(October 25, 2012 at 10:57 am)apophenia Wrote: Perhaps. But how do you separate it from confirmation bias?
Perhaps it's double edge sword. Our emotions wanting to believe in something can be a strength or a weakness.
For example, our belief in morals, is heavily emotionally driven. We also refuse to believe we have no free-will perhaps primarily to emotion. Not upon analytical reasoning.
In this case, I would say "praise" "value" are also emotionally driven beliefs. We want to believe in these things, and without that want to believe, there is a high chance we would not believe in them.
Does that mean however we cannot know a moral truth? Most humans refuse to believe this notion.
There is no cold "logic" here. It's emotional/spiritual and roundy with curves as opposed to straight forward.
Quote:Perhaps. You have a lot of "might be true" things. The class of things which "might be true" is infinite. This is the factual corrolary to logical explosion. If we do not hold to a higher epistemic standard, our world will shudder throughout with the dissonance of infinitely many inconsistent tacit beliefs. And while science and philosophy can't tell you what is true, they can tell you more reliably what is most probable. And that assessment can range from 1% to 99%. However all the deist arguments I've seen you give tend to cluster at around the 0.000001% mark. Science works, not arbitrarily, but because it is founded on good logic and epistemology. If you want to run the old nags and old paint against her Secretariat, be my guest; just don't expect to win.
Science works, but we also need "art", we also need "morals" and I feel we also need "God".
We need to have a sense of pride and science won't tell us the value of our being.
There is "cold" type knowledge that is rather dry, and then there is "hot" "curvy" knowledge that is controversial .
I would say if we only had the "cold" type knowledge, our existence would rather be dry.
And if we inferred God from a "cold" type knowledge, it would feel dry and boring, and not as pleasurable.
We need both squares type knowledge and curvy type knowledge.
We need controversial moral subjects. We need to come across things some people praise and some people condemn.
Or else it would be really really boring