (Vita Activa and the reversal of its value). Through that ancient lens, we know Sisyphus was happy. There was no punishment. Instead of languishing in the underworld to rot away in stagnant contemplation, he got to live Eu Prattein/Vita Activa for eternity. Not sure if "living your ideal" for eternity is "punishment." Seems like the winning proposal from Nietzsche's Heaviest Burden...
Doing what you love over and over again.
"The human condition of labor is life itself." Hannah Arendt on the ancient perspective of Vita Activa (Human Condition). So Sisyphus was "punished" with life it self...
Quoting Fire Ologist
:up: no dualism to collapse. The Mind part is fleeting No thing.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Not dualism though it sounds like one. Not monism either, though ultimately it is. You're saying it yourself, dualism. When you concede that its not just reality, but illusion too. I know you're saying they're the same thing. But then why do we refer to the illusion. The illusion isn't reality, it's a fleeting appearance, which, like code, affects reality. Inconceivable oneness and difference; only the difference is an illusion. At best described as a qualified dualism: the duality is fictional projections.
As for knowledge and belief, they are the same thing. Belief is the last link in the dialectical chain that ends in knowledge. It doesn't always surface with knowledge, but its the settlement necessary to project knowledge. Whether it's 1+1 or e=mc² or there is a God, It is believed and known as one complete structure. In body, the real settled feeling is triggered by belief, giving it its only truth; which true feeling, in turn allows for the, always temporary, adoption of knowledge. But the knowledge for humans is not really, the settled feeling alone is real. The knowledge is a super sophisticated, super complex, highly evolved fleeting system of constructions and projections. And that's where we both experience time, (constructions and projections evolved to surface in the Narrative, linear form), and spend it.
And this, to me, ties in with the OP. For the sake of demonstrating, assume what we're after when we apply reason to seek God, is the ultimate Truth, the Reality of the Universe, in whatever format from Lord to God head to Nature. Then that Truth has to be "found" as a physiological feeling, and, reason can at best be a stimulus of the feeling. We call the feeling, among other things, faith. As for God, like the orgasm, no disrespect intended, and all real things; if it's real, use as much fantasy as you need to get you there, but know that it's fantasy, and truth is necessarily not in the fantasy, but in what the real organism feels.
Seek God etc. [in your hearts] all else is talk
Quoting Banno
There is one point in the OP, reflected in the above, on which I have agreed from the start. Anselm and Aquinas were trying to be logical and create knowledge; they were NOT doing a lot of other things, like they were not being poetic creating verses (unless we all abuse some tacit definition of poetry), or they were not giving a eulogy for a friend, or providing a news bulletin, or preaching an article of faith.
They were building syllogisms, arguments.
Their arguments, in my logical estimation, failed for various reasons (but that is another conversation, on which we might agree as well). If you asked Anselm "why do you believe God exists?" he should say, "I don't believe God exists, I know God exists and I can prove it to you." He should say this, because he was trying to convince others of, in his estimation, a logical conclusion based on evidence.
So, hopefully recognizing my general spirit of agreement with the basic point of the OP, I think you guys are throwing the baby of belief out with the bathwater of faith, or at least Banno is more expressly. And to all of our detriment.
We have to be more careful to protect "belief" and about where we find reasoning.
Quoting Banno
These polar oppositions are distorting both sides, weakening the perfectly reasonable basic point of the OP.
If I put a square on one pole and circle on the other, and say all things in between are square-circles and circle-squares, depending on how far towards one or the other pole one goes, have I said anything at all? The instant you move off the square towards the circle, you have something other than a square, AND other than a circle, something nothing at all like either one. And in fact, nothing at all, because what the hell is a square-circle?
Pitting faith as a circle and reasoning as the square does the same thing. They aren't opposites. Just two different things. (that you rightly point out Anselm and Aquinas were squarely in on the reason side of things, not talking about faith at all, and therefore failing at both!)
But in the process you say things that make it seem like there is no room in the reasonable world for people to believe in things they do not yet know are true through reason. Action in the real world between the poles of knowledge and ignorance, reason and chaos, is impossible.
We need to take all of these terms off of the simple polarizing measuring sticks. There are many more things besides faith and reason to hold in tension to see any of them. Faith is not the opposite of reason, any more than poetry is the opposite of reason, or eulogies are the opposite of reason.
So let's quickly redefine our terms a bit.
If X, then Y.
If Y, then Z.
So if X, then Z.
Roll with me, you know what I mean. This is a syllogism.
What should we make of the first "if" in this syllogism? Can we say instead:
Believing X is the case, Y must follow.
Now holding Y to be necessary, Z must follow.
So once believing X, Z must follow.
I'm trying to breath some life into the "if" in the first form of the argument. In order for the possibility of a logical syllogism to begin, when we say "if X..", in a more naive but just as productive way, we can say "in order for you to follow my logic, take as true, X." Or just, "believe X with me and let's see what logically follows."
Quoting Banno
100%. Important for my argument. Important to make a first premise.
How about we clarify "holding that something is.." a bit: Let's say that, what is held, the something we are holding when we are holding a belief true, is knowledge. I'm NOT saying all beliefs are knowledge; I'm saying a belief is a bit of knowledge that we also hold true, I'm just clarifying "something" in "holding that something is" part of Banno's perfectly reasonable assessment of belief.
So the board pieces (which we should resist from placing as polar opposites a bit longer), so far, are at least belief and knowledge. Now let's find what we mean by "reason" in the mix.
Reasoning lies within the syllogism, not before its premises or after its conclusions.
Saying "If X" isn't giving an argument, It isn't reasoning. It's right at the start of the syllogism; it's needed to start it, but no reasoning is yet applied. It's just positing "X". "If X..." or "If you believe X exists..."
We need to set that pole "X" to launch into "then...."
"Then", which refers back to X also compels one to "Y" (if soundly referred and validly compelled). This referring back and compelling forward from X to Y is where the reasoning lives. If Anselm and Aquinas had been a little more careful with their reasoning, their logical steps referring and compelling this X (perfection) with that Y (God), they would have seen that the ontological proof makes a category error, and so their conclusion is not compelled, there is no necessity to thinking "God exists", and the argument collapses.
That is reasoning - something like that. The motivating engine of the syllogism. It lives inside the argument.
Then there is faith.
We don't even need to talk about faith or define it for the OP point to be made. Anselm and Aquinas were trying logical reasoning, did it poorly, and so built nothing of the sort. They did NOT build something to believe in (like a faith), or something to recite as poetry or at a funeral - they built a bad syllogism.
So again, that specific point of the OP as regards whether a person trying to prove God exists was refuting the need for faith in God, if the only article of faith was "God exists", then yes, knowledge (not reason, but knowledge as the result of a reasoned argument), is the anti-thesis of faith.But is faith only about the existence of God? If you know for sure God exists, will you never need faith again for anything? No, there is way more to it, like poetry has more to it than a simple antithesis: "not-syllogistic argument".
What is faith?
To simplify this, let's look at faith as believing. Like we can look at reason more clearly as the motivating engine in the argument called "reasoning", we should look at faith more as another type of engine called "believing".
You are standing on the edge of a cliff wearing a newly designed parachute. Someone wearing the same parachute says "look it's safe" and jumps off the cliff and safely floats to the gorge floor below. Then another person says "look, we've done the math, tested this 1,000 times before, and here, I have a parachute, I'll give you some more assurance" and jumps landing safely. You look at all of the calculations and tolerances and wind conditions, etc., and look at all the test results with 1,000 samples, and you can see with your own eyes and common senses the two jumpers and say "understanding that knowledge isn't perfect, I know enough to say 'I know I will be safe when I jump.'"
What does what you know matter anymore in the instant you jump? Do you actually jump because of what you know? Or what you believe?
To jump, in the moment one acts, it is because you believe your own knowledge. Faith is the engine of action. You might make other people jump to demonstrate all that you know from your calculations and test results, and say "I know you will be safe so you should jump" but when it comes your turn to actually jump, when you take that leap, it is only because of what you believe is true that you act; If you don't want to die, only because you believe you will make it safely, would you yourself, jump. Never because you can know the calculations and test results are sound and validly ordered.
We act out of belief in something true. We act out of belief that something we know is true. When knowing, knowing is complete in the knowledge. When believing, the belief is complete in the truth, and the bridge between the belief and the truth is how one acts. We make the bridge to the truth by acting on the belief, and believing is bridging. Believing is holding something over there as true here in me. It's what I believe as is testified to in words and deeds.
When we act, we may be wrong in our knowledge, or we may be right in our knowledge. That occurs during reasoning after positing the "If....then...therefore..." There is where reasoned knowledge sits.
Every time we honestly mean the statement "therefore..x" we are saying "we believe X." We believe the reasoning is done, and we believe we know our conclusion can be called knowledge. If someone believes the argument is false, we would either look to the premises and conclusions to re-support the conclusion, or we could simply say "Prove it then, because I believe my proof is done." We can call upon them to prove our conclusion again, but the act of "concluding" is a judgment that "the argument is over, it needs no more or less" and in that moment we "are knowing" we call this knowledge because we are believing there is no more need for argument.
Once it is time to act, (even the act of knowing) all the reasoning and knowledge is literally placed behind you and you are now believing it is true because you are acting on that belief. Your reasoning and knowledge support and uphold the moment of action, but that act is not taken unless you also believe something to be true. How else could you aim a gun and hit a target unless you believed that what you know was true?
Faith is tied up with that. We all have faith in our beliefs that we all have, and believe some of the things we know are true. If we didn't, every act would either be compelled by necessity, or utterly random (again another can of worms for another conversation.)
Believing isn't just about whether something exists. It most fully arrives in this mix somewhere outside of the reasoning (again, agreement with the OP), but so close, it is tied to the "If X..." at the beginning, and more completely just after the conclusion, when one acts on that conclusion, and in the acting, the believing enough reasons exist to leap into the unknowable (until the experiment is over and the shoot failed and we all get to know his calculations missed a few variables, he should not have believed they were true, and should not have jumped...)
So...
Quoting Banno
...is just not the dialectical picture you needed to draw, or should draw, to draw what I agree with in the OP, namely and to paraphrase, "proof God exists precludes the ability to call the phrase "God exists" an article of faith." This is because, as I would add: faith (believing something as an act of consent) has nothing to do with proof (proving, reasoning)."
And besides, do you mean to say anyone who believes in God should try not to use reason and when they talk about God they are unable to be reasoning? That's the gist of some of this. That's silly rubbish.
Yes. Even though the central "destructions" in the critique have been elaborated in secondary and tertiary literature for years. I want to say as the only people perpetuating the critiqued doctrine {ontologies of presence} at this point are its critics, but then you occasionally meet a scientist who tells you that tells you every state a human can occupy is an informational state in its brain... But humans have legs and arms. Which isn't to say that this scientist is an ontologist of presence as stereotyped in the critique, they just say some things which have some of that stereotyped perspective's framing.
There's definitely a lot of good that comes out of the critique, it's just articulated in terms that make it borderline impossible for its continued target audience to grasp. And it's also not that hard to grasp for the philosophically inclined given how much effort has been spent explaining it.
Forced translation exercises out of its technical vocabulary tend to show its worst excesses as the trivialities they are.
But you will see it through your own window.
"In the depths of our hearts the light of God is shining on a soundless sea with no shore.". --Rumi
Quoting fdrake
Sokal read post-phenomenological work, as did Jordan Peterson. Reading and understanding are not the same thing. Understanding a philosophical approach means being capable of summarizing its fundamental concepts in a way that is recognizable to those who support it. If you were to ask me to sum up the positions of your favorite philosophers, I am confident that I would be able to do it to your satisfaction. Before you can adequately critique a set of ideas, you have to accomplish that first step. You have mentioned Deleuze seemingly approvingly in other posts. Do you think he would consider my depiction of postmodern thinking utterly stultifying and totalizing? How would you summarize the key aspects of his work?
Quoting fdrake
Does everyone know that there are alternative ways of thinking about motivation than what is implied in concepts like causal variables? Can you list any of these alternatives and the nature of their critique of causation as it is utilized by your favorite philosophies?
Quoting fdrake
It seems to me that youre advocating for conventional standards for getting shit done. Methodological innovation in applied fields will mean something different than in purely speculative philosophy and psychology. What areas do you work in such that policy that everyone can understand and getting shit done are key goals for you, and do you think it is reasonable to expect cutting edge thinking in philosophy to be instantly translatable into practical policy without an intermediate period of innovators who bridge the divide between the purely theoretical and the applied, and a wider culture which has had time to catch up with the new thinking?
Isnt it this gap between the widely accepted and the bleeding edge that causes the isolated fiefdoms in the social sciences? Wasnt cognitive science an isolated fiefdom in the early 1960s when behaviorism still had an ironclad grip on academic research in psychology? Is 4EA enactivism now beginning to transition from isolated fiefdom to a more widely shared method of getting shit done, a method which seems to be starting to absorb its largest rival, active inference) into its framework? And who is working at the leading edge of enactivism? Have you followed the work of Evan Thompson and Hanne De Jaegher? Stick around for another 20 years and you may be surprised to find that what appears to you as isolated , stultifying and no -operationalizable is developed into the new standard methodology for getting things done policy -wise.
But frankly I think your expressed desire for widely shared standards is a red herring. Your main gripe isn't about application but theory. If you were enthusiastic about the fundamental concepts of what you call discursive irrealisms and their ethical implications you would be among those calling for patience in operationalizing those approaches. Years after cognitive science developed firmly established research methods , B.F. Skinner continued to accuse the program of resting on illegitimate methods. It wasn't its applicability that prevented him from embracing cognitive psychology, it was his inability to grasp its concepts.
Hit me with your link. Do you know how often I even think about faith? Pretty much 0 because when it's something I have faith in, I have faith in it. I don't ever have a need to ever justify my faith to anyone. Not even myself.
I don't understand how you can construe the post-phenomenological heritage a minor paradigm when it's quite hegemonic. It isn't hegemonic everywhere it touches, but it's a pernicious orthodoxy in social studies.
It's also a heritage that lets people do discourse analysis with no fieldwork while still getting papers published. People write 30 page papers whose principal argument is based on homophones {both meanings of site, cite...} and it gets through peer review because it apparently cleverly references the differential nature of the signifying chain.
You are incredibly well read, surely you've seen even worse excesses.
Im disconnected from these institutional structures. What you say may be true; I have no way of knowing. I have found that there tends to be a substantial distance between the work of the oracles of post-phenomenological thought and the interpretation and application of it by legions lesser lights, to the point where it is often almost unrecognizable. You may wonder if I apply my own thinking to real world situations. The answer is yes , every day, as both an ethical and psychological guide. It maintains its validity for me through its effectiveness at making of sense of my world.
Ah right. I hear rage along the grapevine these days, no longer involved in research. My recent exposure to it {in person} has been in addiction studies, in which you can lose your academic prestige for saying heroin causes addiction. These are people receiving research funding from medicine grants.
I started reading a lot of masculinity studies last year - the feminist anthropology version of it rather than the reactionary bullshit on Youtube -. There's a fairly in depth review of how it becomes practically impossible to integrate anthropology and social studies about men with mainstream feminist analysis because the latter's methodologically hogtied to these philosophies of indefinite mediation - actor network theory, discourse analysis, deconstruction. And they don't tend to do fieldwork. The former research tends to be done in constructivist and experiment heavy terms.
Of course the rejoinder is that people who didn't adopt some flavour of postmodern methodology are behind the times. I also find it ironic that this is indeed the rejoinder from a group of academics who have rejected the idea of linear progress narratives.
Quoting Joshs
Yeah I think we agree there. The original texts, and good secondary literature, was revolutionary. There's a lot of ossification over the years. I think the continued emphasis on contingency and mediation is a bit of a fetish at this point. There's a lot of disavowed generalisation despite using these methodologies to champion the singularity of everything. I have a particularly egregious paper in mind for the latter.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
In many cases, the arguments aren't fallacious, per se. They are usually possibly sound, but as I pointed out to someone recently- God's existence is possible (not provably impossible) even without an argument. A possibly sound argument doesn't make it any more plausible, or epistemically probable.
Quoting ENOAH
This seems exactly right to me. It's basically what I've been arguing on these forums for years. Experiences of any kind which are not simply observational are feelings. When we base beliefs on those feelings, we enter the realm of interpretation and judgement and have already moves away from the living experience.
Faith or intuition are valid ways of knowingsimply because inhabiting a faith or intution is a knowing. It is a knowing of a certain kind of experience. It is not, however, a propositional knowingalthough it might lead to propositional beliefs, those beliefs cannot be verified by the faith or intuition. And note, this is not to say that the faith or intution cannot be convincing to the one inhabiting it, it is just to say that it cannot provide sufficient grounds for an argument intended to convince others.
If others are convinced by your intution-based conviction then it will be on account of their being convinced by your charisma, or they are sufficiently lacking in critical judgement to buy an under-determined argument, or they can relate to the experience you describe because they have had similar experiences and feel the same way. In other words, they are being convinced on the basis of rhetoric or identification, not reason.
:100:
Too complex to detail here, but...
even empiricism is neglecting something. Feeling, is no less an organic sensation than seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, hearing.
Just as my mind displaces the raw visual sensation of round red object into the perception of "round" > "red" > until it settles on the belief, "apple" projected as knowledge; my mind displaces the raw feeling sensation of X into the perception of "y"> "z">until it settles on the belief, "god" projected as faith, a particular shape of knowledge.
Anselm, and everyone else who believes they can prove God's existence, "prove" only a generic sort of deity (in Anselm's case, based on "greatness"). None "prove" the Triune God of Christianity, which is the object of their faith. Still, I agree it's more rational than groundless faith (William Lane Craig coined the phrase "reasonable faith"). Where I think amateurs (i.e. people on forums like this one, but more so on apologetic forums) go wrong is to treat their arguments as unarguably sound, and are resistant to understanding why those arguments are unpersuasive.
You may be interested in this discussion of "feeling" written by Shaviro on Whitehead
Whitehead on Feeling
In fact "feeling", "lure", ,"satisfaction": "attraction" and "prehension" are all terms used to describe forms of non conscious, non sense organ dependent experience.
"The jellyfish advances and withdraws" a quote from ANW. Even this relatively simply creature to which we would not usually attribute anything like human consciousness or human awareness of our feelings exhibits a primitive form of awareness of its surroundings and responds to its environment with attraction or avoidance .. Feeling is universal for Whitehead and human consciousness depends on underlying non conscious experience. Even in humans most mental processing and activity never rises to the level of human conscious awareness. Mind in the form of feeling is the basis for all higher forms of experience the pinacle of which is human consciousness.
Quoting Banno
Willful ignorance maybe? Does that have any place in this thread?
Anselm and Aquinas werent doing the faith thing. They werent talking about their faith anymore, and instead, they built bad syllogisms.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Thats closer to doing the faith thing. It comes pre-justified, or sits supra- or extra-justification.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
And in the process he, and you, took for granted that believing (faith) had something to do with reason (which it occurs to me Anselm and Aquinas might agree with you about, which is another mistake they made). Namely you keep leaning on faith is the polar opposite of reason, so by making faith non-reasonable, to shit in people, he shit on his very own when its something I have faith in (that I am doing) I dont ever have a need to ever justify
So you are shitting on using the will, on acting, just to say faithful people are contradicting themselves if they try to use reason.
Total mess.
We all act on faith all the time. No one knows anything 100%. That doesnt mean they are mixing some faith in with their logic. If they wanted to act on their 70% certainty in their logic, when they act, they act because they believe in their action enough to live it 100%, and act.
So according to you, if anyone ever asks about, or someone wants to talk about, something they are doing that they are doing based on faith, they should all be trying to show how unreasonable such acts are, and shouldnt try to be reasonable, there is nothing to say, so piss off if you want to reason about it.
Quoting Banno
So Diff Egg, when it's something [you] have faith in, [and] don't ever have a need to ever justify, and someone asks you anyway what the hell are you doing that for? do you feel any compulsion to try to prove how unreasonable you are, because
Quoting Banno
So my question to you both is, What the hell are you saying faith is anyway?
Banno, thats how I ask what with a bit of respect.
DiffEgg, just to shit on people? Come on man.
The interesting bit in your post was the hint that we might treat faith as relating to action - but that would need filling out.
Otherwise, there are two differing uses for "faith" - roughly, strong belief and complete trust. The complete trust use is the one relating to actions, the strong belief sense is that used in the OP, and in my reply. (Hence the stock theistic retort that faith is not about belief but trust... trading on an ambiguity, and seen already in this thread.)
Can you differentiate these in your reply to me?
No, faith still has nothing to do with knowledge and rationalism or reasonable reason. Faith is belief nothing more. It is a gap in knowledge filled by belief.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Shit on, critique, who gives a f "oh the word Critique is good, but shit one, come on man!"
As for Anslem and Aquinas, they're both people who clearly have a need to justify their faith. It's like he would need to justify to himself why his wife loves him ... or why he loves his wife...
Kinda dumb imo... the fuck do I need to justify my love for my wife to anyone?
"SEE SEE SHE DOES LOVE ME!" Sounds a lot like doubt...
"SEE SEE, GOD DOES EXIST! YOU SEE MY FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT, PRAISE BEFORE GOD HE DOES EXIST!" Pretty much a desperate desire imo.
Noone of real faith needs to do that... just saying.
And the fact that they would publish fallacies as logical arguments shows the desperation imo.
Regardless of how much faith they had, their desire to turn it into logic was greater.
I'm sure there were Nazi that had faith in their reasoning too... saying faith is reason because of bad reasoning is just saying faith is faith... cause that's what poor reasoning is: faith.
An educated guess is a mix of knowledge and faith, faith being the gap in knowledge behind the educated guess. If you got faith the educated guess will work its because you can perhaps visual and bridge the gap of knowledge. You never know until you're capable of demonstrating said thing multiple times with accuracy.
Quine actually has something pertinent to say about this... I'll have to go through the pursuit of truth again, I'll find it and post it. But it was something about evaluating where you went wrong in experimentation...
My post last night was too long.
See if this is friendlier:
1.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Right. Without intending to lose any of your meaning here, I would say the same thing:
Believing is holding that some thing is true.
Believing is more like a holding, both acting, so beleiving is holding just flows better to me, annd avoids positing a rigid belief, but again, no real sense should be changed here.
Some thing, as two words, meaning, something in particular. This is where something.rigid creeps back in a bit, but really, again, is meant to clarify how I say what you said, and not really saying anything new:
Believing is holding that some thing is true.
2.
Is true.
The OP is talking about Anselm holding that God exists is true. God exists is the something that the one who is believing is holding. The question the OP asks is, Can the sound believer hold god exists as a conclusion in a logical syllogism while holding it as a belief? OP says no way, thats dumb and Anselm was dumb to try faith or reason, or both.
So it seems to me, since we are talking about what to make of whether God exists is true or not, true existence is really just any existence at all. We mean the same thing if we just say:
Believing is holding that some thing is. Believing is holding something truly exists. (Truly is now superfluous).
(We can revisit the rabbit hole epistemological reasons to distinguish between holding that God exists and holding that God exists is true, with terms like knowledge and justification also in need of being addressed here later. And we can revisit the issues between the ontological status of concepts/objects like holding that God exists is true versus holding that God exists versus God actually existing or not. But lets try to finish one thought.)
All we need to understand really what was meant in your original statement in the context of the case of the unbelieving bad-reasoning Anselm, is this:
Believing is holding that something truly exists, or just, some thing is.
3.
Quoting Banno
4.
Therefore, the faithful ones who hold a belief, because believing is holding that something exists, must know that this same thing does not exist in order to believe it exists.
[b]So since I kept re-writing 1, here is a renumbering of my question based in really, only your words:
1. Believing is holding some thing exists.
2. The greatest believers would find the most convincing argument about what they believe would demonstrate that what they hold, does NOT exist, to be the greatest believers.
3. Therefore, they must believe that something does not exist (not-exist is true) in order to believe it does exist (exist is true). [/b]
Maybe you still dont get me, maybe there is a better way to say it, but you get my gist.
Somethings off here.
Added:
What do you mean by belief or believing, OR, what do you mean by believing that God exists is true? Because the above argument, basically yours, seems off to me.
The two are different, though, insofar as everyone sees the apple but no one sees god..
What is believed is expressed by a proposition, rather than a "thing", an object.
The other two of your three bolded sentences are indecipherable.
You need to explain how you are saying something decipherable, when you tell a religious belief holder they should be arguing something they believe does not exist if they want to continue believing that same thing exists.
Quoting Banno
You are skipping categories too, like Anselm and Descartes.
What is believed is expressed by a proposition not an object?? That doesnt move the ball at all.
We all get that a string of words, a proposition, isnt the same thing or object as say, what those words are talking about.
Proposition: God exists.
Its Talking about: X over there existing, having a cheese sandwich while walking on water or sorting the reasoning folks from the faithful folks according to you. An object, a thing.
We all get that.
You are proposing we tell someone who says God exists that, if they want to believe that proposition is about an existing thing, they should seek out the most reasonable arguments that conclude with the proposition God does not exist.
That seems impossible, let alone stupid. Decipherable? Not really that either, but Im trying to work with you.
You are moving the goal posts, between propositions and what they are about (expressing things or objects), and saying things and objects who are holding propositions (guys like Anselm), should seek to hold contradictory propositions if they want to be an object /thing called a faithful believer.
And you do so by equivocating on the notion of belief or faith, which Ive been saying all along.
You are smarter than indecipherable. You cant see the problem?
The second sentence you refer to as indecipherable is a quote from you. Its now in 3 below.
1. Believing is holding that something is true.
2. In the case of a person who believes God exists, (ie, the faithful) believing is holding that God exists is true.
3. Quoting Banno
4. Therefore, what are you talking about Banno?
That's one equivocation of it aye.
Sometimes it's best to leave an argument ambiguous so it brings out everyone's understandings. It allows for a multiplicity of interpretations. Doesn't mean you need to accept them all. Hell, I barely even understand who said what to me in this conversation... I'm taking what bits I find useful to deepening the nuance of my evaluations. It's not like my evaluation of faith will directly affect your life in any way. That isn't to say your evaluation is useless. But rather it's just not mine, and that's fine. There have been some interesting and productive developments within myself from the discussion here on various fronts.
If other people have gained from it, so be it, but ultimately I have, and that's mostly what matters to me. I don't care how obstinate others are...
I'm working on a response. I'm trying to put together a new thread to discuss the intuition/faith issue. I may answer it there. Otherwise I will come back here and respond directly.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Sort of an impasse between the pot and the kettle.
Thats fine too, but thats the end of the conversation again. You dont have to keep at it. But I dont think Im being obstinate.
Im just saying it seems contradictory to hold that faith simply means no reason, because it allows silly statements that propositions proving something doesnt exist provide the best support to having faith that it does exist. Seems like an abuse of reason, or faith, or exist. Seems like an abuse of language.
Seems the conversation you started need not end yet to me.
Are you just saying you are being obstinate and so its a warning that there is no use seeking further clarity from you, you are done with all the analysis and interpretation? If so, thanks for the tip. Will catch you on the next one.
I think this is a good distinction. One deficiency in contemporary thought is to tend to collapse all knowledge into propositional belief (and to include "justification" in the definition of knowledge). To be sure, this tendency has never been absolute, but it has been strong in some contexts.
The deficits here are most obvious when one considers "knowing that..." versus "knowing how to..." Knowing how to ride a bike does not seem to involve mere assent to certain propositions with proper justification, and this distinction seems to recover the older notion of "techne." Yet certain elements of religious life seem to involve a sort of "know how."
In terms of the bolded above, I would just note that "similar experiences that feel the same way," might undersell the strength of the arguments that can be mustered in support of a defense of intuition or noesis. After all, how does one demonstrate that reason itself is valid or has any authority, or demonstrate the Principle of Non-Contradiction, etc.? It seems quite impossible to give a non-circular [I]argument[/I] in favor of reason, one that does not already assume the authority of reason.
So, this is a "feeling" that underpins the authority of argument itself, and one might suppose that because of this it is [I]better known[/I] than knowledge that is achieved through rational demonstration.
This does not, however, imply that all noesis is equally easy for all people to come to. Indeed, if it is akin to dianoia, to discursive knowledge, we shouldn't expect this sort of democratization. The challenge then is that Plato, the Patristics, Eastern philosophies of Enlightenment , etc. claim that this sort of noesis or gnosis is in fact not easy to achieve, but usually quite arduous. To use the framework of the Patristics, the nous is damaged and in need of significant healing and therapy before it can properly attain to the truth.
Which is all to say that to collapse faith into assent to propositional knowledge will tend to totally miss this and will mean just talking past numerous other traditions (e.g. Neoplatonism, Orthodoxy, etc.).
A lot of people just say stuff because they want their faith to be knowledge... I really don't care. Faith isn't knowledge. And attempting to prove faith via knowledge turns faith into knowledge. Thus now it's not faith. Faith is an absence of knowing. Just as knowing is an absence of faith. Perspective, our world view, etc etc arises from knowledge and faith.
If you want to pretend faith shares identity with a bunch of other concepts so you can cross reference them and interchange them in conversation via equivocation go for it, but I like to make my words more finite...
If I tell you how to eat and workout to lose weight, you still don't know the nutritional and dietary knowledge or even the fitness knowledge. If you act on the information I give you, you're working on faith that what I'm saying is going to actually work... because you don't know... after it works for you, you adopt the equation because you now know the equation works. Yeah you still dont know why it works, but you know it works... it's like learning applied calculus. Faith in calculus vs knowledge of applying calcus are two different things.
:up: More things for rattling:
Kierkegaard said faith is like floating in water that is 70,000 fathoms deep. He was talking about faith that's along the lines of acceptance. On the other hand, I've never quite understood what Augustine was trying to do with faith. I wish I could ask him some questions. I don't think faith is really one concept for all uses of the word. You have to try to discern what someone means by it, put yourself in their shoes and see what they're seeing. But if they're experiences are very different from your own, you may be unable to grasp what they're seeing.
Thats cool.
Once Anselm attempted to use logic to prove God exists, he was not being faithful to what faith is anymore. Ive said it fifty different ways by now to try to shake hands here a bit.
But thats not all you said, and the picture you create of what a person is doing when they believe something absent logical proof behind it (faith), makes it sound like, in order to believe anything without absolute proof behind it, one has to resist or be in a state of resisting all reason.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
So because of things youve said to me, I have to hope you wont think Im being too dialectic in my argument form. By dialectic, I mean placing things as polar opposites. I think you are doing that just as much as me, but for some reason youve told me a few times that is due to my limited way of thinking. So Im going to ignore those accusations now because I see you thinking in the same dialectical format - which in itself is useful here so Im glad you are. And it shows why we dont want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Just like Anselm would be wrong to say his conclusions at the end of his logical syllogisms are articles of faith (in which we agree, he was wrong), concluding from that mistaken path towards Anselm faith that all faith and believing is the anti-thesis of reason and knowing is wrong as well.
The main reason I think its wrong to make faith merely the opposite of reason is, even if that were the case, we cant ever hold one above the other - we need both to act (will) and to speak about our actions (reason), to be a person at all. I like acting - willing, believing, reasoning - I dont want to declare winners and losers among them. Anselm was just as reasonable and faithful as the next guy, just not in his one little syllogism he hoped (Im sure) might change the world.
The whole picture you create of the twisting rope between faith and reason (maybe you mean willing and knowing), should be saved. I never said that picture wasnt a useful image of things. We ARE twisting, between things, and opposites, and twisting among many more sources of tensions -including our selves as instinct versus social norms versus will versus wits. The overall picture should be saved, and I often describe things that way.
But if you put reason all on the one side of those tensions, irrationality or unreasonableness is on the other.
If faith is on one side of the pulling and twisting, and we need an opposite, indifference or maybe deterministic necessity are on the other.
Reason is not the antithesis of faith. Thats a T-shirt version of this that is actually useless once we get beyond a fear of being religious.
So I am not disagreeing with things so much as I think its worth clarifying things a bit to avoid saying things that can be misconstrued, casting doubt on the soundness of the whole picture of the twisting, torn, creative and tearing man.
We dont want to mock the man of faith, the man of will, the man willing to believe and act despite knowledge, despite any mere proposition. Thats the spice in the otherwise formulaic soup.
(Paradoxically, in a way, according to a picture pitting reason against faith, because Anselms argument ultimately fails, he should be seen by you as one of the greatest saints among the faithful - because his arguments and conclusions are not reasonable, yet he believes them to be, and became a saint about it all, you should think he is the brilliant evil genius who gathered more and more believers to his presentation of bad reasoning! Total digression that probably confuses you. :razz: )
If you want to say fuck off to the faithful idiot, dont do it for sake of the steadfast empirical logician. Shit on both of those guys if you need to shit on anyone. Nietzsche did all of the appropriate shitting. Very few were spared.
But dont mock willing, dont mock the process of believing itself.
Ive said all of this 20 times. I think you have an opportunity here to say huh, I see what you mean, never thought about that and maybe even admit, that no really useful point about a person of faith who is also a person of reason has been made. We all trade in both reasons and beliefs, both the religious and the empirical. This post need not be focused on all religious people whenever they ever form syllogisms.
You said Faith is an absence of knowing. Just as knowing is an absence of faith.
I think you can tell where I agree with what you are saying in this mix.
But we cant say faith has no knowing in it. And we cant saying knowing has no believing in it.
Your basic point here is that, because of the difference between believing an article of faith, and knowing a conclusion of reason, Anselm and church-lovers like him, should not waste their time seeking conclusions of reason if they are satisfied with believing an article of faith. And further, if they stumble upon a conclusion of reason, that used to be held as an article of faith, then that article, that conclusion is no longer a faith thing, its a reason thing now, sitting at the end of a syllogism. Thats great.
But if Anselm is tearing down his own faith by building up his own reasonable arguments, isnt he just doing science? And doesnt that mean that science requires faith as an engine to get started - we move from faith in something that appears may be, using reason, to knowledge of something that is proven to be. This is just science, just thinking, just juggling believing/reasoning/knowing, twisting used here for religion bashing and throwing all of us who bother to think and speak at all under the bus in the process.
The real juggling, as I see it, standing on the tightrope, is acting, believing, reasoning, knowing, believing your own knowledge, and then acting again. Huge, soupy mess that easily goes off the rails, off-rope, all of the time. But I cant see any of it without all of it.
So we dont want to stand up the reasonable man against his enemy the faithful man, because we need both men to be reasonable, as we need both to willingly act on what they believe.
Yes they are different.
My point is we, especially empiricism, designate the info perceived from sight as "superior" to the info received from feelings.
I know why. But it is arguable that in some cases--e.g. so called God--the hierarchy doesn't fit. Besides mythology (broadly) who has seen God? And yet for millenia--even atheists by entertaing the notion--we have claimed that God exists.
Yes, there are psychological explanations etc etc.
Nevertheless maybe if God does exist, we "know/believe" this from fellings rather than the conventionally admired organic triggers of construction (perception).
Oh, I can see the problem.
Cheers.
Yet if faith, or any belief, is to enter into our ratiocinations, it must be put in to propositional form. In particular, if it is to explain our actions, it must be able to participate in those explanations.
The alternative would be silentism. If this is what you are advocating I would be both surprised and please.
Another almost conversation, about talking, your favorite subject, that you wont talk about with me.
Cheers!
And others compete for my attention.
What I was trying to say is like instead of absolute faith, you're now in the realm of educated guess... which is a combination of faith and knowledge, and knowledge isn't faith. I have admitted to equivocating a shift from absolute faith to an educated guess as necessarily a decrease in faith. But I decides that just because someone gains knowledge doesn't mean the faith is diminished. It means their perspective is now maybe 90% faith and 10% knowledge instead of absolute faith (100% faith) only if they converted faith into knowledge would it be a decrease of faith. But gaining knowledge about about something doesn't necessarily mean a decrease in faith.
Quoting ENOAH
Not "superior" but just more reliable. In the context of epistemology, we are discussing what we can be justified in saying we know. That means rationally justified. It leaves untouched the question of the power of emotions, of lived experience, to convince the experiencer of anything. If I have a so-called religious experience, I know the experience in a participatory sense, but the experience cannot justify any post hoc interpretations of, or judgement about, it. Such experiences cannot yield discursive knowledge other than that I had the experience and whatever intutions or feelings that came with it.
Quoting ENOAH
But that "maybe" is of little use to us, since it is unknowable.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We have no other criteria other than those of reason, so there can be no point in questioning its authoritywe can imagine no other reliable authority. We don't need to argue in favour of reason, because any possible argument against it would be using it, and that would be a performative contradiction.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It doesn't seem to say it is just a feeling that underpins arguments. The validity of arguments consists in their consistency. If you contradict yourself then it is impossible to determine what you are wanting to say. If you make a claim about something that can be observed, the claim can be checked and confirmed or disconfirmed. metaphysical claims in general are really undecidable because as valid as they might be they are based on premises which cannot be confirmed. In those cases, we argue for plausibility. Unfortunately, plausibility does not have a precise measure. It's a similar problem as with claims about aesthetics. One might say it is not plausible to claim that MIlls and Boon is better literature than Shakespeare, and it seems good arguments can be given against such an absurd claim, but ultimately no proof can be given.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The question is whether noesis alone can justify dianoia. Noesis is personalit cannot be definitively conveyed. Dianoia is interpersonal, and it is reliably shareable experience which gives it any basis. So it would seem that noesis cannot justify dianoia because noesis cannot be reliably shared.
Or you dont have an explanation as to why it makes sense to you to say a belief is holding a proposition to be true, but when that proposition is God exists then a belief is holding that a proposition is not true.
Thats what you said.
Two beliefs:
Pat believes that "god exists" is true
Pat believes that "god does not exist" is true.
In both cases, Pat holds a certain proposition to be the case.
I am not responsible for your own confusion.
So the same Pat can hold both beliefs at the same time. Got it. According to non-confusing Banno.
Sounds like someone else is confused. Probably Pat. :sweat:
Where did that nonsense come from?
No.
Cheers.
Quoting Fire Ologist
So for faithful Pat to believe God exists, he will seeking to prove the belief that God does not exist.
Im sure you are confused again. Its ok.
No. Rather, their faith would lead them to believe there's something wrong with the logical argument.
Example: William Lane Craig was asked a hypothetical: if he were taken back in time to the first century, and seen Jesus' body crucified, watched it rot for weeks on the cross and eaten as carrion, would he renounce his faith in the resurection. His response: no, he would assume he was being deceived because he "knows" Jesus was resurrected.
This is what faith looks like.
Ok, yah. In that context, I see.
If you like. Your example shows the unfalsifiabilty of objects of faith, which is the crux of my post. Any arguments or evidence to the contrary are rejected using ad hoc hypothesising. This is part of the irrationality of faith.
A more charitable interpretation might be found in Wittgenstein's hinge propositions, but that's a much bigger topic.
Quoting Banno
Quoting AmadeusD
Oh my God. Faith sounds terrible!
Those people must be insufferable, just real douchers.
Am I really a doucher and I just never applied my reasoning to the situation? Banno thinks I cant even reason - now Ill have nothing left!!
But DiffEgg, although I wouldnt say it how he says it, sees belief as more of a presence on the game board, which I agree(d) with:
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Is believing vital to the mix?
Now Im not so sure.
But wait. What about when you dont know? And you have to act on what little you do know?
Are we still acting on knowledge alone?
What about taking risk? Do we need anything like faith to take risk?
Risk involves a lack of knowledge, an act despite the lack of knowledge, like belief despite any reasoning or evidence.
Personally, a lot is not being said. I think belief, reasoning, knowledge are simultaneously at work in many of our actions, and a faith is just another science which is just another story, because its just another wording, which relies on beliefs, reasoning and knowledge to happen. You choose your beliefs, but we are all slaves to believing something.
Dont believe me if you want, but then believe only yourself if you want.
Certainly we need faith to get to know other people. You dont trust me yet do you? Im being sarcastic at times here, so maybe Im a liar. What do you believe, because you certainly dont know?
Religious faith is just the ugliest form, right? or is that the purest form of faith?
Everyone is so biased against faith as organized religion, they overlook how important their own beliefs have been, despite being yet unproven, untested, even unfalsifiable in any practical sense.
So if believing and beliefs and having faith are just the way for us, do we really need to place science and above art and above faith and all else, or might that just be a sort of faith in itself?
I call it all part of the gay science.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Again, the picture that creates is the picture I see, but the words you use to paint it I wouldnt use that way.
I see the educated guess as in between the realm of absolute knowledge, and zero knowledge (like unconscious or subconscious). All of that is separate from will, from believing. You can be 50% sure or 60%. But when you are asked what you believe, given what you know, belief works at either 100% or 0. When you take the guess, at the moment of actually guessing based on the little you know, you are 100% believing that is what you believe.
Like if you were only going to leap once you were fifty percent sure and your at forty, then forty two, then you hit fifty and you say, thats enough, I believe the leap will happen and just as I am about to leap I get more info and now Im at 75%. I know more, the guess is better educated, but I already believed and was ready to leap. I know more, but I dont believe more.
Belief, will, drives the moment of action. Its not the moment of knowing or the moment of reasoning.
Thats my take. Think there are overlaps in the two pictures.
Some who cannot change their belief, no matter what, is a problem for cognitive science to delve into, but I would say:
The belief is an emotional position, and emotions have a direct path into consciousness, sometimes firm and lasting, and at other times less so, bypassing rational logic.
We can recall back when we didn't practice detachment how some anger would persist, as also it's rather late then to detach.
The believer who can't be told a darn thing has possibly reached that point due to some brain wires so often firing together that they essentially wire together, and, there is no real logical introspection going on when their answer comes out.
Same with their teaching or preaching of it as if it is true, as intellectual dishonesty, although they would probably deny that too. It's a sad quirk of human nature, so jail time is not an option.
Some beliefs have emotional components, others don't. Most of us have no emotional attachment to the 4-color theorem or Goldbach's conjecture, and this makes us perfectly willing to reject such beliefs.
Most of us who believe gods don't exist can willingly entertain their existence, because we have no emotional connection to its truth or falsity. But theists have that connection, and that makes the belief incorrigible.
Weird reaction. I was just describing the nature of faith: it's is incorrigible belief. Additional context is also relevant:
1) God's existence is logically possible
2) Personal experience plays a role: many people believe they feel God's presence. This belief is itself incorrigible.
3) For many, it's an integral part of their world-view, not just a simple proposition that they affirm.
Sounds like a person with the ability to reason who wont use reason when it comes to belief. It sounds like a mental problem.
So if a person of faith is reasonable in every other conversation besides faith (because faith isnt reasonable), wouldnt that person be at odds with their own faith? How is that tenable? What kind of inner life regarding their own beliefs would that be? How does one preach that, if one was so inclined to preach? Sounds terrible.
You are certainly accurately describing a lot of religious kooks and cult members. Incorrigible believing. Probably some mental problems. But does that accurately describe all people who believe anything that hasnt been empirically/experientially verified yet? Are all such believers refusing to be reasonable?
We all believe things that haven't been verified, so I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to do so.
Philosophers convince themselves of all sorts of things that aren't verifiable or falsifiable. Their beliefs tend to be pretty tenacious.
They are. Trying to talk to someone of genuine faith about something for which there is contrary evidence is one of the most trying tasks a human can undertake. The Lane Craig example is exemplary. LOL.
Quoting Fire Ologist
If, in a conversation, you display bare denial of evidence which contradicts your stated belief, yep, you would insufferable and liable to being ostracised by those exercising sufficient reason. I don't think that's good, but it does tend to be what happens.
Quoting Fire Ologist
That is what faith amounts to. Belief in lieu of, or despite evidence. An educated guess doesn't require faith in anything but the means of education, as far as I can tell. Faith is not an educated guess. Faith is a commitment. Faith is something which you wholesale give your faculties over to, as a guiding principle chief among others. Lane Craig, again, shows this well.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Risk, generally, involves reasoning. These are not related, as I see them.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Sorry to say, this sounds like pure prevarication. The first line up to "..,and" is apt. That seems obvious. But that doesn't give rise to Faith in many (if any) scenarios. Faith generally isn't required to motivation action. Beliefs about beliefs? An interesting area. Not one which impinges on these views of Faith, though. Though, I think it is clear, and inarguable, that Faith requires commitment to a concept in spite of xx, yy and zz. The others do not.