RE: Question about "faith"
September 25, 2020 at 9:09 am
(This post was last modified: September 25, 2020 at 9:19 am by Mister Agenda.)
(September 24, 2020 at 12:50 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(September 24, 2020 at 9:31 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: When something is based on evidence and reason, I find that I need not exert any will to believe it.
Provided the evidence and reasons meet your personal threshold. And of course, your biases against a proposition undoubtedly raise your acceptance threshold, and biases in favor lower it.
The forum seems unaware that people's thresholds differ; and they judge another's threshold by contrasting it to their own. To use a potentially wrong analogy: for some people the existence of Black Holes is reasonable based solely on the math; for others it is reasonable only when gravitational waves are measured; and still others find it unreasonable until a Black Hole is observed directly.
When it comes to God: for some people, existence alone is sufficient to make the proposition reasonable; for others, nothing short of directly observing God makes it reasonable. And between these ends lies an entire spectrum of thresholds that are as diverse as the brains in which they occur.
As such my only concern is not to convince anyone here that God exists, but getting them to see how someone else might find it reasonable, and to respect that.
Is it good to have a low threshold? Is it a virtue to have to exert will to believe something is true?
The people who are convinced existence alone is sufficient to make the proposition reasonable are making the fallacy of affirming the consequent:
If God, then the universe.
The universe, therefore God.
If there's no gas in the car, it won't run.
The car won't run, therefore there's no gas in it.
(September 24, 2020 at 10:47 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(September 24, 2020 at 10:11 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: Sure, but scientists don't write up 1000 stupid hypotheses and then go about attempting to falsify them.
Science progresses through conjecture and refutation. By conjecturing you are in fact coming up with 1,000 different propositions and attempting to refute them.
Conjecture is by it's very nature inductive, it goes beyond what you know. You are free to think outside the box. Once a theory is formulated, hypotheses are deduced, and experiments are conducted to falsify the conjecture.
To approach God scientifically you need to start with God first, and then attempt to falsify it. You cannot start from zero and attempt to prove your way up to God.
This is because you would be affirming the consequent in your experimental design: If you hypothesize that "If ghosts exists, then lights will flicker at the cemetery" and you take a light to the cemetery and it flickers, that information is insufficient to conclude ghosts exists because other explanations are possible (dead battery).
But if the light doesn't flicker at the cemetery, we can conclude that ghosts don't exist. For that reason science never aims to prove it aims to disprove.
A hypothesis is not mere conjecture, it is a proposed explanation for available evidence, and that explanation has to be falsifiable. Guess what ghosts aren't.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.