RE: Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position
February 17, 2020 at 7:23 pm
(This post was last modified: February 17, 2020 at 7:25 pm by Belacqua.)
(February 17, 2020 at 8:41 am)Mr.wizard Wrote: No it is not possible, you can't believe a god exists and doesnt exist at the sametime, it is impossible. You can believe a god exists and not know that a god exists and thats where gnostic and agnostic comes in. A weak belief and a strong belief is still belief.
Here you're just repeating your assertion, without any sort of supporting argument. It makes me wonder if this is something you believe for no reason. ("What's asserted without evidence..." etc.)
I think that your conclusion is too simple. Here are my reasons:
You seem to be assuming that the mind works logically. I do not believe that logic is the mind's default mode. Quite the opposite.
If people say that somehow the mind is logical and reasonable and rational, but that sometimes the body (in the form of feelings) interfere with this logical operation, they are believing something which is a hold-over from religious thought. The mind is not something separate from the body. Mind-body dualism is false.
Some people say "the mind is what the brain does," but this is also too simple. In fact the mind is one of many things that the body does. And more things affect the mind than just the brain. The liver makes hormones which change our thinking. I've seen articles claiming that gut bacteria affects thinking. Sapolsky at Stanford says that if you catch toxoplasmosis from cat poo it is likely to affect your taste in clothing.
The mind evolved for survival, not for logical correctness. If ambivalence in belief is helpful -- "I don't believe that's a tiger in the grass, but it probably is" -- then logical contradiction will be selected for.
So logic is not the default mode. And that means that the rules of logic -- if you believe A you can't also believe not-A -- don't necessarily hold in people's thinking. Logic is something we can work on and strive for. We can manage it sometimes. But we've all seen cases of people who think they're being perfectly logical when in fact they weren't. (It may be the case with your claims here too. Perhaps you want the mind to work logically, so you ignore all the empirical evidence that it doesn't.)
It would probably make sense for you to read something about phenomenology. Husserl, Merle-Ponty, Henry -- those guys. There is a huge and persuasive body of work on how the world of our experience differs from the world of math and the world that science tells about. Science can tell us the truth, but we may not experience the world that way. What Husserl calls the Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) -- our values, thoughts, and beliefs -- doesn't follow the world of logic, reasonable cause-and-effect, or the laws of nature as science describes them. As a simple example, time goes faster or slower depending on whether class is interesting or boring. Science tells us that's an illusion, but our experience tells us it's not.
So if we want to talk about people rather than logic-robots, we have to think about how people function.