On May 5, 2005, at 6:38 PM, William T Goodall wrote:
On 6 May 2005, at 12:58 am, Dave Land wrote:
I bet that listening to authorities is evolutionarily favored, and listening *critically* to authorities even more so. Categorically disregarding authority is no better than categorically following them: it is equally foolish.
That's why one needs to figure out which authority figures actually know what they are talking about and which are authority figures because of monkey tribal nonsense. Which is why epistemology is important. I think you missed the 'just' in 'just because' in the last sentence you quoted.
Yes; deductive thinking is important. It's very valuable. And it's not being inculcated properly, I think; students accepting the fact of evolution by rote are no more capable of thinking clearly (a priori) than other students accepting that the six-day creation was the way it "really" happened. (I know my phrasing here shows my bias. While I can argue for the contrary regarding matters of faith, I cannot in seriousness present evolution as anything but fact or creation as anything but fantasy.)
I'm not personally trying to question your decision about nonexistence of deity. I'm just suggesting that not believing is not necessarily any different -- or any better, at its core -- than believing. There has to be something behind the declaration, something that approximates self-correcting ideation.
[me re acceptance of authority]
I think the tendency persists, and it's hard to counter its effects sometimes. This suggests to me that those who do not believe in a deity are no more proof from believing wacky things than those who do,
It's true that many people are gullible and credulous and easily taken in by charlatans, and that this is a good explanation for the frequency of religious belief.
And, naturally, anti-religious belief. "There is a God" and "there is no God" are equally statements of faith.
No, they aren't actually. "There is no God" is a rational claim based on evidence. "There is a God" is a statement of faith made in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That's not a valid statement without a lot of qualifiers; for instance you don't describe here what sort of god you're talking about. If a believer is a Deist, he might assert that the only role his god had was in the initial creation of the universe, perhaps twiddling the laws a bit in such a way that life could exist (a kind of anthropic principled god). If that Deist than went on to say that, after getting things going, that god has been totally hands-off, the results we see today would not in any way be affected; that is, that entity's presence would not be reflected in anything e see around us now. No fingerprints, no shadows, no hairs left behind at the crime scene. Therefore denial of that god's existence might be as much a statement of faith as asserting that such a god exists.
Now Occam would probably disagree, but we have to start balancing elegances here a little. The universe's physics do seem to be slanted pro-life, as it were (contrarily, that's not surprising, because if they weren't slanted that way we couldn't be here); and of course we can't meaningfully speak of anything that happened before the universe we inhabit now came into existence. What we have, really, is something that is not testable or falsifiable, which precisely places a Deist's claim in the realm of faith. Thus it's meaningless to assert there's evidence either way, ultimately.
What I see when I look around is a cosmos that suggests there is no deific entity currently pulling any strings anywhere. Thus the idea of an involved, omnipresent, -scient and -potent god is not one I can accept. But if we put on the table the suggestion that a hands-off entity got everything started and has since been watching things play out -- well, while I find the idea unlikely, ultimately I can't disprove it. It was this uncertainty that kept me an agnostic for quite some time, FWIW.
So, depending on how you define your gods, denial of their existence can reasonably (I think) be seen as an expression of faith. A Pauline's involved god or a six-day clay shaper doesn't strike me as being remotely possible, and I don't think that statement is one of faith; however, the Deist idea is not one I can simply dismiss as readily. There, I'll freely concede, I am expressing a faith rather than a proximate certainty.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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