Keith Russell

Digital:

I cannot prove anything to anyone here.

here, all I have are words, and proof requires more than words.

I have personally talked to many people who claim to have 'willed themselves to believe' in God, the Trinity, Mormonism, etc. (Usually due to 'peer-pressure' from friends or family, and I'm talking about adults in their thirties--not children living at home with their parents.

I define faith as 'belief without evidence', but also as the 'desire to believe'. People do believe what they want--the variable is what do they want to believe?

I choose to be as rational as I am able.

Others often make a different choice.

You don't have to take my word for any of this, in fact I would urge you not to do so.

Talk to people, find out why they believe as they do. Find out what motivated them to believe. Often, it's not 'evidence' (let alone 'proof') at all, but simply 'I believe it because I choose to', or 'that's what I want to be true, so I believe it'.

I can't prove this to you, but you (with a bit of research) can prove it to yourself.

Keith.

[ October 15, 2002: Message edited by: Keith Russell ]</p>

Rusting Car Bumper

A few people have responded with good responses.

I will have to get back to this in a few days as I don't have time to write propoer responses at this instant.

DC

John Page

Unitary Fowl:

Agreed, to the extent that there is cause and effect driving belief, but disagreed based on the example of the Little Engine That Could.

In response to the posts of others, that fact that we can discuss the concept of a belief that does not accord to reality admits the possibility that it can happen! How about "Delusion is reality"?

Cheers, John

luvluv

Slightly off topic, but reading up on the various arguments for God's existence (cosmological, teleological, moral, etc.) have gotten me thinking:

Is there ANYTHING that is not empirically verfiable which has been demonstrated to exist conclusively by argument alone?

Is there ANY succesful argument which, in and of itself and without resort to empirical verification, establishes the existence of ANYTHING?

phaedrus

Wittgenstein did grapple with "certainty"....

Wittgenstein holds that knowledge is radically different from certitude and that neither concept entails the other. It is thus possible to be in a state of knowledge without being certain and to be certain without having knowledge. As he writes: “Instead of ‘I know' . . . couldn't Moore have said: ‘It stands fast for me that . . .' ? and further: ‘It stands fast for me and many others. . . .' ” “Standing fast” is one of the terms Wittgenstein uses for certitude and is to be distinguished from knowing. For him certainty is to be identified with acting, not with seeing propositions to be true, the kind of seeing that issues in knowledge. As he says: “Giving grounds, justifying the evidence comes to an end—but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true—i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language game.”

I dont have the text of a nice essay which was published in the book "Gadamer’s Century". I dont recall the name but the author wrote about certainty of uncertainty...and went on draw parallels between wittgenstein's language games and forms of life and gadamer's hermeneutics.

John Page

Tautologies, since they are self defining.

Oh, by the way, that was a tautology.

Cheers, John