xeren

Maybe this topic goes better in philosophy


Hi. I've been having a discussion with a friend about my beliefs (i'm an atheist and he believes in a higher power but not in any specific god).
He said that you can't prove that a god doesn't exist. I agreed, "no, you can't prove a negative". But you can prove a god like the x-tian god doesn't exist by showing logical fallacies in a god with specific attributes.

I then went on to explain a few of them (which i will not get into because
1. we all know the common ones and
2. i'm not interested in turning this into a debate with x-tians)

He replied to these fallacies in god with "yeah, but what if there's some reason that god is doing these things, some quality of god that we're missing that we don't know about?"

He has basically given up on trying to know anything about philosophy because he believes that nothing can be truly proven or disproven because there can always be something out there that we haven't thought of that disproves/proves the things we think we know.

NOW FOR THE BIG QUESTION:
Can someone(especially BILL) give me an argument(not about god's logical fallacies, but about how we CAN actually know things by using logic) that might snap him out of his philosphical apathy?


NOTE: I'm NOT interested into turning this into a debate about the logical fallacies inherent in god.

thank you

NialScorva

I would point out that a lot of philosophy, especially epistemology, is about learning the limits of our knowledge and more importantly learning how to extrapolate from what we do know.

This is an example of why I claim that morality is the foundation for philosophy. Your friend is setting a standard that values proof first and formost, thus any arguable facts are dismissed as worthless out of hand. I'd say to try to change that valuation first by showing how we make knowledge claims on a daily basis and how such non-proven facts are amazingly effective in the sciences. It's probably not even worth addressing that debate until you convince him that absolute proof is an unreasonable demand that prevents us from doing anything, while provisional statements of truth based upon knowledge we are reasonably sure of are useful in making truth claims.


Also consider the possibility that your friend just doesn't want to deal with philosophy and makes that claim to keep you from discussing it with him. That's the tactic my friends use on me, anyway.

Plump-DJ

Yes.. i think the problems of knowing are insurmountable.(sp?) We have to agree i think on certain starting points, before we can even talk to each other.

In fact I find myself agreeing with your friend somewhat. I mean when i ponder such things it usually leaves me in a sort of skepticism about wether we can really know anything for sure.

wade-w

Xeren;

Maybe so

I just posted a relpy to your original post. I'll repost it here.

"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has..."
--Martin Luther

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: wadew ]</p>

jpbrooks

While I (also) tend to agree with your friend, at least in spirit, I would suggest critically questioning the reasoning that led up to and/or supports his skeptical position. For instance, you could ask him whether the reason that he provides for his belief that nothing can be truly proven or disproven applies generally to all knowledge claims or only to specific ones.
If it applies generally to all knowledge claims, then his position is clearly self-referentially inconsistent.
If his reason for his position on knowledge claims applies, not to all knowledge claims in general, but only to certain specific ones, then his position is false because, for each specific claim, it provides itself as its own counterexample.

[ August 31, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

xeren

JPBROOKS:

Wow, you are actually right on where i was trying to lead him. I told him that he was being inconsistent because he was applying complete skepticism to only some but not all decisions/beliefs in life. I used the example that if you doubt several things in philosphy simply because there MAY be something we missed, something we're not thinking about that makes our belief incorrect(though we have no evidence against the belief), then how does that not apply to something like believing gravity is going to continue to work. If you stay consistent, then you should never step outside because trusting gravity(believing in it 100%) is the same as coming to a conclusion about any philosophical issue. Yes, you MAY be wrong, if logic is incorrect, but that cannot stop us from coming to conclusions about life, be they daily tasks which we must trust physics to complete or philosophy, which we must trust logic to complete, or we will not be able to do anything ever again.

His rebuttal was that because we must do those daily tasks to survive, we MUST come to conclusions about them, while philosophy is different because it is not absolutely essential to our survival, so we don't have to come to conclusions about that. I told him that their respective importance doesn't matter because they still all fall under the category "beliefs", but he said that because they are of different importance is exactly why they cannot be compared. He disagreed, and round and round we went. Any suggestions from anyone one how to escape this simple differing of opinions?

Infinity Lover

The most popular definition of philosophy, is the desire for wisdom.

Life is about making (wise) choices, and knowledge to base those choices on (wisdom).
Who ever said it's an academic discipline by definition?

Philosophy NOT essential in everyday life?
Could that possibly be the biggest load of crock I ever heard?

Bottom line, the distinction between philosphy and religion, is that the latter is philosphy with it's head up it's ass. The distinction lies in the belief in
1)an eternal soul
2)afterlife
3)higher power
Or perhaps also 4) taking supernatural poetic metaphors litteral, and engaging in worship and rituals.

None of these elements are even remotely essential for everyday life.

So your friend is defininately full of it on that count.

xeren

Infinity Lover:

His point was that if you don't have philosphy in your life you will not die, but if you do not step outside and walk to the store to buy food, you will.

Therefore it is more important in that respect.

jpbrooks

Interesting!
Your conversation with your friend reminds me of some of my past encounters with my family members who hold positions similar to that of your friend, and who (like my sister who is a teacher in the public school system here in Chicago) should know better.

I agree with your rebuttal that your friend is exhibiting bias in applying skepticism to and discounting the importance of philosophical beliefs in comparison with those of (e.g.) physics. (I once attempted to make a similar point against a moral skeptic concerning his reasons for being only a skeptic about moral concepts.)

The very act of setting up a scale that ranks these beliefs against one another assumes that they are commensurable in some way. So, it would be inconsistent for him to turn around and claim that philosophical beliefs cannot be compared with other types of beliefs.

However, I think the point he is trying to make is that philosophy, as a field of study, makes methodological assumptions that make it appear less conclusive than other fields of study in the process of inquiry. This may indeed be true, but philosophy's apparent "inconclusiveness" may have more to do with the scope of its subject matter than with the nature of its beliefs.
For most fields of study, the study of the philosophy of the field in question is a branch of philosophy, and is not actually a part of the field. An example of this would be a science (such as physics) which doesn't include the philosophy of science as part of its subject matter.
Philosophy, on the other hand, is so broad in its scope that it can include the philosophical inquiry of its own subject matter, so that none of its assumptions and methods, for example, are actually beyond the scope of its own inquiry. Thus its inquiry is "endless" in a way that scientific inquiry cannot be. But again, this point is irrelevant to your point about beliefs.

(I'm going to be busy for a while, but I will return later.)

[ August 31, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Bill

He sounds like a decent candidate (if he will cooperate) for a copy of Ayn Rand's book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=453" target="_blank">Philosophy: Who Needs It?</a> That book is a collection of essays, and I recommend reading only the first two essays (borrow the book from a library). It really sounds like your friend is weighted down by the "self doubt" that Rand was discussing, above. Refusal to even examine the issues carefully amounts to the doubt that you are personally capable of sorting things out to your own satisfaction.

== Bill

[ September 01, 2002: Message edited by: Bill ]</p>