Pyrrho

[This thread is inspired by the hopelessly derailed thread How is faith honest?. The following is a rewording of the opening post of that thread, without the word "faith" that seems to be so very confusing to so many people, despite the fact that one of the commonly accepted definitions of the terms was chosen and explicitly stated. I am interested in a discussion of the topic of that thread, not some silliness about the “proper�? definition of the word “faith�?.]



Many people tell themselves that they're more certain (often, that they're completely certain) about the truth of some assertion than the evidence warrants.

How is that not dishonest?

What evidence is there that Jesus is one and the same as the cause of the universe? There is no such evidence. There is the Bible, but the Bible is not evidence, the Bible is the claim. Taking the Bible as "evidence" is mistaking the claim for the evidence of that claim. Yet many take it without any evidence to be true, and they will tell you that they are 100% certain of this. How is this honest?

I don't doubt that they actually believe it. I am simply noting that the manner in which they arrived at that belief, without evidence, is fundamentally dishonest.

Koyaanisqatsi

Actually, it is claimed to be both. The problem is that anecdotal evidence is not compelling and cannot be substantiated, so it is considered by non-theists (and our judicial system) to be without value.

I think you'll need to clarify. If they say to you, "I am 100% certain that the bible is the truth," then they are being honest, because the honesty goes to their perceived level of certainty, which, to them is "100%." They aren't lying to you, for example, even if they may be lying to themselves .

Agreed, but you would need to word your objection differently or else you will be arguing at crossed purposes (you for the Honest Seeker of Truth standard; they for an honest assessment of how strongly they believe it to be true).

Remember, you're dealing with cult mentality, where the cult member has literally been programmed to believe something. If you programmed a robot to "believe" that it had been made by Leprechauns, then it will, indeed, inform you with all possible self-reflecting honesty that it is "100% certain" that this was the case. It's not lying, it's just been programmed to believe that's true.

jbernier

The first comment to made is one that I made in the original thread but will make again here. What is the warrant for demanding that all things which one believes to be true be supported through logical or evidential means. This gets into the realm of the aesthetic, experiential and the existential. For instance, I can believe that a sunset is beautiful but how can I ever support that through logical or evidential means? Am I being dishonest if I cannot? Nonetheless, it is a truth claim discussing the properties of a given entity or situation. Likewise the basis of my beliefs comes primarily (perhaps exclusively) from my experiential and existential history. Quite simply the idea that Christ is in some fashion divine and that his life is somehow normative for Christians makes the most sense of my experiences. When I conceptually order the world in other ways it just makes less sense than does a Christocentric understanding of ethics (for those who have not noticed theology, for me, is almost entirely about ethics; cosmology, etc., plays very little role in my theological thought). What is dishonest about saying "My experiences make more sense to me when they are framed in a Christocentric fashion"? Indeed I dare anyone refute that sentence - you cannot because, quite simply, you cannot know what does and does not make more sense to me.

To use another example. what is dishonest about saying "I believe in God the Father Almighty"? That is a statement of belief and one cannot falsify that sentence as one cannot prove that the person speaking that line does not believe it. And if you cannot show the statement to be false how can you say that the person is being dishonest? This statement is very different from "Without any reasonable doubt there is a God the Father Almighty." One need only show reasonable doubt that there is a God the Father Almighty to disprove the statement. However, what if one says "It is possible that there is a God the Father Almighty." Well, now we are getting into more dubious range and it is far less easy to demonstrate that there is no possibility that there is a God the Father Almighty. What is clear, though, is that these are very different statements than statements of belief - which are very difficult, if not impossible, to refute.

Gurdur

And I think you're running slapbang into the same problem as before; the argument is a shotgun one, and fails eventually by being too broad a set of assumptions.

I "believe" --- I am firmly of the opinion --- that limited free will and ethics exist.
The evidence on the question is to a large extent contradictory and confused; the question of whether limited free will exists or not is ultimately not decidable by science, since any set of observations and experiments lead back to basic arbitrary presuppositions.
As it is, in some scientific enquiries, limited free will is taken as a given; in almost all academic and clinical enquiries into ethics, limited free will is taken as a given; and in some scientific enquiries, psychological determinism (i.e. no free will of any sort) is taken as a given.

So there we go. My belief that limited free will exists is to my mind justified by the fact that it is a more productive stance when considering human history and society than psychological determinism is, yet I cannot claim all the evidence supports my POV, I can only say in the end that while the "evidence" is in conflict, my POV seems the better from sheer productivity --- but that again is a presupposition in the end.

So, I really don't see just how my belief here could be considered "dishonest", despite the evidence being so inconclusive.

Pyrrho

When people do not use reason and evidence, then they end up will all sorts of silly beliefs. And they act on them, which affects others. Therefore, what people believe is a matter of some concern for others.

For a more detailed discussion of this idea, see:

http://www.ethicsofbelief.com/

(Please note that the authors at that site often use the word "faith" to mean "belief in the absence of evidence". They are, however, generally quite clear about that being the definition that they intend.)


The first step in knowing what to look for in the way of evidence is to know what the claim is that is being made. If, for example, one has the idea that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", that is to say, that beauty is a subjective concept, then one would simply introspect to decide if the sunset were beautiful to one or not, and one would base this judgment upon whether or not one had the appropriate feelings. If, however, one has another idea of what is meant by "beauty", then the first step would be to define the expression, and once one had a satisfactory definition, then one could search for evidence.

The importance of this is easily seen with the following example: Suppose I were to say, "Slivey toves exist." Without having any idea of what a "slivey tove" is, there is no way to look for evidence for the assertion. One must first have a definition; otherwise, the expression is without meaning, as far as one is concerned.

It is only a truth claim if it is meaningful. First one must look for the meaning of the expression, and then figure out what would be evidence for it.

How so? And compared with what?

Since the sentence you propose is about you, we would look to you for evidence. That, of course, is not to say that we would necessarily just take your word for it, but it would require an examination of you, not some other part of the universe.

That is not entirely true, as things that are completely devoid of sense cannot make sense to you. Of course, it is another matter whether or not one feels that something makes sense. However, none of this is essential to the discussion, so I have no interest in pursuing this now.

That is not the kind of statement that is intended in the original post, as is indicated by the sentence there: "I don't doubt that they actually believe it." Since it is a statement about the person's beliefs, rather than about the world, one would look at the person, not the rest of the world, to see if it is true. Of course, one must beware of confusing that expression with: "God the Father Almighty exists", which is a different sentence, though often people slip easily between that one and your sentence: ""I believe in God the Father Almighty." This is probably due to the fact that a person who is open and honest who believes in "God the Father Almighty" would be willing to say, "God the Father Almighty exists". And that is where the discussion becomes more interesting.

The concern has been nicely expressed by Koyaanisqatsi above, in saying that they may be lying to themselves about the matter when they form a belief without any evidence.

jbernier

Now we hit the crux of the problem. I look at the sunset. "Wow," says I. "That meets all the criteria for 'beauty'. It sure is beautiful." I say to you "Pyrrho, that sunset is beautiful." "Bah," says you. "You're on crack. That is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It does not match a single one of the criteria for beauty." Am I being dishonest? Are you? Or are there some concepts and ideas that simply cannot be rigourously subjected to the demands of evidentialist epistemologies?

Not so fast. What if you somehow find a way to examine me and determine that what I am saying is correct (I am not sure how one would do so, given the nature of the statement - but let us assume for argument). If the statement is correct than how can it be dishonest? Same, I must say, with statements about belief. If the statement is correct how can it be dishonest?

So we thus see that the question is perhaps a poor one. If you do not doubt that they actually believe then how can you say that they are being dishonest?

But does necessarily have to make the statement "God the Father Almighty exists beyond any reasonable doubt" in order to state that "I believe that God the Father Almighty exists"? Could not one say "God the Father Almighty might or might exist and I am going to take a guess and say that GtFA does, indeed, exist"? Or, to turn it around, is there greater warrant for saying "God the Father Almighty might or might not exist and and I am going to take a guess and say that GtFA does not exist"? What I am getting at is that I am not convinced that the requisite logic or evidence is available to answer the question "Does God the Father Almighty (or God in general) exist?" either positively or negatively with absolute certainty. In short the "belief without sufficient logic or evidence" could potentially be turned upon atheism as much as it can be turned upon theism.

jbernier

This brings up a very good point (as happens so often with your posts, Gurdur). My issue in this thread is with the moral implications of "dishonesty." That, in fact, is why I even bothered getting involved in the discussion in the first place. If one wants to say that statements made with greater certainty than the evidence warrants are unsound, great; that, however, is very different from "dishonest" which, properly speaking, says something about the character of the person making the statement.

jbernier

Leaving aside my befuddlement about why I must defend what was essentially an autobiographical comment (that my Christocentric ethics make the most sense of my experiential and existential history) I will address these questions.

Let us start with "And compared with what?" As I have recently said in another forum which some here frequent, my ethics are perhaps best described as "social democratic Christocentric political theology." It is a mouth-full but it captures my thinking in the area of ethics with greater precision than most labels ever could. So, "and compared with what?" Well: "Social", in that I prefer a collectivist politics in which such things as health care costs are shared by the larger community as opposed to an atomistic politics in which each person is left to fend for themselves; "democratic", in that I favour a 'decentralized' power structure in which the widest number of people have as much participation as possible in the running of their communities, the state, etc., as opposed to one in which power is concentrated in the hands of a very few; Christocentric, in that I argue that Jesus' vision was an essentially a social one and that this social vision offers a meaningful ethics for the contemporary world, as opposed to a position which says that Jesus is wholly irrelevant as a thinker on ethics; "political", in that I think that all ethics are concerned with the social and that concern with the social also entails concern with the political, as opposed to those who would argue that Jesus' message has nothing to do with politics. The noun, of course, is theology and is modified by the already discussed adjectives; I would have no problem replacing this with "theory" although, I use "theology" to indicate that this is a position which on some levels engages contemporary theology as well as contemporary political thought.

I probably should throw "pacifist" into the adjectival mix but I think that I have enough adjectives in there as it is.

BDS

I wish. I vote for MORE silly beliefs! The one thing we need in this world is more silliness!

Gurdur

To a very large degree, that is very correct.
Throughout history, much damage has come from people convinced they were purifying the dross, and cleaning up society for the "better".

Pluralism rather than purification may well be the best bet.