[roelschroeven]

> One can't help but have some kind of faith, you have to believe in something.

Can you expand a bit on that? Because to me statements like that are not right or wrong because to me they don't really mean anything. Clearly to many people it does mean something, because you are far from the only one to make statements like that. To be clear, I don't mean any of this in a condescending way; I'm truly trying to understand.

For starters, what exactly do you mean by 'faith' and 'to believe in something'? I presume that believing in a god will certainly fit the definition, but what about people who are not religious? Would something like believing in the general goodness of people fit the definition?

The thing is, when I read or hear a statement like 'you have to believe in something' I try to determine whether is applies to myself, and then I have a problem. Do I believe in something? I don't know. I don't believe in a god, that's for sure. I do believe in evolution, for example, in the sense that I believe it exists (or more precisely perhaps, I accept the evidence in favor of the theory). But somehow I feel things like that are not what is generally meant by 'something to believe in'. But then I feel like there's nothing really meaningful left that I believe in. And of course then I start to question why I should have to believe in something. But maybe that's just because of a misunderstanding on my part.

[weard_beard]

“We just don’t know” only gets you so far. In order to participate in modern society constant little assumptions sneak into your thinking. At about the rate videos are uploaded to YouTube. AKA faster than we have the time and capacity to audit them.

We all have faith in the same way we all have spam in our inboxes.

It doesn’t mean we all think a Nigerian prince is going to make us rich.

[trasz3]

Funny you mention human rights, which is something the religion (Catholicism) fought frantically against.

There are different kind of beliefs. The author is quite explicit in that he’s describing one particular kind: religious beliefs. Which, as we now know, are just another kind of fringe theories, like flat earth. But - and that’s what the article is about - they could make sense in some specific circumstances.

[beepbooptheory]

Lots of angles here. For one thing, consider, like a Humean skeptic, small things. You believe if you hit a billiards ball with another, it will roll away at a certain vector. How might we justify this belief? You might say, "well I have seen billiard balls interact before, and this prediction is consistent with my past experiences, I have no reason to believe otherwise." Hume would say: "the belief itself that you can predict a phenomena based on prior analogous observations cannot be justified alone by those observations." That is, there is nothing in your experience alone that proves that things that act one way in the past will continue to act that way in the future, there is something like belief there.

But you are probably smarter than that. You would say, "well the study of physics shows that we can generalize the behavior of bodies in space such that we can predict their behavior. And look! We can make planes and computers and such with these generalized rules, so they must be real." But what fundamentally has changed here? Not only is it ultimately the same act of belief, but now you are at best 1 step removed from actual experience. Not only are you putting some belief into the consistency of the universe, you are putting it into a giant infrastructure of research and peer review and state-interest and grants that you can't possibly be personally a part of entirely. You have in fact contracted out your empirical life to others!

Because it is "better" or "worse" as a story, does not change the fundamental act of belief. Hume, I believe (its been a long time), would say this kind of believing is a habit, which makes sense to me.

To get even crazier, consider even perception itself, as Husserl did. You are looking at a table in your room, you can't see the other side of the table, but you "know" its there. But what do you really know? You know that perception itself tends to present a "world" with certain characteristics like extension, where moving around an object will present different parts of it. But that perception "shows" you a world like this does not justify the world itself, only the characteristics and tendencies of your perception.

This is what I mean in principle, perhaps we "know more" but we are certainly not "smarter" than religious people of the past. We just have longer stories for things. Stories that are sometimes, but not always, more fruitful.

And a related but different angle: I think even secular/atheist/agnostic people who aren't even necessarily militant weirdos like Dawkins/Harris unconsciously must contextualize themselves and their life in a world of belief. Trivially, you not believing in god is not an absence of delusion or whatever, but necessarily a belief. You go about the world and live your life based on unconscious assumptions that there is fundamentally a ground you are standing on, whether you are a philosopher or not.

[roelschroeven]

Hm, OK, that's a whole different approach then what I expected. If one calls the expectation that the law of physics work the same tomorrow as they did today and yesterday and all the days before a belief, then yes everyone believes in that. It's so obvious that it doesn't mean anything anymore, at least to me.

> perhaps we "know more" but we are certainly not "smarter" than religious people of the past

Oh, I never said that we are smarter than people of the past. I would leave religious out of it though, since I think being religious is independent from being smart.

> And a related but different angle: I think even secular/atheist/agnostic people who aren't even necessarily militant weirdos like Dawkins/Harris ... By Dawkins I guess you mean Richard Dawkins? I don't know that much about him, but he doesn't really seem like a weirdo to me? I don't know Harris so I can't comment on they being a weirdo or not at all.

> ... unconsciously must contextualize themselves and their life in a world of belief. Trivially, you not believing in god is not an absence of delusion or whatever, but necessarily a belief.

I don't think it's trivial at all to state that not believing in god is necessarily a belief. Maybe it's true, maybe not, but I don't think it's at all trivial. There are infinitely many things that I don't belief in. Surely we can't say that for each and every one of those I actively belief in their absence? Or is there a fundamental difference between god and other things I don't believe in? Or is the distinction between absence of belief and belief of absence a distinction without meaning, just a play with words, not much different from discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

[beepbooptheory]

I just meant that my particular argument right there was trivial, not the belief itself. Ie:

Not believing in x === believing in not x.

Thats what we in the biz call "trivial".

If we lived in a world where the idea of god never crossed anybody's mind, then they would neither believe nor not believe. I dont believe in unicorns, but i neither believe nor disbelieve some random microorganism Ive never heard of.

Just consider yourself lucky you are not familiar with Dawson :).

[roelschroeven]

> I just meant that my particular argument right there was trivial, not the belief itself.

Yes, that's what I thought you meant, and I disagree.

> Not believing in x === believing in not x.

Ah, so indeed to you the two are the same. Again, I don't think that's trivial at all.

Let me mention Shigella roterei, a species of bacteria, to you. There, now you have heard of it. But does it exist? Do you believe in it? What if I state that it doesn't exist? Just because I now mentioned it to you, do you necessarily have to believe it doesn't exist. You can't just not believe in it anymore. Fine with me, but I don't think I work that way.

[beepbooptheory]

I do think we are just in a linguistic wrinkle here. Because "not believing in x" is ambiguous in that it could also obtain those who have never even heard of x. I apologize, that was not what I meant, I thought the context was enough to understand that, but I get your confusion. I really dont think we are disagreeing about anything really!

But if it isn't the ambiguity there tripping us up, very curious to hear your argument for why that formulation is incorrect. I would believe in the fungus if I trusted the authority of the person telling me about it. But before I heard about it, I neither believed nor disbelieved it.

[roelschroeven]

[Sorry, please ignore, I accidentally posted an incomplete comment]

Hm, OK, that's a whole different approach then what I expected. If one calls the expectation that the law of physics work the same tomorrow as they did today and yesterday and all the days before a belief, then yes everyone believes in that. It's so obvious that it doesn't mean anything anymore, at least to me.

Some of the questions philosophers think about are interesting to me in a w

[beepbooptheory]

Well the law is the thing we come up with to explain the phenomena. Its not about the laws changing, but quite literally the world the law is supposed to speak to. But I don't understand how its trivial, its a very deep epistemological assertion. You could imagine another world where experiments yield very different laws, but it would be no less science, and no less a world.

[roelschroeven]

If you say that philosophy tells us that even the smallest observations we make require some belief about how the world looks, yes, that is an interesting assertion (though I feel philosophers make a much bigger deal out of it than what it's worth). I'm not arguing that.

But when you state "Everyone has to belief in something", that is just a trivial consequence of the above. We've defined 'belief' to be something that is inherent in the most trivial things we do in our life every single second of every single day. With that definition of belief, of course everyone necessarily believes.

At least from my view. From you view, as I now realize, "everyone has to belief in something" is a summary for the theory of knowledge, and thus not trivial at all.

> Its not about the laws changing, but quite literally the world the law is supposed to speak to.

I feel you're playing with the meaning of words like I feel philosophers tend to do, causing all kinds of misunderstandings. The laws of physics don't speak to the world; they try to describe the world. When I say that the laws don't change, what I mean is that the way the world itself works doesn't change.

> You could imagine another world where experiments yield very different laws, but it would be no less science, and no less a world.

I could, but that has nothing to do with the world we live, or what I do and don't believe in. I don't see how this is relevant at all.

[beepbooptheory]

Sorry, I meant "Speak to the world" as precisely "describe the world". As in, "the countries stringent laws speaks to its cultural values" or "his eloquence speaks to his strong reading ability."

And yes, my point was to try to show that something seemingly trivial in fact shows something implicit about the way we think. That is the form of my assertion. I don't really think we are disagreeing about anything, but philosophy is definitely not for everyone! Only really for the worst kinds of people in my experience ;)

[trasz3]

>Trivially, you not believing in god is not an absence of delusion or whatever, but necessarily a belief.

At, the old “_not_ collecting postage stamps is a hobby too” argument.