Belief - repost

[andrewducker]

Question three was borked. Rewritten to actually cover all the bases, and not be internally contradictory. Apologies to the 7 people who already filled it in!

[Poll #1427776]

Comments

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

This.

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

Believe in god is one thing.
How many kids adhere to a belief system?

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

You can't be sure that your beliefs are accurate. They're beliefs. Anyone who didn't tick the last option is a) wrong, b) deluded, c) irrational or d) a monkey who can't use a mouse properly. (I might be persuaded to make exceptions for people who ticked the second one, on a case-by-case basis.) The use of the word 'belief' clearly implies irrationality, because beliefs are irrational! Belief in anything is irrational, because the word 'belief' implies, at least to me, that you don't have proof for it.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Sorry, how is "I believe in.." not a belief system?

What I'm asking for is the poll to exclude those childhood beliefs burned into us by society/parents/whatever.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

You can't be sure that your beliefs are accurate.

Equally, what proof do you have that any of the people responding to this actually exist?

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to add to the discussion, but I would love to be able to sit down and discuss beliefs with a religious person? I don't think I've actually had the chance to learn and discuss at a personal level since I was 15 and had Mrs Emami for RE. The internet is, frankly, crap at this because any attempt at finding stuff out assumes you need converting.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

For that statement alone, you should feel blessed that you live in the UK.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I have to caveat my answers, since I went to a CofE primary school, but stopped believing in God when I was nine or ten.

As far as I am concerned, God is a human construct; I don't believe we need to invent God to understand or explain the universe. Indeed, inventing supernatural powers is such a cop out.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"strong" and "weak" are both bad, misleading terms, because in both cases they concede the framing of the argument to imply that there is a *reason* to "assert nonexistence*, or a functional difference between nonbelief and assertion that other people are wrong to believe.

And, reall,y I'm not saying you can't call this position agnostic. I'm simply saying, I'd call it atheistic:
Since you don't actively believe that one or more of the postulated supernatural things are affirmatively true, you're not a theist. To not be a theist is to be an atheist. Full stop.

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

I mean that there is a difference between believing in what a religion teaches and practicing its rites and rules.

Most children do not follow the full set of rites and rules of a religion until they are past a given age. In some religions that age is marked by a ritual. In others it is not.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Didn't answer the last. I follow Model Agnostism (Specifically, Wilsonian Postmodernism via RAW), and there's no option for rejecting belief as an operant.

Also, I see with interest that the atheist anthill has been poked with a stick. Don't do that. They don't like it. ;}P>

[darkoshi]

I'm not sure what I believed when I was a kid. I remember coming up with the idea that whatever anyone believed, was true for that person. Ie. if you believed in reincarnation, you'd be reincarnated, or if you believed in heaven, you'd go to heaven, etc. But I don't remember what I personally believed at that time. There was a point later on when I realized that I did not believe in Christianity, or in a god... which sort of implies that I did believe it before then, but I'm not sure. Yet I did believe in Santa Claus at one time, and the Easter Bunny, so does that count as a belief system?

[yalovetz]

I'm certain that at least one of my beliefs is wrong, but I don't know which, so I continue treating all of them as if they were right.

I'm not quite sure where that puts me on your last question. I went for the middle option, because the final option is simultaneously too weak (in level of certainty) and too strong (in scope) for my position.

[yalovetz]

I recommend theology degrees for such discussions. ;)

[andrewducker]

If atheist, to you, means "One who does not positively believe in God." then what's your word for "One who positively believes God does not exist."?

[andrewducker]

I also went to a CofE school when I was young, but I never believed.

[andrewducker]

I was also born in the South of England, in 1972, and I never believed. A fair number of my compatriots of the time seem to have felt likewise.

There were celebrations, but they seemed to be entirely rite, with no actual belief involved.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It's pretty hard to know what Carrier actually means [I read a fair amount of his blog post, but it is (this all his blog posts) extremely long and the content seems to mostly be at the beginning], because if he's going to come up with a definition of natural that uses the term mental, then he needs to define what mental actually means otherwise his definition is not very useful because it is either terribly incomplete or hides within it what I suspect is a circular argument (by making the reader assume certain things about the nature of mentality).

Perhaps you're right, and under his definition aliens are supernatural if they're somehow not made of stuff, but I imagine there are quite a lot of people who would think of aliens as not being entirely reducible to stuff (if by stuff we mean the kind of things physicists study) but wouldn't think that that makes them supernatural. Perhaps it ought to - although it is confusing to have the term used in quite a different way to how people would use it generally.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yes, people would see a difference between the things that God generally does (like the creation of new life in babies) and the things he does rarely (like the resurrection of the dead), but they wouldn't see them as being in two stark categories like natural and supernatural.

A christians can use the terms natural and supernatural to talk about the things that God generally does and the things he does rarely, but the terms have a different meaning than what the Christian means by them even if they broadly refer to similar classes of thing (although arguably they don't if we accept Carrier's position above).

So while the terms might be useful to have a common language to talk about approximately the same collections of things, the terms import ideas that the Christian wouldn't (or rather shouldn't) hold to.

[andrewducker]

If by "aliens" you mean "creatures from a different planet" then they'd be made of stuff in the same way that we are. Why would aliens be any different?

I think that part of the difference here is that we are constrained by the laws of physics. Aliens will also be constrained by said laws of physics. They may well have a better grasp of them, allowing them to do more impressive things (just as we do, compared to our 19th century ancestors), but we aren't supernatural compared to them, just better at working with nature.

God, however, is presumably capable of changing those laws - and is not bound by them. God is outside of, and above of, the natural system which God has created. Thus super-natural.

[andrewducker]

Of course I can't be _certain_ that my beliefs are accurate. I can merely be confident that they match with my observations of the universe and logical hypotheses based thereon. That's as good as it's going to get, and good enough for me to be _near_ certain, and to act as if they were true outside of philosophical discussions of this nature.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I should have been clearer. My second paragraph is following on from the first.

I mean that aliens are not reducible to stuff in the sense that their minds might not be 'reducible to stuff' unless mentalness is ultimately reducible to stuff, which is completely unknown.

Carrier's definition of supernatural has absolutely nothing to do with outside of a system which God might have created. It's about the nature of mentality.

BTW I think this is a good example of how either Carrier's definition is not very good, or (more likely) 'supernatural' is being used without being properly defined (where really it means 'things I don't think exist').

[andrewducker]

I would consider God to be outside of the laws of nature if I believe in God. And therefore supernatural.

[andrewducker]

Outside of the laws of nature. God, for instance, would presmably be able to ignore gravity, the speed of light, the inverse square law, etc. if God so wished.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

OK, but that's not what Carrier means by supernatural at all, and Christians wouldn't (or shouldn't) even think in terms of the supernatural.

So I guess it goes to show that the term supernatural is not actually that useful for having a productive discussion as it means entirely different things to different people.

It's misleading (or just plain confusing) in the way it frames the debate, and leads to assumptions about the position of the other people in the debate.