(August 9, 2015 at 4:45 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:Quote:Correct me if i'm wrong,but isn't disbelieving in something because there is no good reason not to as irrational as believing in something because there is no good reason not to?
You're wrong. Here's why.
When I say 'disbelieve x because there's no good reason not to', I'm making the semantic equivalent of 'there is no good reason to believe x'.
If I say 'believe x because there's no good reason not to', I'm making the semantic equivalent of 'accept x even though there is no good reason to suppose it is true'.
What you seem to be shooting for is the ultimate 'middle ground' - you will decline to disbelieve a proposition until all the evidence is in. Nowt wrong with being skeptical, but there's such a thing as being so open-minded that your brain falls out.
I'll try one more example: Bigfoot.
There is no direct evidence for Bigfoot. All of the indirect evidence is either astoundingly poor or revealed as hoaxes. Primates do not live in temperate zones. Tens of thousands of people have been, for 50-odd years, scouring the USian northwest and other areas with cameras, microphones, IR scanners, and yet there's not one piece, one scrap of evidence for ANY 8 foot tall bipedal primates in these areas - no fur, no scat, no flesh, no blood, no bones, no videos, no still photos. Given the number of reported sightings, Americans should be running over a Bigfoot with a car every other day. Yet we haven't found a single Bigfoot corpse. Not one. People often like to compare Bigfoot with the skepticism of Europeans when they heard reports of gorillas in Africa. Why is this a lousy comparison? Because the first Europeans who actually went looking for gorillas found them.
At this point, it is non-rational to say, 'We, they could still be there.' The rational positions is, 'People have been looking for an type of animal in a habitat where that animal is known not to exist. They've been looking for this animal for a half-century of more, with all manner of sophisticated equipment and have come up with fuck all in the way of evidence. I do not believe that Bigfoot exists.'
Boru
(Guilty of not reading the whole example)
The problem with examples is that there cannot be any examples.Unless the subject in the example is something that is as Personal and as ill-defined as God.
You couldn't give an example with the subject being Bigfoot,because most people know what it is and agree unanimously which is not the case when it comes to God.
For example,you could give an example with the subject being something as meaningless as God,like asdfghjkl,but not Bigfoot.
That's what i think.
