RE: Do Christians have faith in oxygen/air?
December 27, 2017 at 4:09 pm
(This post was last modified: December 27, 2017 at 4:12 pm by Mister Agenda.)
SteveII Wrote:Mister Agenda Wrote:The list of stupid beliefs that cannot be proven false is potentially infinite. I don't think that with a standard that low, crossing the bar of 'not proven to be false' alone would not bring a belief up to a point that it could reasonably be called rational.
I am not saying this is what makes a rational argument. I am saying that in addition to all the reasons that I have outlined here countless times why I believe that list, you cannot show they are false beliefs (or even likely to be false)--so they remain rationally justified beliefs. To say it another way, if you had a way to show they were false, yet I still believed them to be true, then they would not be rationally justified beliefs.
Unfalsifiable beliefs (that is, if they aren't true, there's no way to prove it) don't fall under the heading of 'rationally justified'. It wouldn't take much to falsify my opinion that God is very unlikely to be real; it would be trivial for an omnipotent being to prove me wrong if it cared to. What would falsify your belief that God is real?
SteveII Wrote:Mister Agenda Wrote:That's an interesting story. Too bad your list of dodgy assertions doesn't have that level of credibility going for it. It matches what I suggested for a series of justified probabilistic references, though; but I get you can't tell the difference.
Assertions? Like I told Kevin, it is ridiculous to demand formal arguments every time I mention the reasons for my well-known beliefs.
It's not ridiculous to note that nothing you've ever presented in support of those assertions has held up to scrutiny. You talk as though you've previously made the case for those assertions successfully. It wasn't successful in persuading anyone who wasn't already convinced of your position already.
SteveII Wrote:Mister Agenda Wrote:Your 'cumulative case' is more like:
Say I tell my daughter Santa Clause is real and he's coming down the chimney at our house on Christmas Eve to leave presents (she has a belief). She hears a noise on the roof that night, a sort of clattering sound. Later she hears some noise downstairs and sees someone messing with boxes around the Christmas tree. The next morning she sees that indeed, presents have been delivered. Her original belief has been strengthened by more facts that are not themselves conclusive, but fit the framework. 'Cumulative'. :
Bad parody. I can offer a hundred defeaters for Santa Claus existing. So, while a child's belief might be rationally justified in the absence of those, it will not be if I share them.
And I can offer a hundred excuses to defend Santa, because Santa is unfalsifiable by the same standards God is (keep backing up the claim until there's nothing left that can be disproven; Santa is a normally-invisible spirit and his workshop is on another plane of existence, and only those presents that are unaccounted for are from him; for instance). The child's belief is understandable, but not rational. She's taken your word that such an entity exists without critically examining the fundamental assumption that such a fantastic being is real in the first place. The 'evidence' that follows is built on light, powdery, snow that can never accumulate enough to make Santa Claus being real a rational belief.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.