(August 9, 2015 at 1:53 pm)pool Wrote:(August 9, 2015 at 1:45 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: If you don't know what something is, the first step is figuring that out. If someone tells you that a god exists, if you do not know what the person means by "god," then you are not in a position to say whether it exists or not. So, until you know something about that, you should neither believe that it exists, nor believe that it does not exist. It is only after you know what the person is talking about that you will be in a position to look for evidence. If you do know what someone means by their claim, then the default position is still that you do not know whether it exists or not, until after you get some sort of evidence regarding it. Then you should believe what the evidence supports, and you should believe in proportion to the evidence. Which is to say, you should only have a slight tendency to believe something if you have weak evidence for it, and a strong tendency to believe something if you have strong evidence for it. Right now, I am more certain that I am sitting in front of my computer, than I am that the car I have been using is parked out front. The reason being, I presently see my computer and notice that I am sitting in front of it, but I cannot see the car out front from my present position. It is possible (though unlikely) that someone has stolen the car since I last observed it. So my belief that I am sitting at my computer is stronger than my belief that the car is out front.
In the case of the god question, if you find that the person does not mean anything by the term "god" (which is more common than you might think), then the proper response is NOT to say that "god does not exist;" the proper response is that the person is just speaking gibberish and is not really saying anything meaningful.
Finally...A human that understands me! lol xD (I hope you're not playing me like EP lol)
So i have just this one doubt,i understand that i cannot believe in the claim or not believe in the claim until i understand what the claim constitutes.
Consider a situation where it is not possible to understand what the claim is.How am i supposed to react to this situation? What is my position?
Well, people can and do many unreasonable things, so people can believe that something is true without understanding it. Also, and this is worth remembering, if every respectable physicist tells you that "E=mc2" is true, you might reasonably believe that the statement is likely true without necessarily knowing what it means, if one has reason to believe that the physicists know what they are talking about.
In the general case of not knowing what something means, if one is reasonable, one simply takes no position about it. One neither affirms that it is true, nor does one affirm that it is false.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
