Although I have to say, the adage that “you can’t reason a man out of beliefs he hasn’t reasoned himself into” always struck me as a load of cobblers. Growing up is, to me, a process of discovering that what you always believed was true ain’t necessarily so. But I’m sure it gets harder as you get older.
Paleo. No grains, refined sugar, artificial sweeteners, legumes (Ah loves ma peas!), salt, or processed foods of any kind.
Fascinating. There’s a kook at EvC forums who’s written a very scientific and peer-reviewed (but not published) paper proving that a triune God exists because of unmistakable patterns in the open scenes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I’ve seen every episode of every Star Trek TV show and all the movies, some many times. If there are patterns in the ST:TNG intro proving the existence of a triune God, I would have to disagree with your kook; they are highly mistakable. I would be fascinated to read his paper, though.
William,
True, and it makes perfect sense.
Most of us are wired for curiosity just as we are wired for empathy or sexual desire.. When you’re wired for empathy, the well-being of others becomes an end in itself. When you’re wired for sexual desire, sex becomes an end in itself. When you’re wired for curiosity, the truth becomes an end in itself.
The wiring contributes to average reproductive success in all three cases, which is why it was favored by evolution.
People wouldn’t stop wanting sex if in vitro fertilization became the norm, and they wouldn’t stop desiring truth even if the negative consequences of false beliefs were magically nullified.
And I suspect that is the rationale used by many people who profess to be religious. It is always easier to go with the flow. And, at different times in history, it was positively dangerous not to go with the flow.
But I find it far more rewarding to keep questioning things rather than to blindly accept them. And I am lucky to live in a place and time when this questioning of “belief” is not detrimental to my health.
You mean, if false beliefs were true, then they’d be better than true beliefs which apparently are not true. Probably so.
Or what was that string of words supposed to mean? For many of us, “true beliefs” are in fact what are better at predicting future results, or better at keeping us safe, etc. Pragmatism, pragmaticism, or basically Kantian notions (Husserlian phenomenology rides those) that we know nothing of “reality” or of “Ding an Sich,” but we deal with it in the way that we find ourselves relating with it anyhow.
Science doesn’t claim “truth” in any metaphysical sense, but to come up with reliable results vis-a-vis the phenomena as we sense them. Of course it calls that “truth,” because it’s impossible to know “the real truth” if it somehow happens to differ substantially from our perceptions of the world. But metaphysically it could all be false, and if so, we prefer this false view to an incomprehensible “true view.”
The trouble with UD and ID getting into these matters is that they’re basically treading water about five feet below the surface of real philosophical understanding of these issues. They never get anywhere, because the point is not even to achieve anything except a resort to their own presupposed default, that God magically makes their naive realism into Truth.
Glen Davidson
William J. Murray,
I don’t see it as ‘toughing it out’. I am, as I said, curious about how the universe works. I don’t feel any need to believe it works in a particular way. I try to find out. When a particular conundrum falls into place, there is an intellectually satisfying ‘aha!’ moment.
OTOH there are some theistic beliefs that seem decidedly unsoothing – see eternal damnation, for example. Obviously, if you were taking your ‘choice’ approach, you wouldn’t pick that one.
Exactly, and this really cuts across William’s point. William seems to be saying: “what does it matter if a belief is true or not if it’s useful?”
While in science we actually evaluate the “truth” of a model precisely by its usefulness. We do not even aim for some kind of metaphysical truth, whatever that would mean.
The best we can do is produce reliable predictive models. The model comprised by modern geology, cosmology, and biology is “truer” than YEC because it produces better predictions, but only in that sense – and every time we tweak those theories so they make better predictions still, they become “truer”. However, for some things, a model that is less predictive generally (e.g. Newtonian physics) is a lot easier to use over the range of problems we regularly encounter, so it is “more useful” for those problems.
One other thing a false belief has to be to count as a delusion in psychiatry is that it has to be impairing. If a belief is harmless, no matter how idiosyncratic or unfounded in evidence or reason, it doesn’t count as a delusion.
So I think we can safely leave psychiatry out of this: we do not give people “pills” to alter their beliefs in psychiatry. We give them pills to help them form beliefs that are more useful – and what those are is entirely up to them, not the pills.
I just have to add, that I have observed and participated in conversations with genuinely mentally people.(People who have committed some offence as a result of their delusions and have been committed for treatment).
Pills of no, talking to such people is about as rewarding as arguing on the internet, but with the added zing of knowing that there is a live person in front of you whose life is messed up. And in the real world, what people mostly get is pills and maybe a couple weeks of group therapy.
Yes. I find myself with an adverse gut reaction to hypotheticals about magic pills that could cure schizophrenia. If only.
But people are complicated, and, as you say, to help someone whose life is messed up by paranoid delusions and hallucinations, fragmented thoughts and impaired volition, you need more than “pills and maybe a couple weeks of group therapy”.
If we find a cure for schizophrenia – great. Then I’m happy to address the ethics of using it, just as, incredibly, the church once addressed the ethics of giving women pain-relief in childbirth.
But let’s wait until that moment comes. I hope whoever finds it gets a Nobel.
William,
Though you find this hard to admit, you care about the truth just like the rest of us. I gave an example a few weeks ago:
The truth is that pissing the bed will make you uncomfortable. You care about this truth, just as I do.
I just realized that “Mo” in the title of the OP stands for Muhammad.
Color me stupid. Color Elizabeth a coward.
Mung:
Okay.
Why? That’s the name of the comic strip: Jesus and Mo
Shall I color you stupid again?
Indeed. Color me stupid and color yourself a coward.
Was I wrong? Is “Jesus” not Jesus and is “Mo” Not Muhammad?
Is the hate for Muslims here just not as strong as the hate for Christians?
I don’t hate either Muslims or Christians. But I do enjoy laughing at their idiosyncracies, which is what the Jesus and Mo comic is about.
Mung,
I don’t think KeithS created or contributes to the comic, Mung.
Another Mung backfire.
FFS. Mung, are you high? Or what’s your excuse?
I don’t get it. Explain?
I don’t think the comic is any more severe on Christians than it is for Muslims, and I don’t think “hate” is the right word anyway. The comic author is an ex-Muslim, and the comic pokes fun at the beliefs of both It does not promote hatred of either Christians or Muslims.
And I do not hate Christians or Muslims either.
Colour ‘Mung’ an IDist bigot? Probably yes. Yet since he’s hiding behind a pseudonym, he doesn’t seem to care. No one at TSZ will force or entice Mung to anti-theism or ‘skepticism = anti-theism’ of TSZ crude variety.
Elizabeth, let’s not pretend you respect Muslims & Christians. You think their worldview is wrong & they are living in an unreal fantasy, as attractive as that fantasy is to you personally in your current disenchanted (atheist, indeed, ultimately nihilistic) personal outlook.
Gregory, people are entirely entitled to post anonymously on this blog. Not only that, but their right to do remain anonymous is enshrined in the rules of this site.
And you are wrong, Gregory. I do respect Muslims and Christians. I also think that much of what many of them believe is not only factually wrong, also morally wrong if taken literatlly, and often dangerous.
In fact, in my experience, the Muslims and Christians I most admire and respect hold moral principles superior to that of putative deity they profess. I do not know a single Christian, or Muslim, personally, who would torture another human being for eternity on the grounds of a difference of opinion. Or on any grounds, actually.
I’m still mystifed by Mung’s comment.
Although it occurs to me that “foolhardy” might be a better description.
Mung,
Jesus and Mo have been online as Jesus and Mo since 2005. To quote the author of the webcomic:
Please keep comments addressed to arguments not people.
I agree that it is possible to respect individual Christians and Muslims yet disagree with their beliefs. We call that tolerance.
But far too many Christians (probably Muslims as well, but I have little experience with them) perceive criticism of their beliefs as persecution. It’s not. Persecution is not allowing them to worship, not allowing them to congregate, preventing them from employment. If anything, atheists have more of an argument for persecution than Christians do. In many places, don’t bother running for office if you claim to be an atheist. In Canada, you cannot teach in the Catholic school system unless you are Catholic, even though the entire system is funded by the tax payers. My daughter is denied emoyment in this system because she is not Catholic. What does religion have to do with teaching math.
Sorry for gettin on my soap box.
Acartia,
It depends on who you ask:
Damn, that must mean that I am immortal. I always thought I was, but I was chalking that “belief” up to ego. I am happy that there is a mathematical basis for by “belief”.
I thought that was a joke, then I looked at the link.
At that point I really knew it was a joke.
Glen Davidson
Dr. Sharon Robbert knows that religion has everything to do with teaching math:
I, for one, do not think that the world-view of Abrahamic theists (Christian, Muslim, Jewish) or other religions is false or wrong. There are some theists (and polytheists) who take their world-views to have entailments that are empirically false or morally wrong, but they are a relatively small (though vocal) minority. And there are also atheists who take their world-view to have entailments that are empirically false or morally wrong. The problem lies in the entailments, not in the world-view itself.
About “scientific realism”: I do think there are compelling philosophical reasons for thinking that successful scientific theories are partial approximations of the ultimate structure of reality, but I don’t think that adopting or rejecting scientific realism actually matters for the practice of science itself. For practicing scientists not concerned with metaphysics, “devise a model with testable implications and let truth take care of itself” seems eminently reasonable.
I could appreciate some specifics.
Ditto.
Specifics about what? About why I don’t think theism (or any other religion) is, as world-view, false or wrong?
Yes.
First of all, assuming that there are “world-views” at all (and I’m not convinced that there), I don’t think that any world-view is established based on evidence or reasoning.
Rather, it’s the reverse: what counts for us as evidence, and for that matter, what counts for as good reasoning, is itself internal to the world-view that we hold. (Recall that it is not uncommon for the participants at Uncommon Descent to exclaim that Buddhism is “irrational” because it denies the principle of non-contradiction and the substantiality of the soul — that is, it is irrational from the Christian perspective.) One’s world-view is the perspective from which one views the world, and that perspective is matter of one’s participation in a family of social practices, rituals, symbols, and institutions as well as, often but not always, discourses about those practices, rituals, symbols, and institutions.
I count myself as a scientific metaphysican, in that I think that the right approach to take in metaphysics is based on the results and methods of the empirical (natural and social) sciences. I have friends and colleagues, some theists and others not, who think that metaphysics must go beyond the sciences. I think that this is deeply mistaken — that any attempt to do so will run afoul of what Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given” — but ultimately, it is not a matter of reasoning but of existential orientation. I do not discern within my psychology a longing for the transcendent, and they do. Does that make them wrong by my lights? Hardly. It is a difference in existential orientation, or you prefer, a difference in attitude. And attitudes are neither true nor false. In line with Wittgenstein and Putnam, I do not want to inflate this difference in attitude into a metaphysical distinction.
Of course there are theists who take their worldview to license empirical claims that are false (e.g. young-earth creationism) or vacuous (e.g. intelligent design), or to license actions that are morally wrong (e.g. gender-based oppression). But the moral wrongness there lies in patriarchy, not in theism per se, just as the empirical falsity lies in what creationists say about geology and astronomy, not in theism per se.
There are plenty of theists — usually but not always Christians — who insist that their theistic worldview is based on reason. Apart from picking apart at the arguments themselves, I think that this approach amounts to a hyper-intellectualization of the religious world-view, and one that downplays the bodily, symbolic, and practical dimensions of religion.
The same point applies to atheism. Actually, I think that atheists are even more prone to hyper-intellectualization than Christians are. This comes out in the demand for “evidence” that one often hears from the New Atheists. But the very idea that evidentialism is itself the correct approach to take in epistemology is just as contentious as anything else philosophers argue about.
KN,
You seem to regard worldviews as separable from their entailments, but I don’t see why. I reject the YEC worldview, for example, precisely because its entailments clash with observation.
I somewhat agree.
Like you, I am skeptical of “world-views” at least as that expression is often used.
But, if there are, and if they are something similar to a Kuhnian paradigm, then my preference is to say that they are neither true nor false. They are generally selected on pragmatic grounds. Typically, that is influenced by evidence but not deducible from evidence. And, to some extent, they define their own data and their own criteria for truth.
And you are right to do, but I do not regard young-earth creationism as itself entailed by theism per se.
KN,
Nor do I, but I do regard YEC as a worldview — an incorrect one.
Tom English thinks keiths is a smart cookie.
Meh, with his comments below the best we can say is that keiths is argumentative, disingenuous.
Also, a bit slow to follow along. So….once again, from the top….
It matters not one wit whether religious beliefs are true or false. They, (empirically at any rate) live better, happier, longer lives. So more power to them for any beliefs they may hold that are potentially false but happen to lead to a long, quality life.
Oh, and do try to remember that science cannot tell whether a concept is TRUE or FALSE, but only if it can be translated into an object that can do work.
Just ask E. Liddle. She understands (correctly) science’ primary and attractive function to be its utility. It has a remarkable track record in that regard.
Not so much… as a truth meter.
No… the better a model predicts, the more “effective” it becomes, not the truer.
Different animals.
Using the word’ truth’ as opposed to the more accurate ‘effective’ is Liddle’s reflexive way of trying to put science in the middle, taking accolades for all manner of human experience.
But at the end of the day, it just science knowing about things
Steve,
Right. The religious beliefs of ISIS have no negative consequences at all.
P.S. Have you made any progress figuring out why your God allows dogs to eat babies’ heads?
I agree that it does not matter whether religious beliefs are true or false. I have yet to see any agreed method of determining whether they are or not, so that is just as well. However, it is NOT true that “[those who hold religious beliefs] live better, happier, longer lives”. Some commit torture and mass murder in the supposed furtherance of those beliefs. Some merely make the lives of others miserable because their religious beliefs include religious taboos – gay sex, being an common example, but also other things, such as divorce, contraception, abortion, assisted suicide, the rights of women, the rights of those who do not share their beliefs. There are legitimate ethical discussions to be had about some of these issues, but “religious belief” sheds no light on them, for the simple reason that there are an almost infinite variety of religious beliefs, and no agreed method of determining whether any of them are or not true. Revelation is no good, because there is no way of distinguishing true revelation from false.
Not sure what you mean by “an object that can do work”. A scientific model is not an “object” except metaphorically, and “does work” in the sense that it makes sound predictions. One we have models that are good predictors, we can certainly make “objects that can do work” – telephones, GPS systems, solar panels, cars, oil rigs, computers, MRI machines, genetic testing kits, better yielding food plants, etc. But we can also do other things with those models, including sheer contemplation of the beauty of the model and what it tells us about the universe of which we ourselves are a part.
Not too clever of a retort, keiths
ISIS are thugs, not religious people. they are only interested in a respectable cover to rape, murder, torture. lots of fundies are that way. sure, it give religion a bad name, but like Christ said, we all have to learn to separate the wheat from the chaffe (and I might add, two-facedness is a universal malady not exclusive to religious types).
So studies and surveys done, OVERALL, conclude that skepticallessness is a longevity elixer. Empirically determined, see……
And once again, we have to remind keiths, that PARENTS are responsible for dogs eating baby heads, not GOD.
Unfortunately, it does appear like we will have to spend more time than ordinarily required to remind keiths of the vacuity of keiths/ position on parenting responsibilities.
So say you. They claim to be the legitimate servants of God.
Yep. And a huge percentage of their fellow religionists agree with them and their goals, perhaps disagreeing with their violent means or with the specific targets of their violence. Most of the world’s billion Muslim people just want to live peacefully, taking care of their families, getting food on the table … certainly not dreaming of going to war against (mostly) their fellow Muslims. But at the same time, ordinary Muslims apparently don’t think ISIS partisans are “not religious” merely because they are “not peaceful”. Of course, ISIS members are religious (and motivated directly by their religion, as well as by their politics). Even the Muslims who are being attacked and killed by ISIS think that ISIS is religious. While they’re dying, they’re not trying to pretend it’s just caused by “thugs”.
I never thought I would see a No True Scotsman defense posted by a christian on behalf of Islamic “thugs” — so I do have to thank Steve for giving me that pleasure today. Well done, Steve!
Well, golly ‘cold foot’, if ISIS were religious, in the sense we all accept it to mean, then you might have a point.
But seeing as they rape, murder, steal, torture, we can safely AND logically conclude that well, NO!, they do not fall into the religious category, regardless of ISIS protestations ( or cold foot’s for that matter) to the contrary.
But I wont take your charge, that I am hawking Scot tinged fallacies, too hard. I mean therejust happens to be a percentage of Scot blood running through my head, and a few living Scot in-laws with a keen sense of smell to boot.
Sir Richard is taking the claims of rapers, murderers, tortures at face value???
Hmmm.
Elizabeth,
Actually ALL humanity are guilty of crimes, infidelities, idiosyncracies, fetishes, etc. etc.
So religious types and atheists all share the above except a belief in the unseen.
Hence, the inference that this single characteristic likely accounts for the disparity in lifespans.
Hope and faith, regardless of their truth value have measurable and positive effects on quality of life.
at the end of the day, what matters is the efficacy of one’s decisions, not its truth value.
The secret to it all is what my composition teacher told me way back when. Positive mental attitude…..and a good vocabulary of course. But she was right.
Now can one be non-spiritual and still exhibit a positive mental attitude in all of life experiences? Possibly. But the odds are against it.
Thats the core of the matter. The odds are in favor of the spiritual person since they are more likely to exhibit a positive mental attitude when confronted with life’s obstacles.
Hence, the religious/spiritually inclined folks tend to have longer lives.
Its that simple.