(July 23, 2015 at 9:45 pm)bennyboy Wrote: ...
But let me ask you the same thing I asked the OP-- do you think that ideas based on "sufficient evidence" are any more sure to lead to good behavior? ...
Beliefs based on sufficient evidence are more likely to lead to good behavior if the person's motives are good. But not if the person's motives are bad. Beliefs are only part of the equation. But they are an important part.
If you sincerely believe that people will go to hell, where they will be constantly tortured in unimaginably bad ways forever, if they don't believe in god, then wouldn't it make sense to torture someone now if that would get them to believe so that they could avoid hell? Wouldn't you be doing them a favor by so torturing them? From this, which is obviously not a purely hypothetical example, we can see that beliefs are extremely important, even though they are just part of the totality that brings about actions. Ironically, if you did not care about a person at all, and had such a belief, you might not torture them, as you would not care that they will be tortured forever in hell.
Most people, though, seem to have some feelings of empathy, however weak, and so most people will be more likely to do good things if they are careful about what they believe. Additionally, societies tend to condemn certain kinds of behavior (like murder and theft), and so having the appropriate beliefs about those sorts of things also tends to encourage good behavior, for those who wish to avoid the relevant punishments. Of course, for someone who does not care if he goes to jail or not, threats of jail are no deterrent. Nor is death, for someone who does not care if he is killed or not. So which things matter will depend on many variables for particular individuals. But we can say that most people don't want to go to jail, and most people don't want to be fined, etc. So we can make general pronouncements, even though those pronouncements will not apply to absolutely every individual.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
