Godlessness and choice

[possibletarian]

Why you trust in them is moot to the point I am making. My point is that you do trust in them, even though you can provide no empirical support or objective evidence that they are trustworthy without using them to prove them, in which case you would not be proving anything.

Then why believe that believing in god is correct, if you use your own statement the very best you can say is that 'I believe in god because i believe in god, but I can't be sure that's correct at all'

But if we are talking about the notion of faith as is alluded to in the Old and New Testaments, then you should have no misgivings with it, for it is the notion of trusting in something for which we have good reasons to do so,

What good reasons exactly ?

even though those reasons are not empirically verifiable.

Correct, there is a vast difference between me telling you a giant red jelly baby runs the universe and if only you made a leap of faith you would believe it too, and telling you that a ship floats on water, one I can demonstrate, the other I can't

I agree. Blind faith and wishful thinking are not reliable pathways to truth and in many cases such a faith is indeed given as an excuse to believe when all available lines of evidence appear to not support the belief.

Absolutely

Name one piece of evidence you can provide me that would demonstrate that our senses provide an accurate portrayal of reality as we experience it without appealing to your senses. You can't because anything you provide me will have been acquired via your senses.

Which is exactly why belief in invisible beings is silly, we cannot trust a reality we cannot see, smell, or touch, to do so is to make any statement of reality equal. In other words if you say your interpretation of anything you experience is fallable, then why trust your senses in regards to belief at all ?

Sure we do. It comes in the form of eyewitness testimony and you must accept it on faith.

But haven't you already said in effect that any eyewitness testimony is fallible,(coming from our own senses) make you mind up. There has to be a reason to take some testimony more seriously than other testimony, and especially so when the claims really are fantastic and are two thousand years old.

The evidence will only take you so far but it will take you far enough if you are willing to take a step in the direction it is pointing and commit yourself to the One to whom it points, Jesus Christ.

But it does not, that's the point, there is no evidence.

 

[Ed1wolf]

Then where did god's rationality come from?

As a cause and not an effect, He does not need a cause or source for His rationality.

 

[Ed1wolf]

I did, and your post is wrong. If you want to though, try supporting your post with a legitimate scientific paper, then we'll talk.

I did, two of them.

de: Ok, then what's your evidence to support it?

Read the post prior to the one that you responded to.

de: Prove that you didn't.

You made the assertion, you have to back it up.

 

[Ed1wolf]

Link their work

I can't do everything for you.

 

[Dave Ellis]

As a cause and not an effect, He does not need a cause or source for His rationality.

But you said rationality must come from a rational source. Why are you special pleading in regards to god?

 

[Dave Ellis]

I did, two of them.

Read the post prior to the one that you responded to.

I haven't seen any scientific papers that support your claims.

You made the assertion, you have to back it up.

I did point out where you were committing non sequiturs, you simply failed to acknowledge it. As such my claim stands.

 

[Dave Ellis]

I can't do everything for you.

Then your point remains unsupported

 

[anonymous person]

Again, you're trying to equivocate.

We have no eyewitness testimony, or any other evidence for that matter.

At least in regards to our senses, we have a model that apparently works. Can we prove that we don't live in the matrix? Of course not, however they are all we have to go on, and they appear to work in most cases. However even then we know our senses are not 100% reliable and should not be fully trusted in many cases.

We all have pistis that our senses are veridical. I have decided to just use the Greek here.

It connotes strong conviction or trust in something.

 

[anonymous person]

Yes, but you are stretching faith to breaking point, you are in effect saying my 'faith' that the floor will be there when i put my feet on the floor when getting out of bed is the same way faith is used when believing in fantasy stories about invisible gods, of which yours is one of many.



So your belief is not based in god, but in the bible a book written by men ?


If for instance we are walking along together and we come across a wall, we both look at it and get into a conversation about how high it is I say its 3 feet high, and you say 'oh no it's more like two feet high'

I insist it is three feet high though, and luckily you happen to have a tape measure in your pocket, you pull it out and sure enough the tape says two feet high. I then go onto to tell you that the people who made the tape measure are fallible humans who's perception of the reality of what a foot is is debatable, and I through greater use of my faith in measurements am convinced that and really I am right in believing that the wall is in fact three feet tall, and that your faith in the accuracy of the tape is warped by fallible human understanding.

Such a thing is of course just plain silly, but seems to be what you are presenting as the same being able to verify if something exists or not, such as a house, fence, or indeed a wall is not the same as believing the unverifiable.

There has to be a point where a statement of faith has to be proven in other ways other than feelings and experience otherwise every spiritual experience must be taken with the same validity.

Do you trust your senses?

 

[Dave Ellis]

We all have pistis that our senses are veridical. I have decided to just use the Greek here.

It connotes strong conviction or trust in something.

Ok, however your strong conviction or trust is meaningless to what exists in reality. How well can you support your beliefs is what matters.

Before you go back to the senses bit, our senses are not always reliable. They shouldn't always be trusted. However they do at the very least allow us to navigate the world as we experience it in our day to day lives.

So, how well can you support your beliefs?

 

[possibletarian]

Do you trust your senses?

Yes, for the most part it would be impossible to live any other way. But certainly not when it comes to invisible beings and stories of fantasy then i require a great deal of evidence and proof before i have faith.

I don't require 'faith' in any normal sense of the word when I put my feet on the floor getting out of bed, Nor does science require faith it is the study of the observable and provable.

Science:
the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

 

[bhsmte]

Do you trust your senses?

Senses can be influenced by our personal psyche and emotion. One way to determine if your senses are in tune with well evidenced reality, is to determine if what you sense, aligns with independent/objective evidence.

 

[anonymous person]

Senses can be influenced by our personal psyche and emotion. One way to determine if your senses are in tune with well evidenced reality, is to determine if what you sense, aligns with independent/objective evidence.

You have to use your senses to do that though.

 

[bhsmte]

You have to use your senses to do that though.

Your senses reach a certain conclusion. Objective evidence will either support that conclusion, or it won't.

 

[anonymous person]

Your senses reach a certain conclusion. Objective evidence will either support that conclusion, or it won't.

Objective evidence is still interpreted via our senses.

 

[anonymous person]

Labeling it objective does not negate the fact that it is ascertained via our senses.

 

[anonymous person]

You use your senses to determine whether a particular conclusion is supprted or not.

 

[bhsmte]

Objective evidence is still interpreted via our senses.

What else would it bd interpreted by? Lets say you go to one doctor and they just ask you questions and look at you and they state; my senses are telling me you have lung cancer. Then, you go toba second doctor, who runs diagnostic tests, blood, ct scan and tissue biopsy and they state there is no cancer present. Who's interpretations will you rely on? The doctor who did zero diagnostic tests, or the one who ran several tests, that determine if cancer is present?

 

[possibletarian]

Labeling it objective does not negate the fact that it is ascertained via our senses.

You don't actually seem to be saying anything, apart from taking us on a trip of circular reasoning. and oddly are helping the non believers case more than yours.

If you are saying that we cannot objectively trust evidence of our senses, no matter how much external proof , then why do you believe in anything at all ?
Or are you saying we should trust our senses ?

How do you yourself determine if your senses are reliable or not ?

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Objective evidence is still interpreted via our senses.

...it's also especially interpreted by our brains as we each process, analyze, and attempt to synchronize what is 'apparently' received as sense data. [I'm just adding this in as an additional point to ponder, not as a correction, my friend.] So, you are right: objective evidence is STILL interpreted.