Truth

[mitchellmckain]

Belief
Belief is information that we feel is true.

And this is where the complete bullshit is to be found in what you are saying. It is a platform for self-serving arrogant rhetoric to declare that anyone who believes differently than you do, doesn't "think" something is true but only "feels" that it is true.

No this is bullshit. And I don't think your other definitions match up with an honest evaluation of their actual usage either.

Belief is information that we think is true and we always do so for some sort of reason and evidence. But belief lies in a spectrum of certainty from mere opinion to knowledge, depending on the nature and extent of the reasons and evidence that the belief is based upon, and measured by how much we invest in, depend on and act accordingly. We may be of the opinion that a bridge is safe but if we lack certainty we may be unwilling to trust our lives or the lives of our family to the thing. Knowledge is nothing more than beliefs which we are wholly invested in without reservation and thus live our lives by them. To say that knowledge is any more than that is nothing but a lot of hot air and bluster attempting to force what you believe onto other people.

Thus my Venn diagram has belief intersecting truth and knowledge as a subset of belief that also intersects truth.

Faith and theory do not belong in the diagram at all.

Faith is a choice that makes up for the universal inadequacy of proof and evidence and their failure to establish things beyond all possibility of doubt. It is ultimately what distinguishes knowledge from the rest of the spectrum of belief. We choose to put our faith in things because life requires it and simply does not wait. Rational faith is always contingent upon finding no conclusive evidence to the contrary, and thus must be distinguished from "blind faith" which wilfully contradicts and ignores all proof and evidence to the contrary. Absolute certainty is ultimately a delusion, and it is a delusion which people indulge in as a part of wilfull ignorance and blind faith.

In science a theory is an explanatory system that enables us to explain and answer a whole range of phenomenon and questions. Every time it successfully predicts the result of a proceedure (experiment), the theory is confirmed, and as the theory continues to prove itself in this way it becomes scientific knowledge because more and more we use it as a tool by which we conduct futher scientific inquiry.

Most people would probably say that by definition they must believe what they consider to be the truth. However, is that really so? A well-documented6 phenomenon called Motivated Reasoning informs us that people are likely to select beliefs that reinforce their world view rather than accept beliefs according to the validity of the propositions presented.

As if "belief" were distinct from "world view". LOL Of course people try to select beliefs in one area that they think are consistent with their beliefs in other areas.

[Yuri]

Belief
Belief is information that we feel is true.

And this is where the complete bullshit is to be found in what you are saying.

Of course people try to select beliefs in one area that they think are consistent with their beliefs in other areas.

My assertion is that people choose their beliefs based on their feelings. Your second statement is a good example, it is just that you are misusing (in my opinion) the word "think" when "feel" would be more appropriate. People select beliefs that they feel are consistent. To think they are consistent requires a logical test to prove consistency; that is not the case with belief. If they performed the logical test and proved consistency, they would know rather than believe. Thus, belief is information that we feel is true. Knowledge is information that we think is true. If you still think that I am wrong about it then calling it "bullshit" won't change my mind! I am open to rational persuasion.

My Venn diagram has belief intersecting truth and knowledge as a subset of belief that also intersects truth.

Faith and theory do not belong in the diagram at all.

I can picture your venn diagram: Knowledge is wholly inside belief. Knowledge and belief intersect truth. So, knowledge is a kind of belief. Consider the statement:

"I strongly believe in the Loch Ness Monster."

If knowledge were a sub-set of belief, then you could further add,

"I strongly know in the Loch Ness Monster."

If you happen to know that the Loch Ness Monster exists, you wouldn't say "I believe in the Loch Ness Monster", you would say "I know the Loch Ness Monster exists."

I'm sorry, I am not persuaded by your assertion that knowledge is a kind of belief.

Note, I am only talking about the workings of the rational brain. A religious devotee may not be capable of distinguishing between knowledge, belief and truth.

To an atheist, it seems a simple enough proposition to recognize reason and abandon faith. To the devout, it is an absurd proposition. Belief is nothing like knowledge; belief has an emotional value, it is derived from feelings, it is chemically part of the workings of the mind, not simple valueless thought like relativity or evolution. Furthermore, for most religious people, it might only be possible to abandon their belief along with abandoning friends, family, culture, and country. In some cases, even life is in jeopardy if belief is publicly abandoned. In these circumstances, I don’t expect to persuade everyone.

Religious devotees who expose themselves to logic and secular knowledge must live lives under constant mental discomfort from cognitive dissonance. You see it on the web forums, you see it on the TV when the religious riot over cartoons, you see it on the news when the religious clash with their opposites, the secular fascists. It is that discomfort that I have shed by trimming down much of my belief and my knowledge. I strive to only keep beliefs that I know are not on topics which ought to be the realm of objectivity. My beliefs are such subjective things as that I love my wife more than anything or anybody else in the world, that I love to go skiing, that I love my cat, I love motorcycling, I love certain artists’ work. There can be no dissonance with such beliefs. As for knowledge, I only know what I can prove, and even that I suspect may be false and I keep looking for ways to test it. To the rest of information I say “I don’t know”. The nimbleness of such open-mindedness releases more of the mind’s potential.

Those who believe things which they know must have an ultimate truth are confused. To admit belief is to admit a value-based judgement with all its associated cognitive biases. If you have a single belief based on an incorrect premise on a topic that has no business in subjectivity, you are in danger of being host to an intricate web of delusion. Such topics are questions like "where did the universe come from?" or "what happens after I die?" If you want an opinion on those topics, make a hypothesis and test it. Don't assume that some authority source knows the answer or you end up stuck in an endless loop of circular value-based reasoning called "Faith".

Faith is a choice that makes up for the universal inadequacy of proof and evidence and their failure to establish things beyond all possibility of doubt.

Agreed. There is another choice, which is to say "I don't know." It's a more difficult but more honest choice.

I broadly agree with your description of science. To me, science is logic-based, whereas faith is value-based. You can see this in the comparison that we constantly question the validity of scientific theory to get closer to the truth, but we never question our faith - because that would be blasphemy.

[Keep The Reason]

Religious devotees who expose themselves to logic and secular knowledge must live lives under constant mental discomfort from cognitive dissonance.

Yup.

Agreed. There is another choice, which is to say "I don't know." It's a more difficult but more honest choice.

Agreed again.

I broadly agree with your description of science. To me, science is logic-based, whereas faith is value-based. You can see this in the comparison that we constantly question the validity of scientific theory to get closer to the truth, but we never question our faith - because that would be blasphemy.

Well theists consider questioning their faith to be blasphemy but secularists who might have faith-based beliefs -- for instance, the faith in one's scientific hypothesis before proof comes along to support it or topple it -- recognize that faith is not knowledge, but belief. That's not enough to satisfy, hence the scientist will take their faith--based belief and apply to it stringent disciplines to try to make it into knowledge. And if they fail, they will say "I don't know." (or, they might keep at it for their entire lives and still fail).

Theists simply do not do this-- even the theists here (who are not the unthinking type of theist that defines the vast majority of believers) cannot apply any disciplines to their faith-based beliefs but simply ignore that step, or convince themselves they have not ignored it by claiming special dispensations as to why their faith-based beliefs are outside of such due diligence.

[Yuri]

Agreed with all you said, Keep The Reason. One thing:

Well theists consider questioning their faith to be blasphemy but secularists who might have faith-based beliefs -- for instance, the faith in one's scientific hypothesis before proof comes along to support it or topple it -- recognize that faith is not knowledge, but belief. That's not enough to satisfy, hence the scientist will take their faith--based belief and apply to it stringent disciplines to try to make it into knowledge. And if they fail, they will say "I don't know." (or, they might keep at it for their entire lives and still fail).

I think we have two completely different meanings for the word "faith" in the english language. One is the faith we have in our son when we say we have faith he will do well in his cricket match, or the faith a scientist has in his hypothesis before he tests it. The other is the religious kind. I think they are quite separate meanings for the same word, and it causes a deal of confusion.

Thanks for the feedback.

[mitchellmckain]

Please make up your mind! Are you disagreeing with me or agreeing with me?

My assertion is that people choose their beliefs based on their feelings.

Completely disagreeing. People choose their beliefs for all kinds of reasons. Some may indeed do so based on their feelings, but others do not. Therefore your assertion is incorrect.

Your second statement is a good example, thank you for backing me up.

I certainly think that the belief stated here is very likely one that is based on YOUR feelings -- like your desire for things to agree with your declarations -- even if you have to force round pegs into square holes.

Logical consistency is a matter of thinking not feeling. People choose their belief according to what they THINK fits into a logically consistent picture of reality as they have experienced it. Logical consistency is, in fact, the minimum condition for something to even be meaningful. Therefore it makes no sense whatsoever to choose a belief that is inconsistent with your world view. So if you think there is sufficient evidence for believing something that is not consistent with your world view then you are going to change your world view first.

Note, I am only talking about the workings of the rational brain.

No I think you are talking about YOUR mind. That is after all the only one that you have first-hand knowledge of. Thus when you assert that "beliefs are based on feelings", the obvious truth of what you are saying is that YOUR beliefs are based on feelings. Thus despite your wish to pretend that yours is an example of a rational mind your assertions prove that this most certainly is not the case.

I am open to rational persuasion.

Not likely since you choose your beliefs based on feelings rather than thinking.

A religious devotee may not be capable of distinguishing between knowledge, belief and truth. It could be a kind of brain damage.

Ahh! So if you were ever in a religion then your brain is damaged, right? So then people abandoning religious belief are not doing so with a fully functioning brain, but those who were never in a religion but decide to adopt a religious belief CAN be doing so with a healthy brain. This is not a very high recommendation for non-religious belief.

But, of course, this is all bull shit and nonsense that reveals the feelings behind your beliefs -- the desperate need to believe that people who think differently than you and disagree with your subjective undemonstrable opinions must have something wrong with them.

I have no such need or feeling. I do not measure the rationality of other people by their agreement with my beliefs. People can be rational whether they are Christian, atheist, Wicca, Hindu or whatever. Rationality has to do with the logical consistency of their beliefs and not their position on issues which are not objectively demonstrable. Likewise people can be irrational whether they are Christian, atheist, Wicca, Hindu or whatever. I see irrational declarations by people regardless of their position on objectively undecidable questions.

To an atheist, it seems a simple enough proposition to recognize reason and abandon faith. To the devout, it is an absurd proposition. Belief is nothing like knowledge; belief has an emotional value, it is derived from feelings, it is chemically part of the workings of the mind, not simple valueless thought like relativity or evolution.

To me I see both propositions, that God exists or that God does not exist, as matters of reason not feeling. But your inability see these both on a rational basis reveals that beneath your rational pretensions is a sea of emotion upon which you base your beliefs in this matter. So with regards to the workings of your mind and the beliefs which you embrace I think your model is a good fit indeed.

You see people don't just abandon religous beliefs they also adopt religious beliefs and they do both for a great variety of reasons. And either way, some are caught up in the emotion of their personal experience of liberation from their past life and others are simply following a line of reasoning seeking that which best matches what they have experienced of reality. I think the surest sign of which is which, is visible in their attitude towards the world-view they have abandoned. Those who change their beliefs based on emotion cannot look at both sides with equanimity. They have difficulty seeing the objective undecidability of the matter and thus will start measuring things like rationality and morality simply by whethr things agree with their new belief system. They invariable see those who hold the view they have rejected as having something wrong with them.

Religious devotees who expose themselves to logic and secular knowledge must live lives under constant mental discomfort from cognitive dissonance.

LOL Incorrect. I was raised in the most liberal family imaginable by two psychology graduates, fed a steady diet of skepticism, secular values, and scathing criticisms of the Christian establishment. In college I studied mathematics (BS) and physics (MS). But I also explored the offerings of philosophy and I strongly resonated with existentialism and pragmatism. I explored the beliefs of many different religions and found much of value there also, and although I am still a secularist, a physicist, an existentialist and a pragmatist, and find no fault with the criticisms of the Christian establishment taught in my youth, I am also an evangelical Trinitarian Christian.

There is no cognitive dissonance or mental discomfort in my case, and I don't have to discount dissonant data by believing that people who disagree with me are somehow defective.

You see it on the web forums, you see it on the TV when the religious riot over cartoons, you see it on the news when the religious clash with their opposites, the secular fascists.

Certainly. I also see it when the anti-religious clash with those they oppose.

It is that discomfort that I have shed by trimming down much of my belief and my knowledge.

Yes but not everyone's beliefs are motivated by a desire to avoid intellectual discomfort.

As for knowledge, I only know what I can prove, and even that I suspect may be false and I keep looking for ways to test it.

It is false. Knowledge is not based proof. Like all beliefs it CAN be based on reason rather than emotion, especially if instead of repressing and ignoring emotions one acknowledges them and includes them as part of the datum to be considered when deciding what is true. But being based on reason is not the same as based on proof because logic can only take you from premises to conclusions. Thus you have to start somewhere with premises taken on faith. The point of using reason is not some delusion of proof but of making sure that all your beliefs are rationally consistent with each other and seeing the logical implications of the premises that you have accepted.

Beliefs become knowledge when you live by them.

If you want an opinion on those topics, make a hypothesis and test it. Don't assume that some authority source knows the answer or you end up stuck in an endless loop of circular value-based reasoning called "Faith".

I have never assumed any authority knows the answer better than I do, but figure things out for myself. The result is that although I am a evangelical Trinitarian Christian my views are somewhat unique and come as quite a shock to those ready with canned rhetoric to "prove" that those who disagree with them are defective. I have also never assumed that anything which is true or knowable must necessarily be objectively testable as a scientific hypothesis. On the contrary it is my observation from the history of science and my own study and work in science that its success is a result of and depends upon a highly selective filtering of what questions can be considered the legitimate subject of a scientific inquiry.

[Moonwood the Hare]

Yuri - I think your over all framework is an interesting one and certainly worth developing. However I also think you have misunderstood Popper and Jung. Popper did not say nothing could be known for certain or verified, rather he tried to distinguish between the kinds of statement that could and could not be proved. For Jung feeling is a councious process but it is a type of judgement distinct frpm thinkind it focusses not on true/false but on like/dislike.

[Keep The Reason]

I think we have two completely different meanings for the word "faith" in the english language. One is the faith we have in our son when we say we have faith he will do well in his cricket match, or the faith a scientist has in his hypothesis before he tests it. The other is the religious kind. I think they are quite separate meanings for the same word, and it causes a deal of confusion.

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes, they are quite different kinds of faith-- rational vs. irrational. You'll probably note that when you debate theists, they blur this by insisting that "atheists have faith too" as one of their core arguments / rebuttals.

[Yuri]

Yuri - I think your over all framework is an interesting one and certainly worth developing. However I also think you have misunderstood Popper and Jung. Popper did not say nothing could be known for certain or verified, rather he tried to distinguish between the kinds of statement that could and could not be proved. For Jung feeling is a councious process but it is a type of judgement distinct frpm thinkind it focusses not on true/false but on like/dislike.

Thanks Moonwood Very very useful feedback. You are absolutely right. I have changed the Popper quote on truth to this: "Karl Popper argued that the truth could never be verified, only falsified."

You are right about Jung's view that feeling judgement is a conscious process. I have to be rigorous in explaining that it is my idea that feelings are founded in the subconscious. However, I might well be absolutely wrong about that. My MBTI preferences are INTP, so my feeling judgement process is my least-developed preference, and thus I might have difficulty consciously experiencing my own feeling judgement. I shall have a think about that, thanks.

The more I think about this theory, the more I realize that the core of it has come from Jung, whom I have been using to practise MBTI for 3 years now. He has really got under my skin and I find it hard to consider brain function without doing it in his terms. He was a genius of observation of the processes of the mind.

Thanks again.

[Yuri]

Please make up your mind! Are you disagreeing with me or agreeing with me?

My assertion is that people choose their beliefs based on their feelings.

Completely disagreeing.

First of all, I have to apologize. I edited a post (after you had evidently uploaded it) and you are now quoting something that I deleted. I am very sorry this happened and I shall endeavor to not post until I am sure I have got it right. I removed the "please make up your mind!" line because it is emotional and inappropriate. Sorry.

People choose their beliefs for all kinds of reasons. Some may indeed do so based on their feelings, but others do not. Therefore your assertion is incorrect.

You can't choose your knowledge, you can only choose your beliefs. Therefore I would argue that my assertion is correct.

Hypothesis: If I am wrong, then you will not be able to give me examples of knowledge you have which is not underpinned by logic, or beliefs you have which are not underpinned by feeling. Go ahead and prove me wrong. Remember that I am going to do everything I can to show that the knowledge examples you give are from logical deduction and ideas and the belief examples you give are from feeling and authority sources.

Logical consistency is a matter of thinking not feeling. People choose their belief according to what they THINK fits into a logically consistent picture of reality as they have experienced it. Logical consistency is, in fact, the minimum condition for something to even be meaningful. Therefore it makes no sense whatsoever to choose a belief that is inconsistent with your world view. So if you think there is sufficient evidence for believing something that is not consistent with your world view then you are going to change your world view first.

Yes, agreed. That is the whole premise: you can't change a person's opinions, but you can try to change their perspective, which will then result in their opinions changing. In the case of theological debate, I assert that if we can make people realize that they have formed their religious faith from unsubstantiated authority sources, that they will recognize the fallacy, review the legitimacy of their faith, and it will evaporate all by itself.

No I think you are talking about YOUR mind. That is after all the only one that you have first-hand knowledge of. Thus when you assert that "beliefs are based on feelings", the obvious truth of what you are saying is that YOUR beliefs are based on feelings. Thus despite your wish to pretend that yours is an example of a rational mind your assertions prove that this most certainly is not the case.

Let me be absolutely clear: It was Carl Gustav Jung who first pointed out the functions and attitudes of the brain, not me. Unfortunately. I am merely quoting him when I say that we make judgements by Feeling or by Thinking.

I am open to rational persuasion.

Not likely since you choose your beliefs based on feelings rather than thinking.

I did not mean I was open to changing my beliefs, I meant I was open to changing my knowledge (rational persuasion). In other words, no matter how harsh your words may get, they can't affect my feelings and change my beliefs, because I have no beliefs on this subject. I only have knowledge. If there is an aspect of this topic in which my knowledge is in error then you will hopefully explain it to me and I will then understand and change my knowledge.

Your style of discussion attacks my beliefs, which is rather pointless, because I don't have any. So I am like a logical observer, watching you hack at some imaginary opponent - a feeling-based me, in the realm of emotion. In your mind you are striking at me, but in my observation of the situation you are shouting at my shadow. I'm over here!!!!

So if you were ever in a religion then your brain is damaged, right? So then people abandoning religious belief are not doing so with a fully functioning brain, but those who were never in a religion but decide to adopt a religious belief CAN be doing so with a healthy brain. This is not a very high recommendation for non-religious belief.

I must apologize again, I think I took out the bit about brain damage, it was an emotional attack, not a logical one. It has led to your somewhat emotional outburst caused by cognitive dissonance. What you have done here is an example of an irrational thought process known as Straw Man Fallacy. The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. Dissonance requires soothing with a consonant cognition, and the consonant cognition is the resulting Straw Man fallacy. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern (I am person A, you are person B):

Person A has position X. (My position: religious devotees may have brain damage.)

Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X). (Your distortion: people abandoning belief are not doing so with a fully-functioning brain.)

Person B attacks position Y. (Your position: People abandoning belief have made a mistake, and people embracing faith with a healthy brain are making the right decision.)

Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.

But, of course, this is all bull shit and nonsense that reveals the feelings behind your beliefs -- the desperate need to believe that people who think differently than you and disagree with your subjective undemonstrable opinions must have something wrong with them.

I have no such need or feeling. I do not measure the rationality of other people by their agreement with my beliefs. People can be rational whether they are Christian, atheist, Wicca, Hindu or whatever. Rationality has to do with the logical consistency of their beliefs and not their position on issues which are not objectively demonstrable. Likewise people can be irrational whether they are Christian, atheist, Wicca, Hindu or whatever. I see irrational declarations by people regardless of their position on objectively undecidable questions.

I know, it's amazing isn't it, that a man can be a devout believer on Sunday, genuinely believing that he is consuming the body and blood of Christ, and then on Monday go back to his day job and perform surgical procedures based on modern science or teach physics at university. The flexibility of the mind to simultaneously accept such contrary understandings of basic science is evidence to me that belief and knowledge are separated in the mind.

To me I see both propositions, that God exists or that God does not exist, as matters of reason not feeling. But your inability see these both on a rational basis reveals that beneath your rational pretensions is a sea of emotion upon which you base your beliefs in this matter. So with regards to the workings of your mind and the beliefs which you embrace I think your model is a good fit indeed.

Perfect. Give me the rational thought process you have used that God exists, without any element of it coming from an assumption or authority source, and I shall know that God exists too!

You see people don't just abandon religous beliefs they also adopt religious beliefs and they do both for a great variety of reasons.

Yes - my Dad is a born-again Christian. He had a very difficult period of his life during which he saw Luis Palau at Wembly Stadium and got hooked by emotion into belief. One of the reasons I am here is to figure out how to revive him from his religious coma.

Religious devotees who expose themselves to logic and secular knowledge must live lives under constant mental discomfort from cognitive dissonance.

LOL Incorrect. I studied mathematics (BS) and physics (MS). I am also an evangelical Trinitarian Christian. There is no cognitive dissonance or mental discomfort in my case, and I don't have to discount dissonant data by believing that people who disagree with me are somehow defective.

Excellent, please give me the explanation of the Resurrection of Christ and free will alongside an omniscient being, for example, from the point-of-view of physics in a deterministic universe. I can't wait to hear how you have done that without either ignoring certain religious "truths" or breaking the laws of physics.

[mitchellmckain]

I did not mean I was open to changing my beliefs, I meant I was open to changing my knowledge (rational persuasion). In other words, no matter how harsh your words may get, they can't affect my feelings and change my beliefs, because I have no beliefs on this subject. I only have knowledge. If there is an aspect of this topic in which my knowledge is in error then you will hopefully explain it to me and I will then understand and change my knowledge.

Your style of discussion attacks my beliefs, which is rather pointless, because I don't have any. So I am like a logical observer, watching you hack at some imaginary opponent - a feeling-based me, in the realm of emotion. In your mind you are striking at me, but in my observation of the situation you are shouting at my shadow. I'm over here!!!!

I don't buy your game of semantics and rhetoric to claim to be some homo-superior by calling your beliefs "knowledge" based on thinking while those who disagree with you have only beliefs based on "feeling". Your need to see something wrong with people who disagree with you makes the emotional basis of your perspective rather obvious.

So if you were ever in a religion then your brain is damaged, right? So then people abandoning religious belief are not doing so with a fully functioning brain, but those who were never in a religion but decide to adopt a religious belief CAN be doing so with a healthy brain. This is not a very high recommendation for non-religious belief.

I must apologize again, I think I took out the bit about brain damage, it was an emotional attack, not a logical one. It has led to your somewhat emotional outburst caused by cognitive dissonance. What you have done here is an example of an irrational thought process known as Straw Man Fallacy. The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. Dissonance requires soothing with a consonant cognition, and the consonant cognition is the resulting Straw Man fallacy.

No it is not a straw man, it is what you actually said and the emotional basis of this is so obvious that you have been forced to admit it.

I know, it's amazing isn't it, that a man can be a devout believer on Sunday, genuinely believing that he is consuming the body and blood of Christ, and then on Monday go back to his day job and perform surgical procedures based on modern science or teach physics at university. The flexibility of the mind to simultaneously accept such contrary understandings of basic science is evidence to me that belief and knowledge are separated in the mind.

Yes some people have a flexible mind which can wrap their head around such apparent contradictions as the fact that light and the most fundamental constituents of matter are both particles and waves, while others insist on a more simple minded view of reality and will ignore and dismiss whatever aspects of reality that don't fit even if they have to declare that the people who value such aspects of reality are brain damaged.

Perfect. Give me the rational thought process you have used that God exists, without any element of it coming from an assumption or authority source, and I shall know that God exists too!

That doesn't follow. As I explained before, logic is an equation that only takes us from premises to conclusions. It only leads to the same conclusions if you start with the same premises. It is purely delusional to claim that you don't start from any premises at all. It has been the general discovery of academia that the premises that a person's perspective is based upon are quite often buried and take considerable digging to uncover. And then quite a few people don't even want to do such digging, because they don't want the challenge of looking at the implications of their own premises and dealing with intellectual dissonance that this reveals and thus they prefer to pretend that there are no such premises -- but that only proves that the basis of their perspective is not logical thought but emotional.

But assuming that one faces up to the fact that logic only takes one from premises to conclusions, the more rational mind chooses the fewest premises that can explain the most of reality that they experience, because they like the intellectual challenge of exploring the logical consequences of the premises on which their beliefs are based. Those that prefer to avoid the challenge of intellectual dissonance will ether adopt more premises to prop up their perspective and avoid looking at the implications, or simply dismiss whatever aspects of reality don't agree with implications of the premises they have adopted - typically saying that those who disagree are just emotional or brain damaged.

Yes - my Dad is a born-again Christian. He had a very difficult period of his life during which he saw Luis Palau at Wembly Stadium and got hooked by emotion into belief. One of the reasons I am here is to figure out how to revive him from his religious coma.

Hopefully you will find something to revive yourself from your anti-religious coma. This does not preclude being an atheist, only that one face up to the subjective nature of it.

Religious devotees who expose themselves to logic and secular knowledge must live lives under constant mental discomfort from cognitive dissonance.

LOL Incorrect. I was raised in the most liberal family imaginable by two psychology graduates, fed a steady diet of skepticism, secular values, and scathing criticisms of the Christian establishment. In college I studied mathematics (BS) and physics (MS). But I also explored the offerings of philosophy and I strongly resonated with existentialism and pragmatism. I explored the beliefs of many different religions and found much of value there also, and although I am still a secularist, a physicist, an existentialist and a pragmatist, and find no fault with the criticisms of the Christian establishment taught in my youth, I am also an evangelical Trinitarian Christian.

There is no cognitive dissonance or mental discomfort in my case, and I don't have to discount dissonant data by believing that people who disagree with me are somehow defective.

Excellent, please give me the explanation of the Resurrection of Christ and free will alongside an omniscient being, for example, from the point-of-view of physics in a deterministic universe. I can't wait to hear how you have done that without either ignoring certain religious "truths" or breaking the laws of physics.

I doubt that I can satisfy your demand for a simple minded explanation especially if we are going to talk about physics. Topics in physics such as relativity and quantum field theory are anything but simplistic and reveal the fundamental fallacy of the common abuse of Occam's razor to support such demands for simple minded explanations. But let us begin with two points, one on the scientific front and the other on the theological front.

Physical determinism has been disproven with the experiments measuring the correlation in John Stewart Bell's inequality. The only way of clinging to a belief in determinism is by appealing to causality outside of the accepted physics world view. Thus one option out of four has been eliminated and besides the only one that allows determinism there are two others. You can insist that the physics world view is the limits of reality but then you must abandon determinism. Finally you can accept that the laws of nature are causally open (you have causality outside the accepted physics world view) and yet reject determinism for other reasons. The last is the one that I think best fits with the totality of human experience.

On the theological front, besides the deterministic view of Calvinism, the logically inconsistent views of Arminianism and Molinism, there is open theism, which rejects an understanding of omniscience and omnipotence which is not logically consistent. Furthermore we can accept the discovery of quantum physics that things can exist in a state of superposition and that knowledge of things cannot therefore be abstracted from interactions which create the very things that are known. And this is why Christians with a knowledge physics like myself and John Polkinghorne (who is both a quantum physicist and an Anglican priest) are open theists. Thus we reject a view of omniscience that makes it a restriction of what God can do to put God's will rather than human theological definitions at the apex of power and keep it within the bounds of logical consistency. Thus a recognition from quantum physics that knowledge is an act of power means that omniscience must be defined in much the same way as omnipotence, to say that God can know whatever logically constistent thing He chooses to know just as omnipotence means that God can do/accomplish whatever logically consistent thing He chooses to do/accomplish. Thus in the open theist view God can do all the things that human beings can do, like take risks, make sacrifices, give privacy to others, and impose limitations upon Himself. God can make a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it by choosing to limit His own power, and God can create beings with free will by choosing not to know what they will do before they make their own choices. Indeed I would assert than any real act of creation -- a creation of something that is not a part of Himself -- invaribly involves such risks, sacrifices and self-limitations.

[Moonwood the Hare]

Thanks Moonwood Very very useful feedback. You are absolutely right. I have changed the Popper quote on truth to this: "Karl Popper argued that the truth could never be verified, only falsified."

No. Popper did not say truth could never be verified. He said that a universal theory could never be verified. A particular claim, what he calls an existential claim can be verified. A specified existential claim can be verified or falsified. An unspecified existential claim can be verified but not falsified. So All swans are white can be falsified but not verified. There is a white swan on the pond can be verified or falsified. There is a black swan somewhere, which is the logical correlative of the first claim, can be verified but not falsified since to falsify it you would have to an exhaustive search of every existent universe. But all of this applies only to empirical science; it has not bearing on what Popper calls metaphysical claims like 'There is a God'.

You are right about Jung's view that feeling judgement is a conscious process. I have to be rigorous in explaining that it is my idea that feelings are founded in the subconscious. However, I might well be absolutely wrong about that. My MBTI preferences are INTP, so my feeling judgement process is my least-developed preference, and thus I might have difficulty consciously experiencing my own feeling judgement. I shall have a think about that, thanks.

These days I don't like the term unconscious. But if we are to use Jungian terms I would say feelings are a product of the self, what Rogers would call the organismic totality - though as you seem to have noticed what Jung calls feeling others such as Rogers would call valuing. I am INTP as well and incidentally so was Jung. As you can see these days I am more influenced by Rogers than Jung though I like to combine elements of both. Jung's theory of individuation allows more diverse pathways to psychological health than Rogers process of organismic actualisation.

But my real point was that for Jung feeling is not a way of making true/false judgements but a way of making value judgements. For example suppose we take the truth claim there is a hell where people suffer eternally. Thinking types would simply ask is this true. Feeling types would ask do I like this. Feeling types may conclude it cannot be true because they do not like it and thinking types will be baffled by this. Feeling types will be baffled when thinking types accept this idea without even considering whether it is a 'good' idea but solely on the basis of whether they think there are reasons for holding it to be true. But you have to remember that pure types are rare; most people have developed a secondary function, a perceptive function in the case of predominantly thinking or feeling types which balances that out. You and I for example deal with the world through intuition but we will have some sensing and feeling which develops more with age. I find my feeling is more developed than my sensing which MBTI would say should not happen with an INTP.

The more I think about this theory, the more I realize that the core of it has come from Jung, whom I have been using to practise MBTI for 3 years now. He has really got under my skin and I find it hard to consider brain function without doing it in his terms. He was a genius of observation of the processes of the mind.

What have you been using MBTI for? I have found MBTI very useful over the years. And given your categorisation of belief and knowledge what do you make of Jung's claim that he knew there was a God? I would like to give your ideas more time. Keep the Reason was right that I would find them interesting. I was thinking I might do a micro-teach on MBTI in a few weeks as part of a teaching course - there is a lot of stuff in adult education based on Kolb who borrowed from Jung. Are you familiar with that?

[Yuri]

Thanks again, I have changed the quote to "Karl Popper argued that a universal theory could never be verified, only falsified." It is essential to get these details right, or those who are looking for faults in the argument will latch on to mistakes like that and use that as a reason to dismiss the whole lot. Grateful for any and all similar observations.

What have you been using MBTI for? I have found MBTI very useful over the years. And given your categorisation of belief and knowledge what do you make of Jung's claim that he knew there was a God? I would like to give your ideas more time. Keep the Reason was right that I would find them interesting. I was thinking I might do a micro-teach on MBTI in a few weeks as part of a teaching course - there is a lot of stuff in adult education based on Kolb who borrowed from Jung. Are you familiar with that?

I work as an instructor and my firm sponsored me to undergo training as a performance coach. As part of that, I studied MBTI with OPP and became a qualified stage 1 & 2 practitioner. I have coached 3 dozen coachees now and used MBTI with most of them, as well as with friends and family. The more I use MBTI the more I understand it and now I am fairly fluent in its application; I can usually have a pretty good guess at someone's preferences after a short interaction. I have no doubt in its applicability to western brains, and I would be fascinated to know if it is to do with the physical wiring of our neurons "out of the box" (and thus equally applicable to all humans) or if it stems from western culture and education. I have not heard of Kolb but will take your recommendation and study him.

Jung's claim that there is a God: A typical late 19th Century Swiss would not have had any qualms in questioning faith, and he was apparently disappointed in his Father's academic approach to faith. Jung, however, was far from typical. As a boy he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves and hid the case in the attic. Periodically he would come back to the mannequin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. To me, this indicates that he was a natural spiritualist. It perhaps explains his genius at looking into his own mind and working out what was going on.

Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung believed that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. It is in that sense that I suppose he "knew there was a god." According to Gary Lachman's book Jung the Mystic, Jung's ambition was to be seen as a man of science.

My relationship with Jung is really via Myers & Briggs who concentrated on his work on personality preferences. It is those observations he made of mankind that pertain to my theory of knowledge and belief. He wasn't the first human to make the observations. Native American Indians had precisely the same concept of Jung's functions (but not attitudes). A young indian would be given a necklace called a "medicine wheel" with his chief's judgement of his primary function on it. The "medicine wheel" could have Bear (introspection), Eagle (illumination), Buffalo (wisdom) or Mouse (trust). These correspond to Sensing, iNtuition, Thinking and Feeling. The Indian's task was to learn to view the world from all perspectives. As he developed this ability, he would be awarded the corresponding symbols to add to his medicine wheel, the objective being to earn all 4. There are other concepts of mind that similarly support this idea, such as Phlegmatic, Sanguine, Choleric and Melancholic. So, Jung was a spiritual individual with a genius for observing his mind's processes and those of others. I think he got it right and my basis for the belief/truth/knowledge relationships is that aspect of his work.

[Yuri]

Help! I am stuck. Can anyone help steer me straight on this bit of logic please? Here we go...

Positive and Negative Cognitions
Beliefs and knowledge are positive cognitions. Thus you should not confuse things you believe or know with things you don’t believe or know. Things you consider false are not beliefs or knowledge, they are errors, nonsense, allegory and balderdash. You don’t “not believe in” anything. You don’t “not know in” anything. Let’s say you consider Bigfoot not to exist. In that case, if someone asks,
 “Do you believe in Bigfoot?” You would be expressing a negative cognition to say “I don’t believe in Bigfoot.” Unfortunately, owing to the fact that we have learned to speak illogically in certain respects, we are prone to asserting negative cognitions in our everyday speech. This is a loophole that allows antagonists to claim that, for example, atheism is a faith the same way as religion is a faith. They will say that “I don’t believe in God” is a belief just as “I believe in God” is a belief. They will then assert atheists are no different from theists except that they have opposite beliefs. This is a logical fallacy. We must learn to avoid expressing negative cognitions; here are some examples:

I do not believe the Earth is flat. This should be avoided. Options:
The Earth is an oblate spheroid.
The Earth is round.
I don’t know the shape of the Earth.

I do not believe in the Loch Ness Monster. This should be avoided. Options:
The Loch Ness Monster does not exist.
I have seen no credible evidence of the Loch Ness Monster. I consider belief in it to be an error of reason.

If your antagonist asserts that you “do not believe” in something, you should resist the assertion and reply that you do not not believe or know in anything. You do not not know the Earth is square, you do not not know 2+2=5, you do not not know the moon is made of cheese. You only know and believe in positive cognitions.

I want to prove that negative cognitions are a logical fallacy but I don't know how. It's just an idea. Can anyone come up with a hypothesis?

[mitchellmckain]

Positive and Negative Cognitions
Beliefs and knowledge are positive cognitions. Thus you should not confuse things you believe or know with things you don’t believe or know. Things you consider false are not beliefs or knowledge, they are errors, nonsense, allegory and balderdash. You don’t “not believe in” anything. You don’t “not know in” anything. Let’s say you consider Bigfoot not to exist. In that case, if someone asks,
 “Do you believe in Bigfoot?” You would be expressing a negative cognition to say “I don’t believe in Bigfoot.” Unfortunately, owing to the fact that we have learned to speak illogically in certain respects, we are prone to asserting negative cognitions in our everyday speech. This is a loophole that allows antagonists to claim that, for example, atheism is a faith the same way as religion is a faith. They will say that “I don’t believe in God” is a belief just as “I believe in God” is a belief.

No the point is that atheists have world view full of beliefs that do not include belief in God. The fact that they are an atheist means that they have considered the question and decided where they stand. Their decision is based on different premises which are just as unprovable as the premises upon which beliefs of the religious are founded. But irrational atheists like playing this homo-superior game of rhetoric in which they waffle between different contradictory definitions of atheism, on the one hand saying that they have no beliefs to be criticized while at the same time denying that a real atheists could ever change their mind and become a theist. LOL They employ this bull shit rhetoric that atheism is the default position and that infants are born as atheists. But there is no default position and infants not having considered the question and have not decided where they stand on the issue, so they are not atheists. No they don't have a belief in God. They have no beliefs at all. But that does not even begin to compare to the complete silliness of the claim that atheists could never change their mind. It is just like the typical nonsense and irrationality of many of the religious who will insist that, for example, a Christian that changes their mind was never really a Christian in the first place. The irrationalities are often so similar because the motivations are so similar -- decisions founded on emotion -- embracing a liberation from a past which they have come to hate.

If your antagonist asserts that you “do not believe” in something, you should resist the assertion and reply that you do not not believe or know in anything. You do not not know the Earth is square, you do not not know 2+2=5, you do not not know the moon is made of cheese. You only know and believe in positive cognitions.

I want to prove that negative cognitions are a logical fallacy but I don't know how. It's just an idea. Can anyone come up with a hypothesis?

There is no logical fallacy. A negative cognition and the absense of a positive cognition are not the same thing, just as -2 and 0 are not the same thing.

If someone makes an assertion and you say that you do not believe what they assert then it must be concluded that you have beliefs based upon which you make such a denial. If you meet a stranger and they say their name is Peter you typically believe them because there is no reason not to. If they say that they are the president of the United States then since you know that there is only one president of the United States and you know who that is, then these beliefs give you good reasons not to believe their assertion. Atheism is no different.

[Yuri]

I don't buy your game of semantics and rhetoric to claim to be some homo-superior by calling your beliefs "knowledge" based on thinking while those who disagree with you have only beliefs based on "feeling". Your need to see something wrong with people who disagree with you makes the emotional basis of your perspective rather obvious.

In that case let's move on. When you are ready to give me examples of beliefs you have which are not formed from authority sources or knowledge you have which is not formed from logical processes then I will be ready to abandon the idea.

Perfect. Give me the rational thought process you have used that God exists, without any element of it coming from an assumption or authority source, and I shall know that God exists too!

That doesn't follow. As I explained before, logic is an equation that only takes us from premises to conclusions. It only leads to the same conclusions if you start with the same premises. It is purely delusional to claim that you don't start from any premises at all. It has been the general discovery of academia that the premises that a person's perspective is based upon are quite often buried and take considerable digging to uncover. And then quite a few people don't even want to do such digging, because they don't want the challenge of looking at the implications of their own premises and dealing with intellectual dissonance that this reveals and thus they prefer to pretend that there are no such premises -- but that only proves that the basis of their perspective is not logical thought but emotional.

If I understand your statement, you are asserting that even a logic-based reason process is rooted in subjective (emotional) premises, thus it is not possible to have a purely logical explanation for the existence of God. My point is that nobody can provide a purely logical explanation for the existence of God precisely because there is no valid objective premise on which to base such an argument. However, your assertion that all logical arguments are based on emotional perspective is wrong. Here are some examples that are not: the 2nd law of thermodynamics, Newton's Laws of Motion, Ohm's Law. What is the emotional underpinning of those logical reasoning processes?

The reason you can't provide the rational thought process to prove the existence of God that is not underpinned by emotion is that there is no rational thought process to prove the existence of God that is not underpinned by emotion.

My second challenge (which you accepted) was to provide an explanation of free will with an omniscient God in a deterministic universe. If I may avoid quoting a large chunk of your post and instead summarize your answer in my own words, you say that you believe in free will, a non-deterministic universe, and a partially-sighted God with limited powers. These conclusions are based on physics and comply with certain logical limitations on omniscience and omnipotence. I hope I have understood it correctly.

May I firstly congratulate you on an ingenious example of creative rationalization. You have taken three different jigsaw puzzles and managed to put them together to make one picture that fits your knowledge and beliefs. Outstanding - no wonder you are proud of your theological viewpoint. I am impressed.

Please help me understand your dismissal of determinism. Correct my simplistic understanding please: The universe consists of stuff which obeys laws of nature. No random interactions occur between the stuff, and no power outside the universe reaches in to affect those laws. Thus, as Laplace said,

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

You have told me that Bell and others have given us certain models for QM that give us an incomplete picture of the laws of nature. However, those laws still exist, whether we know them or not. In reality, there are no laws of nature that give random results for interactions between stuff. We just don't yet know what those laws are because we don't understand what stuff really is and how it interacts.

I apologize if the razor I borrowed off Occam is too sharp but I think that no matter how complicated nature is, the upshot of her laws can only lead to a deterministic universe.

By the way, I didn't like the fact we don't have free will when I found it out. Cognitive bias and dissonance make determinism hard to swallow. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it isn't true.