Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

OT: Rebelious reopening of locked topic 7-Sep-2010 At 4:55:00 PM dave h.

Message

On 3/09/2010 One Day Hero wrote:
>Does the lack of proof not bother you at all?

Thanks for your kind words.

In response, last Sunday the minister at my church explained Aristotle's view that people believe things for a combination of these three reasons: - intellectual, emotional, and social. He was quite prepared to concede that most Christians believe for a mixture of the three reasons, but he also suggested that it's a bit high-handed for atheists to assert that their reasons for unbelief are purely intellectual.

On the subject of proof specifically - I've tried to talk a little bit about the historical evidence earlier in the thread. In that discussion of proof/evidence I neglected to mention the subjective emotional/spiritual experience as proof - I didn't talk about it there because it's not the sort of evidence that people generally find persuasive or cceptable. But it's evidence that I can consider when deciding for myself whether or not I believe.

Off the top of my head, the justifications for my belief are personal experience (emotional), historical - eg the correlation between extrabiblical sources and the gospels (intellectual), physical - fine-tuning of universal constants (intellectual), and biological - biogenesis. I don't expect everyone agrees with each of these reasons. And when each is examined in isolation they are weak. I think that when you add all of these individual reasons up, you'll start to see why theists don't regard their belief as irrational or unproven. It's not proved absolutely, but for me there's sufficient proof.

And I guess all of us get to decide just what constitutes sufficient proof.

On 7/09/2010 TonyB wrote:
>I don't think that many achieve real independent thinking. John Nash
>was a great example of a true independent thinker. He refused to read text
>books in school because he felt they would influence his thinking.

The opposite view has also been held by great thinkers - cf Newton's comment, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

How independent do you have to be to be an "independent thinker"? Sure Nash did some good stuff (Nash equilibria). Nash's attitude might also be seen as arrogant, and reflecting a belief that there was nothing for him to learn in textbooks.

There's no strict dichotomy between "independent thinkers" and "drones who swallow the information they're spoon-fed." We all take some things on trust (a while ago I met a philosophy student doing her Phd on epistomological trust, which is basically this idea that we don't need to investigate from first principles). Most of us take the vast majority of modern science on faith, despite not going to the trouble of repeating the experiments ourself.

Personally I think Newton's view is preferable, for two reasons - pragmatism and truth.

Pragmatism: if our predecessors have made discoveries, and verified them in a valid way, and the theories they put forward are still working for us, why on earth should we expend all our energy deriving the same results from first principles/repeating experiments?

Truth: I think it reflects the way we live more realistically. Generally we're happy to stand on the shoulders of aeronautical engineers, medicinal chemists, plumbers, carpenters, welders, etc. We neither reject everything we are told, nor accept every explanation uncritically. Some things we consider contentious (for whatever reason), and these things attract our scepticism more. I think this is good, as I like modern plumbing but don't know much about how pumps work. :)