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Try and keep it on the political/societal/cultural end of the discussion. This deals not only with gay rights but also the larger issue of looking at the interaction of religious groups within secular society, their rights and their influence, in contrast with the privileges of other groups. Which religion, if any, is right is irrelevant and arguments of that nature will be moderated. |
On January 04 2013 10:53 Reason wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 08:13 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: I'm pretty happy to say: "any belief which can be tested with science is legitimate if and only if it is legitimized by science" Can we go further yet? If there are two types of beliefs, beliefs which can be tested by science and those which can not, how do we judge or test the latter? You can't deem any of them more or less meaningful/valuable/important/true than each other because you have no basis upon which to judge them... If we can't come up with a methodology for judging them, why is it wrong to say "until we know by what criteria these beliefs are too be judged, we must judge them all equally" Would that be an acceptable way of phrasing what I said earlier  lol ?
You are assuming here that science is the only way of proving the legitimacy of a belief. I personally think that is true, but i know that some religious people will say that the Bible proves the legitimacy of a belief in a Christian/Jewish God over others.
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On January 04 2013 10:57 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 10:53 Reason wrote:On January 04 2013 08:13 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: I'm pretty happy to say: "any belief which can be tested with science is legitimate if and only if it is legitimized by science" Can we go further yet? If there are two types of beliefs, beliefs which can be tested by science and those which can not, how do we judge or test the latter? You can't deem any of them more or less meaningful/valuable/important/true than each other because you have no basis upon which to judge them... If we can't come up with a methodology for judging them, why is it wrong to say "until we know by what criteria these beliefs are too be judged, we must judge them all equally" Would that be an acceptable way of phrasing what I said earlier lol ? You are assuming here that science is the only way of proving the legitimacy of a belief. I personally think that is true, but i know that some religious people will say that the Bible proves the legitimacy of a belief in a Christian/Jewish God over others.
No, I'm specifically not doing that.
We are all in agreement that some beliefs are verifiable by science and others are not.
I'm asking then, how, if at all, can we verify these other beliefs?
I'm actively seeking other methods of verifying beliefs that don't involve science...
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On January 04 2013 10:55 sam!zdat wrote:well I would argue that there are five types of beliefs but let's not go there.it's only wrong to say that because it would be better to say "let's have a serious discussion about how we're going to judge those other things". Your thing is ok, I guess, but a bit lazy, uninteresting, and useless  the point is to try to find a basis. yes it's hard.
I'd come to expect more from
+ Show Spoiler +
The Indefatigable Sophist
Also, I disagree, it means until we find a suitable alternative for positivism then it's acceptable to use it, does it not?
On January 04 2013 10:53 Reason wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 08:13 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: I'm pretty happy to say: "any belief which can be tested with science is legitimate if and only if it is legitimized by science" If we can't come up with a methodology for judging them we then must say
"until we know by what criteria these beliefs are too be judged, we must judge them all equally"
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On January 04 2013 10:59 Reason wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 10:57 Jockmcplop wrote:On January 04 2013 10:53 Reason wrote:On January 04 2013 08:13 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: I'm pretty happy to say: "any belief which can be tested with science is legitimate if and only if it is legitimized by science" Can we go further yet? If there are two types of beliefs, beliefs which can be tested by science and those which can not, how do we judge or test the latter? You can't deem any of them more or less meaningful/valuable/important/true than each other because you have no basis upon which to judge them... If we can't come up with a methodology for judging them, why is it wrong to say "until we know by what criteria these beliefs are too be judged, we must judge them all equally" Would that be an acceptable way of phrasing what I said earlier lol ? You are assuming here that science is the only way of proving the legitimacy of a belief. I personally think that is true, but i know that some religious people will say that the Bible proves the legitimacy of a belief in a Christian/Jewish God over others. No, I'm specifically not doing that. We are all in agreement that some beliefs are verifiable by science and others are not. I'm asking then, how, if at all, can we verify these other beliefs? I'm actively seeking other methods of verifying beliefs that don't involve science...
Yeah i see what you mean. Well then ignore my first sentence, and you have one way of verifying beliefs. Its not one which i agree with, but i have seen it used (in a debate between Hitchens and a Pastor whose name i can't remember). He claims that faith in God, as depicted in the Bible, proves the legitimacy of the Bible as a basis for beliefs.
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On January 04 2013 11:02 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 10:59 Reason wrote:On January 04 2013 10:57 Jockmcplop wrote:On January 04 2013 10:53 Reason wrote:On January 04 2013 08:13 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: I'm pretty happy to say: "any belief which can be tested with science is legitimate if and only if it is legitimized by science" Can we go further yet? If there are two types of beliefs, beliefs which can be tested by science and those which can not, how do we judge or test the latter? You can't deem any of them more or less meaningful/valuable/important/true than each other because you have no basis upon which to judge them... If we can't come up with a methodology for judging them, why is it wrong to say "until we know by what criteria these beliefs are too be judged, we must judge them all equally" Would that be an acceptable way of phrasing what I said earlier lol ? You are assuming here that science is the only way of proving the legitimacy of a belief. I personally think that is true, but i know that some religious people will say that the Bible proves the legitimacy of a belief in a Christian/Jewish God over others. No, I'm specifically not doing that. We are all in agreement that some beliefs are verifiable by science and others are not. I'm asking then, how, if at all, can we verify these other beliefs? I'm actively seeking other methods of verifying beliefs that don't involve science... Yeah i see what you mean. Well then ignore my first sentence, and you have one way of verifying beliefs. Its not one which i agree with, but i have seen it used (in a debate between Hitchens and a Pastor whose name i can't remember). He claims that faith in God, as depicted in the Bible, proves the legitimacy of the Bible as a basis for beliefs.
A story told in X book proves legitimacy of X book as a basis for beliefs?
That doesn't even make sense! I'm not disagreeing with you that people may have attempted to use that argument but come on... that's terrible.
On January 04 2013 08:13 sam!zdat wrote:
but the point is that some beliefs can't be tested, like beliefs about morals
Perhaps then morals are not a set of beliefs that cannot be tested, but rather themselves a/the framework to test beliefs which cannot be verified by science?
We collectively though obviously not unanimously hold the moral belief that it is wrong to discriminate against people based upon gender/race/sex/etc and we are happy to base secular law around such judgements, what happens when two different codes of morality/ethics clash?
Which takes precedence, always the majority right?
I suppose that would lead us back to the conclusion that it's right for religious groups to discriminate against homosexual couples for as long as the majority holds that opinion?
I don't like that answer myself but it does seem reasonable 
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On January 04 2013 11:07 Reason wrote:
Perhaps then morals are not a set of beliefs that cannot be tested, but rather themselves a/the framework to test beliefs which cannot be verified by science?
Ah now you're on to something :D A+
I don't like that answer myself but it does seem reasonable
welcome to my life
I don't think you have to do "majority rules" but I'm not really in a position to put forth my own ethical theory, I just want to show people that they don't actually know what they think they know.
When I say "useless" I just mean if you decide "there's no way to judge things" then you can't get anywhere useful. So you try to come up with something that IS useful, but it's really hard and you turn all cranky and angry like me when you try.
edit: and you try to avoid talking to people who say things like "some people say the bible proves that the bible is true, and idk man what can you do??"
edit: rejecting positivism doesn't mean you can't use science, it just means you can't reject truth claims just because they're not scientific.
edit: I claim following Habermas, that the five kinds of truth-claims are:
cognitive-instrumental: (truth of propositions, efficacy of teleological action)
moral-practical: (rightness of norms of action)
evaluative: (adequacy of standards of value)
expressive: (truthfulness or sincerity of expression)
explicative discourse: (comprehensibility or well-formedness of symbolic constructs)
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I'll do the best I can, Reason:
On January 04 2013 03:25 Reason wrote:
So with the example of rolling the die, are you saying that the belief that the die is not weighted can't be tested?
The evidence is rolling it a few million times and being 99.99% certain it's not weighted.
What about belief in God? Can you ever remove that from square on 50% certain vs 50% uncertain?
I think the former is a belief that can be "tested" and the second cannot. This would seem to contradict what you're saying..
What if I have anecdotal evidence that the die isn't weighted, because I'm never used a weighted die before, and I have authority-based evidence because my parents who never learned to count to three promised me that the die isn't weighted, but I've rolled the die a few billion times and that "evidence" shows there's a 99.9999% chance that it is weighted...
You are saying all types of evidence hold the same level of importance? Is this two against one and I should ignore the mathematical data and instead trust my gut instinct and my parents?
I have no idea what you mean by "tested." You have evidence. Rolling the die provides evidence. Comparing to other dice provides evidence. What do you mean by 'tested' vs 'untested'? I mean, let's say you roll it a million times and you find out that it's perfectly even. But then you roll it a billion times and you find that rolling a 1 has a .018% chance higher of being rolled than another number.
Belief in God has evidence for it and against it. I have no idea why you think otherwise. Personally, I'd say that's a random assertion meant to protect your belief from scrutiny. Consider a Christian's beliefs vs a Muslim's beliefs. Their personal experiences, for whatever reason, lend one to the Christian God and the other to the Muslim God. I don't really know how that's arguable.
One is obviously more than 50% toward Christian God and the other is obviously more than 50% to Muslim God. So I really don't understand the assertion that you can never be anything different from 50/50.
As to your 'authority vs empiricism' argument, I don't really get it. Your parents are obviously a terrible authority, so their weight shouldn't be garnered nearly as much as empiricism. You'll find that if you actually start using Bayesian Reasoning you will find empiricism to be much stronger than nearly anything else. You don't always have empiricism to rely on, though.
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On January 04 2013 11:56 DoubleReed wrote:I'll do the best I can, Reason: Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 03:25 Reason wrote:
So with the example of rolling the die, are you saying that the belief that the die is not weighted can't be tested?
The evidence is rolling it a few million times and being 99.99% certain it's not weighted.
What about belief in God? Can you ever remove that from square on 50% certain vs 50% uncertain?
I think the former is a belief that can be "tested" and the second cannot. This would seem to contradict what you're saying..
What if I have anecdotal evidence that the die isn't weighted, because I'm never used a weighted die before, and I have authority-based evidence because my parents who never learned to count to three promised me that the die isn't weighted, but I've rolled the die a few billion times and that "evidence" shows there's a 99.9999% chance that it is weighted...
You are saying all types of evidence hold the same level of importance? Is this two against one and I should ignore the mathematical data and instead trust my gut instinct and my parents? I have no idea what you mean by "tested." You have evidence. Rolling the die provides evidence. Comparing to other dice provides evidence. What do you mean by 'tested' vs 'untested'? I mean, let's say you roll it a million times and you find out that it's perfectly even. But then you roll it a billion times and you find that rolling a 1 has a .018% chance higher of being rolled than another number. Belief in God has evidence for it and against it. I have no idea why you think otherwise. Personally, I'd say that's a random assertion meant to protect your belief from scrutiny. Consider a Christian's beliefs vs a Muslim's beliefs. Their personal experiences, for whatever reason, lend one to the Christian God and the other to the Muslim God. I don't really know how that's arguable. One is obviously more than 50% toward Christian God and the other is obviously more than 50% to Muslim God. So I really don't understand the assertion that you can never be anything different from 50/50. As to your 'authority vs empiricism' argument, I don't really get it. Your parents are obviously a terrible authority, so their weight shouldn't be garnered nearly as much as empiricism. You'll find that if you actually start using Bayesian Reasoning you will find empiricism to be much stronger than nearly anything else. You don't always have empiricism to rely on, though.
You yourself coined the phrase "tested" in your OP, that's why I've used it since.
It means verified to a certain standard, for example if I flip a coin twice and it comes up heads once and tails once, I don't think it's fair to say that we've "tested" the coin and "verified" that it's a fair coin 
On the die subject, do you have any idea of the probability of rolling it a million times and not discovering the 0.018% tendency to roll a 1 over another number?
I think we usually go for accurate to X% with a margin of error of X% or something like that, I'm happy to accept that sort of "verification". I don't think any die ever constructed is atomically correct enough to roll every number with equal probability, you would just look for a reasonable distribution and account variances simply to variance itself or to minute imperfections that don't really make a difference.
There is no evidence for or against the existence of God, I have no idea why you think otherwise as this is a very well known fact.
It's very clear that we can "test" if the die is a fair one, or not, but you can't "test" for God, which is what all of this was about, sparked by your original comment that there aren't beliefs that can or can't be tested, merely beliefs.
On God being 50/50, as there is no evidence against or for his existence I'm curious how you would create a test that could determine the liklihood of his existence or non-existence credibly, therefore I referred to it being a 50% chance and I don't see how you could deviate from that.
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United States41958 Posts
Saying there are two outcomes and therefore both are equally likely based on no information is absurd. There are a great, great many numbers between 0 and 100, the odds of it being 50 are no better than it being pi% that he exists. There is no shame in saying you cannot test it but claiming that ignorance somehow makes it 50/50 is nonsense, ignorance means it is very unlikely to be any given number over any other.
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Actually he's right in that regard. Having zero information, all possibilities have equal probability (You may disagree with the number of possibilities of course). That's part of Bayes' Theorem and part of Bayesian reasoning.
What he's not right in, is that there is zero evidence against God's existence. The fact that we have yet to discover any supernatural entities using empiricism does in fact give evidence against the entire idea of the supernatural. The fact that we have yet to find irreducibility in things gives evidence against the idea of irreducibility.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That is an absolutely essential part of Statistics and Bayesian Reasoning.
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On January 04 2013 12:33 DoubleReed wrote:
Actually he's right in that regard. Having zero information, all possibilities have equal probability (You may disagree with the number of possibilities of course). That's part of Bayes' Theorem and part of Bayesian reasoning.
What he's not right in, is that there is zero evidence against God's existence. The fact that we have yet to discover any supernatural entities using empiricism does in fact give evidence against the entire idea of the supernatural. The fact that we have yet to find irreducibility in things gives evidence against the idea of irreducibility.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That is an absolutely essential part of Statistics and Bayesian Reasoning.
Can you characterize this use of "absence" a bit more? What sort of space does it take up? I guess what I'm trying to ask is whether or not "evidence of absence" and "evidence of absence of evidence" mean the same thing to you?
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oh god I feel a specter of Derrida beginning to haunt this thread. take it away farv 
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On January 04 2013 12:39 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 12:33 DoubleReed wrote:
Actually he's right in that regard. Having zero information, all possibilities have equal probability (You may disagree with the number of possibilities of course). That's part of Bayes' Theorem and part of Bayesian reasoning.
What he's not right in, is that there is zero evidence against God's existence. The fact that we have yet to discover any supernatural entities using empiricism does in fact give evidence against the entire idea of the supernatural. The fact that we have yet to find irreducibility in things gives evidence against the idea of irreducibility.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That is an absolutely essential part of Statistics and Bayesian Reasoning. Can you characterize this use of "absence" a bit more? What sort of space does it take up? I guess what I'm trying to ask is whether or not "evidence of absence" and "evidence of absence of evidence" mean the same thing to you?
What?
Think about statistics for a moment. Let's say you're trying to find a correlation between two things, but even after lots of sampling and data and stuff, there's no evidence at all of a correlation. That, by definition, is evidence against the idea of a correlation between those two things. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Get it?
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edit: shouldn't multitask
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Well you construct your possibilities so that they are disjoint...
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On January 04 2013 13:37 DoubleReed wrote:
Well you construct your possibilities so that they are disjoint...
right so there seems something question begging about this. what credence do you give to the belief that the disjunction of propositions to which you offer credence is the correct one?
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On January 04 2013 12:33 DoubleReed wrote:
The fact that we have yet to discover any supernatural entities using empiricism does in fact give evidence against the entire idea of the supernatural. The fact that we have yet to find irreducibility in things gives evidence against the idea of irreducibility.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That is an absolutely essential part of Statistics and Bayesian Reasoning.
Okay, I'm liking it, though I'm forced to ask this question following the previous discussion concerning positivism:
If the supernatural is by it's very nature undetectable via empiricism is it logical to use this line of reasoning in this instance?
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On January 04 2013 13:43 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 13:37 DoubleReed wrote:
Well you construct your possibilities so that they are disjoint... right so there seems something question begging about this. what credence do you give to the belief that the disjunction of propositions to which you offer credence is the correct one?
What? I think you're going too meta about this for my brain. You do have to make assumptions for any model to work. That's a complaint you could make about any model. Besides, you can't judge the consistency of a model from within a model. Err... if I'm reading you correctly, which I don't think I am. Shrug.
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yeah, my point is just against attributing undue ontological status to any model.
"there are beliefs for which bayesianism is not a good model" QED
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On January 04 2013 13:51 Reason wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 12:33 DoubleReed wrote:
The fact that we have yet to discover any supernatural entities using empiricism does in fact give evidence against the entire idea of the supernatural. The fact that we have yet to find irreducibility in things gives evidence against the idea of irreducibility.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That is an absolutely essential part of Statistics and Bayesian Reasoning. Okay, I'm liking it, though I'm forced to ask this question following the previous discussion concerning positivism: If the supernatural is by it's very nature undetectable via empiricism is it logical to use this line of reasoning?
Empiricism is applicable to all observable phenomena, no matter how indirectly they may be observed. To be beyond empiricism is to be beyond observation.
Suppose an entity takes no action whatsoever, except that it contacts certain people's minds. In doing so, it alters the behavior of those humans, producing observable phenomena! Empiricism applies.
Any effect the 'supernatural' has on humans, no matter how indirect, is a piece of data. Consequently, the only way the supernatural can be immune to empiricism is if the supernatural has no effect on observers at all.
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EPT
