RE: Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position
February 14, 2020 at 9:37 pm
(This post was last modified: February 14, 2020 at 9:37 pm by Belacqua.)
(February 14, 2020 at 5:13 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: Let's take the motto "I believe in science" for example, which is, for most skeptics, a euphemism for "I don't believe in anything any religion claims".
One thing to keep in mind is that the word "believe" in English has two distinct meanings.
One meaning is: "I believe the world is round" which is assent to the truth of a proposition. I hold the proposition to be true.
The other meaning is "I believe in equal rights for women," which is commitment to a value. Obviously we don't have equal rights for women now, so we don't believe in them the way we believe the world is round.
I think that a lot of religious belief is this second type. People say "I believe in Jesus" (or something similar) as a commitment to a value. Jesus represents values for them, and they want to be committed to those values.
The trouble is when people conflate the two. Someone may feel forced to believe in the first way (Jesus really did those things) when he believes in the second way (I like what Jesus said).
Likewise, people are reasonable to say that the results from the scientific method are (relatively) believable in the first way. We assent to the truth of propositions which are arrived at through the scientific method.
But here too, people may believe in science as a commitment to its values, and in this case it becomes something more like ideology. Those things science shows are to be valued and things it can't show are not to be valued. This ends up doing more than the scientific method really shows. In this case, it's true that some people aren't thinking about the words sufficiently.
