A3

The biggest flaw is that religions have taken literal tekst and put their interpretations as first and foremost. The Creation story has nothing to do with what you see out the window now. It has everything to do with your insides, you mind. In fact it is the creation of a new spirit and a clean heart in us. The Jews took their revelation literally and so are still waiting for their Messiah. Also the Christians have taken things literally and are still waiting for their Messiah (and that's why there are so many diff. religions (read: opinions). The revelation to the Jews was based on: Do as I say or else (out of obedience) The revelation to the Christians was: do it because it is the right thing to do (from Love) and there is now a new revelation that explains it all (do it because you understand).
Next time I'll post one of our sermons on the Trinity, don't worry it is only a couple of pages long.

Kent Stevens

I am trying to get back to some of the ideas in this topic. These accusations can be bought against everyone.

1. Everyone has faith in reason. Faith here means what it normally means, that is belief without reasoned support.

2. Simple Acceptance. That is you have to simply accept things without any articulated reason for doing so at the time. You just believe some things without any articulated reason being given at the time. You got to have simple acceptance.

3. If you have faith in reason and you have simple acceptance then why do you not accept any religion or ideology that is based on you just accepting certain doctrines. This belief in a religion/ideology could be based on saying if I have faith in reason I can have faith in something else. Or it could be justified by saying I just accept some things so I just accept certain doctrines.


1. This accusation of faith in reason comes from the problem of proving reason. If you try to prove reason then you use reason. Therefore you are using circular reasoning. You seem to be saying I accept reasoning because I accept reasoning. Therefore reasoning if it is to be accepted must be accepted irrationally that is without any reason. But this is what faith is supposed to be firm belief without any reason given. Now since induction is part of reasoning then that must also be accepted on faith.

However, if you fully accept reasoning on faith this stops you accepting anything else irrationally. If you try accepting else irrationally like pigs might fly reason automatically says no to this.

If you say you use faith to accept reason and so you can use it elsewhere you are using reasoning. Reasoning though is diametrically opposed to faith by the definition given above.

Proving faith also has problems. If you use reason to try to prove faith you end up saying reason is good. But reason eliminates faith. If you are accepting faith by faith you are also using a circular argument, which is against reason.

According to Hume the rationalist and the religious person has a similar problem. For you cannot use reason to prove reason or use reason to prove the use of faith.


2. People do simply accept some things without further reason given. You might accept that Mt Everest is the tallest mountain in the world. You might just accept the world is round when you are thinking about travelling. You do not give a reason for this or if you do give a reason you would accept certain premises without further support being immediately given.

When you get up in the morning you just accept that you want to get up. If it is for the money you have not given a reason for wanting money. You are just accepting that you want the money.

This does not mean that you simply accept everything. For example you do not accept that the world is flat. That might be based on believing that science gives a good picture of the world and science says the world is round. But you are simply accepting the premise that science is good when you are doing this immediate reasoning. Because you simply accept certain things results in you rejecting other things.

3. If you have faith or irrational belief in reason this tends to make you reject everything else that wants you to accept anything something on faith. If you just accept faith then you reject reason.

What tends to happen is that people of faith are inconsistant in their use of reason. They use reason to buy a car or pay the bills but then abandon reason to accept certain religious or ideological doctrines on faith. The only thing that rationalists might irrationally believe in is reason itself.

If you just accept some things that makes you reject other things. If you simply accept reason then this would probably make you reject religious ideas that are called faiths.

A3

Sorry, gotto throw in this quote from Swedenborg:
Having heard this, I asked the angels to conduct me to them; and they led me to a cave, from which steps descended to the lower earth. We went down, following the cry, "O how learned!" And see, several hundred spirits stood in one place, stamping upon the ground. Wondering at this, I asked why they thus stood and stamped the ground with their feet, adding, that they might make a hole in it with their feet.
At this the angels smiled and said, "They appear so to stand still, because their thought on any subject is never accepting, but only debating whether it is so or not, and thus it is a matter of dispute; and as they never get beyond this in their thought, they appear as never advancing, but only as treading and wearing on one spot."
The angels also said, "Those who come from the natural world into the afterlife and hear that they are now in another world form themselves into companies in many places and ask where heaven is, where hell is, and where God is. And when they have been told they begin to reason, dispute, and contend about whether there is a God. This they do, because in the natural world at the present day, there are so many naturalists, who, whenever religion is talked about, bring the subject into dispute, both among themselves and with others; and the discussion of this question rarely terminates in an affirmation of belief that there is a God. Afterwards these persons associate themselves more and more with the wicked, which is done because no one can do any good base on the love of good, except when it is from God."
A3

Kellys255

Bullhocky

owleye

Kent...

Suffice it to say that I'm not impressed that you support your assertion by carting out other non-believers to support you.

"Observe the Islamic profession of faith (shahada) which all Muslims must pronounce. "There is no god but god and Muhammad is his messenger". The first part says there is only one god which contradicts the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of the holy trinity. No wonder there is such conflict between Christainity and Islam at times."

I believe you are misrepresenting the position of one religion by characterizing it through another religion, presumably on the grounds that you think it implies something contradictory and therefore everyone would equally find it so. However, what is holding you back is your non-belief. For some reason you want to take a literalist position on religious doctrines -- so literal and formal that the language being spoken is that of logic and mathematics.

"What I am trying to suggest is that not everyone has to say things like justifiable assumptions all the time when they are talking about a scientific experiments. They can simply talk about having certain assumptions. It is implicitly assumed that they are justifiable or else the experimental results would be wrong. If the assumptions are not justifiable this may be found out by someone who redoes the same experiment."

If this says anything, I can't imagine what it could be. It would be helpful if you gave an example of what you had in mind. As I mentioned the last time, I was not going to respond to any of your psychological ramblings but decided to try to see whether you were formulating your ideas in the above area of science in a non-psychological way. Unfortunately, your "clarification" did not dispel that possibility. I can be still be wrong, though. It's difficult to get past this when you include "has to" and "all the time" in "not everyone has to say things like justifiable assumptions all the time." Do you have a psychological point you are making or a point of language use, or what? This same sort of thing is reflected in your discussion of mathematicians and logicians, as if you are involving them personally in the point you wish to make.

"Also, for each mathematician or logician I am not saying they change their normal way of talking when they talk about axioms of a given system. They do not have to start talking about justifiable axioms all the time."

To support the above, you go on to say...
"It is implicitly assumed these axioms are justifiable or else the results would be false."

Do you really mean "justifiable?" Or would it be or accurate to say "justified?" I say this since one might conclude from what you say that if the results of an experiment did not support the theory being tested, its axioms would not be justified.

In any case, I don't believe this is the logic of the scientific method. Many of a theory's axioms could be justified, yet some experiment might not give the expected results. Ordinarily speaking, if this represents what is called a falsifying result, the fault is given to the theory itself (i.e., the law of nature being formulted by the theory) not specifically to its assumptions. Nevertheless, I suspect that in the majority of cases, when a theory is rejected, one or more of its assumptions turns out to be wrong. However, it is highly unlikely that all of the assumptions turn out to be wrong. And this is what you seem to be implying.

owleye

owleye

Kent...

Your dogmatism is showing.

"1. Everyone has faith in reason. Faith here means what it normally means, that is belief without reasoned support."

I disagree with the first assertion, both on the count of its alleged universality ("everyone") and that "faith in reason" is wrong on the face of it. I disagree with the second assertion as well, since this is not what faith "normally means." I might, however, allow that it means belief without supporting evidence, requiring a "leap of faith" (i.e., some risk). In any case, it is a misuse of 'faith' and 'reason' to say that we place faith in reason. Indeed, our use of reason (in its scientific application) specifically does not depend on our faith. Science, in order to advance, requires evidence. Our reasoning could be entirely wrong and will be shown to be wrong if the evidence doesn't support it. This is precisely what is missing when we take things on faith. Indeed, if we did in fact place our faith in reason, we would believe theories to be true despite the evidence which goes against them and this is not how science operates (in the long term anyway).

Fell

John Page

Kent:

Faith need not be blind to reason.

Kent Stevens

What I am saying that I am not the only person who thinks the doctrine of the holy trinity is ridiculous.

The doctrine seems ridiculous because it says that there are three persons contained in one person. If there are three persons are decisions made by a committee? God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost get together to decide when the second coming of Jesus is going to be. Jesus says that he wants to go back now but the Father says no and the Holy Spirit says no. They take a vote and decide that Jesus will come back at a later time.

The doctrine of the holy trinity suggests that God could be schizophrenic. Does god take on the Fathers persona when he wants to be wrathful, Jesus' persona when he wants to forgive, the Holy Ghost persona when he wants to bring peace. Then god is inconsistent in his attributes.

If someone says I am one person with three aspects would you believe them? Would you believe if they say that they are simultaneously a father, a son , and a grandchild say? If you say that all things are possible with God then he can break reason and say that he is both Arthur, Marthur, and Richard simultaeously. But God is supposed to be a god of reason from which we derive our reason from.

I plead guilty to being a literalist, and using logic, and mathematics in the search for truth. If god exists then according to Islam I will burn forever in fire for my unbelief in God. So I had better find out the truth about this situation. I accept that if God existd he also created logical and mathematical ability in man, and expected us to use it.

In terms of having justified acceptance what I was trying to say was that people accept something because it feels all right to do so. But this does not really mean much at all. Even Hitler or Stalin might feel justified in their heinous crimes. If they did not feel all right about murdering millions of people they would not have done these crimes at the time. But in no way are these crimes justified to normal moral thinking.

Consequently, I am not using the term justified acceptance any more. I am using something completely different that is the term simple acceptance. Simple acceptance refers to the when you simply accept something without any other articulated reason being given at the time. For example someone might accept the world is round without articulating a reason why this is so. If they want to dig deeper an find out why they might end up simply accepting the evidence provided by science that the world is round.

"Your dogmatism is showing."

I am not dogmatic. If I was dogmatic I would not be having a philosophical discussion about the truth of things. I would not have modified my ideas in this thread which is what I have done. I would not have abandoned using the term faith for many things because it is so confusing to others. I am exploring a subject and allowing others to criticise my suggestions. I have confidence but I am not arrogant in that I will not change my views if evidence suggests otherwise.

If you are unhappy using the term faith you can use the term irrationally in its place. Irrationally means without reasoning. The first proposition then becomes pretty much equivalent to

1. Everyone accepts Reason. (Accepting reasoning is like accepting language. Language is pretty much universal as is using some reason.) If people accept reason based on reason they are not justified in doing so as this is itself circular reasoning. In this sense the principle of Reason is accepted irrationally without further reasons given.

Someone might say that if reason is accepted irrationally then why not accept doctrines from Christainity without logical justification? But I say that once rationality is accepted we would not accept other things irrationally if we were consistent in our use of reason.

I see that everyone uses reason at least part of the time. If someone does not use reason much at all that person might be put into a mental institution. By reason I mean that people draw conclusions from premises or they by induction they infer generalisations.

Hume was as a thorough going skeptic who doubted pretty much everything. He doubted reason itself as how can reason be proved without using other reasons.

Hume said that reason was accepted irrationally without reason. Hume also said that religion was accepted irrationally because of things like the problem of evil existing if god is all powerful.

Hume said that reason was built into us like an instinct and reinforced by culture. This does not necessarily mean that we use reason all the time but it does mean that do we use reason for at least part of the time.

[ March 02, 2002: Message edited by: Kent Stevens ]</p>

Kent Stevens

It is an abuse of language to say that we have faith in reason.

Partly this is because faith and reason are antagonistic towards each other. But it also seems weird or nonsensical to use the word faith outside of it's normal religious context.

The following are examples of the abuse of the word faith when the word belief or believe should probably be used instead. You could also use the word accept instead of the word belief.

I have faith that the world is round.
I have faith that Mt Everest is the tallest mountain on the Earth.
I have faith that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen.
I have faith that I exist.
I have faith in government.
I have faith in science.
I have faith in my children.
I have faith in the principles of Marxism.
I have faith in the principles of the American Revolution.
I have faith that I have a sense of vision.
I have faith that I have the sense of hearing.
I have faith that everyone uses language.
I have faith that I use reason.
I have faith that everyone uses reason in part.

In terms of basic features of humanity it would be wrong to use the term faith such as:
I have faith in the sense of sight.
I have faith in language.
I have faith in reason.

It is better to say:
I have the sense of sight.
I use language.
I use reason.

About in the only context that the use of the term faith is probably not an abuse of language is in a religious context. Some of the following examples show how faith can be used sensibly.

I have faith in the divinity of Jesus.
This is a profession of my faith.
I have faith in the holy church.
I have faith in the holy bible.

Now you could also use the term belief here where the term faith is used. But you should not use faith where the term belief is used.

Some people could replace faith with irrational belief such as.
I have an irrational belief in the holy church.
I have an irrational belief in the holy bible.

But religious people would probably want to dispute this interpretation of faith.

Even the use of the term irrational can create problems. We normally use the term irrational when something does not make sense such as
It is irrational to say that 1 = 3.
Her behaviour was irrational.

Does not make sense is different from not using reasoning.

It is better to say that we have reason. We use reason like we use our sense of sight. We simply accept the principle without further reasoning being given. We can not prove reasoning. Some reasoning is pretty much universal like language or the sense of vision is. Furthermore, culture may reinforce the use of at least some reason.

A3

Hi Kent,

Hume said that reason was accepted irrationally without reason. Hume also said that religion was accepted irrationally because of things like the problem of evil existing if god is all powerful.

This goes to show what "reason" can do if we don't know the why or where. If you know why and from where evil exists there is no problem.
If we assume that God is reasonable and just than so should a correct interpretation of His religion be reasonable and just.
Humans can reason that a crow is black and that it is white.
Sometimes when we step back we might see two drawings arguing about the existance of the architect.
Just thought to elaborate a bit here. We have all heard it before, God is Love. Love is a spiritual "substance" and the essence of love is: Love others outside of oneself with the desire to be one with them and make them happy.
So God creates people that He can share His love with them, NOT because He needs their love. We don’t marry somone so they can love us, we don’t decide to have kids so they can love us either. Synonymous with love is freedom, love cannot be forced. He gives us choices as to how we respond to life and thus Him. We have the freedom to accept His love or to reject it. This freedom is so important that He will not force us to love Him, or compel us to live honestly, fairly and peacefully with each other. The origin of evil is us making the wrong choice. So evil is allowed but only in so far some good can come out of it.
That BTW is one of 5 spiritual laws.
A3

[ March 03, 2002: Message edited by: A3 ]</p>