RE: On Belief in God X
July 16, 2013 at 2:43 am
(This post was last modified: July 16, 2013 at 2:46 am by Ryantology.)
(July 16, 2013 at 12:44 am)FallentoReason Wrote: They can say whatever they want about the cards they see in front of them. The way properly basic beliefs function almost always guarantee that they are being internally consistent with their claims. Whether or not the internal is consistent with the *ex*ternal is a different matter, and one that you can tackle by undermining their concept of a super-duper-extra royal megaflush. If it's contradictory like a square circle, then their experiential justification is invalid since the experience was false to begin with, just like someone who claims to have seen a square circle holds a false belief.
What I'm trying to say, and what I often say to theists when this subject comes up, is that internal beliefs (should) mean nothing by themselves. Any belief I hold is not a based upon anything I can reliably trust until it has undergone, and survived, the far more rigorous stress test that is testing it external to myself; sharing it with others and allowing them to test it. I am a human. I have senses which are prone to reporting false or contradictory information and I do not have anything like a perfect understanding of what they do show me to know, every time, what is legitimate and what is not all by myself.
If I hold a hand which looks to me, at first glance, like a super-duper-extra royal megaflush, it would be dishonest of me to actually believe it is such a thing until I lay the cards down and subject my hand to the scrutiny of both the rules of the game and the other players at the table. I may really want it to be the ultimate hand of poker, because I am playing this game and I want to win it, but if I am to be a player of this game, I can't let my desire to win be more important than following the rules. Otherwise, I am not really sitting at this table to play the game honestly. I'm only sitting here so that I can make believe that I'm special and feel the entirely insipid satisfaction of knowing that nobody else can ever prove that my hand isn't better than all of theirs.
In short, internal beliefs (other than those which form the border between myself and full-on solipsism) don't mean jack shit to me, and that does not except any that I actually might hold.
