There are also various raw materials that get rarer. And we are still not making concerted efforts to get off this rock. — Echarmion

Elon Musk is developing astro-mining. It's a several trillion dollar-industry calculated as of late.

Which makes the focus on jobs as the ultimate end of all policy making even more perplexing. — Echarmion

Exactly, but the reason is that politicians are demagogues who follow the will of the people or manipulate the will of the people in order to have more power and money. A politician that actually fights for the people and for rational decisions in face of the future are rare, or non-existent. Politicians only make decisions when they face a problem that is critical.

This is why they are politicians because they focus on one thing they want to change or do and they have no education with other things. So they try to combine expertise help with holding on to the power that they have, instead of figuring out the best course of action.

In essence, I agree with the need for philosopher kings, but I would use it within a democracy. Don't let anyone be able to become a high-level politician if they have not undergone philosophical training and learned how to research issues themselves. Then they can figure out together with experts, the best course of action and we are less susceptible to rich narcissists taking over entire countries.

No, I am deducing attributes from the little that the proof shows us about the end of the line. We know that it is, In Aristotle's proof, the ultimate cause of change, or, in my meta-law argument, the ultimate conserver of the laws of nature. We also know that, to be the end of the line, it must explain itself. These are things the respective proofs allow us to know for a fact. So, no assumptions are involved. — Dfpolis

You are making conclusions based on data that proves you "to know the truth", when in physics we still don't have data to complete a unification theory. You claim a deduced truth when there is no data that can support your concluded truth. We know that the universe expanded quickly, referred to the Big Bang, we don't know what came before, we have no data to conclude what the cause was so we don't know what was before. This is facts, real facts about the current state of knowledge about the causality of the universe. Your deduction is based on the interpretation of some data, cherry-picked to fit the narrative of your argument and its logic.

If you are going to prove, without a doubt, a truth about the causality before Big Bang, you need to solve the physics that has not yet been solved and you need data that hasn't been gathered yet about Big Bang.

Before this, you don't have an argument that can claim itself to be true, because you don't have the facts that support it.

You seem to have no idea that the proofs involve concurrent, not time-sequenced causality, so that the nature of time and/or the history of the universe are totally irrelevant. If you read the proofs, you may be able to make relevant objections. — Dfpolis

What proof/data in physics are you using for your conclusion? I want references to the science that support your definition of proof. Without it, you are doing pseudoscience nonsense.

So, if you think the proofs fail you need to show either (1) they have false premises, or (2) they involve invalid logical moves. As you refuse to read the proofs, you can do neither. — Dfpolis

Do you have data to prove something beyond what current physics don't have data to prove? If so, that is your flaw. You shoehorn some data into fitting your narrative, you do not have a deductive argument, you have a belief and you use flawed logic and insufficient data to support that belief.

Please get back to me when you've read at least one of the proofs and think you can do (1) or (2). — Dfpolis

Please get back to me when you can combine your concluded truth with current understanding of the physics data we have to explain the universe at this time. You also need to prove what came before Big Bang in such a way that it combines all theories of physics into a unification theory.

If you do not do that, you cannot claim God to exist, because you don't have sufficient data to explain what came before Big Bang, therefore you cannot explain the start of causality or the attributes of it. And you can also not dismiss other possibilities because you cannot prove any possibility without a unification theory and data that proves which possibility is true.

What I said here, breaks your argument. You have burden of proof on your shoulders. You need to prove, without a doubt that your conclusion is true. If physics cannot prove it because of insufficient data at this time, then you cannot do it either. Period.

everyone seems to be going with the assumption that technology will provide the necessary improvements in time. — Echarmion

But we are living in a time when technology is in a whole other place than back then.

The problem we face now is that technology will outperform us, that automation will render blue-collar workers (first) irrelevant for work. We are facing a mass unemployment-era in which most are out of a job, but industries need consumers in order to survive. It might possibly be the largest collapse of the economy the world has ever seen and if no one is establishing a new model of economy, we will not be ready for it.

Was it Hume who said human has a natural tendency to believe everyone, but should not believe anyone. — Hypnos

Does this even apply to the era we are in at the moment? It seems that we have flipped this on its head and that we now have a natural tendency to not believe anyone because we now only believe our own belief.

That the narcissism of this era has made everyone skeptical of everyone and through the love of their own belief and a bias to that belief, never accept anything, even if it's proven true?

For myself, the idea of being responsible for what is happening now is the most interesting thing.
Whether that happens through the register of religion or something else is not as interesting as the idea by itself, that individuals influence what is happening now.
So, how does one get to that place? — Valentinus

I would say that epistemic responsibility is the first thing. That is a virtue to follow in the now. That responsibility demands that you do not make choices lightly and you are responsible for bad outcomes if you didn't think them through. But per my argument, that would mean that if you believe in something that you cannot support rationally, you are breaking epistemic responsibility and therefore you are responsible for negative outcomes of that. I would also argue, as I do in one of the premises, that if your belief affects people into doing bad things you are responsible for spreading that belief. Just like if someone is confusing someone into murder.

Supported belief has a lower probability of distorting reality for you and others, and is, therefore, the ethical choice. Unsupported belief has a high probability of distorting reality and could lead to negative outcomes for you, others around you or influence people after your death to do things according to that belief. It's unethical to be the source of such causality. You cannot know the causality, but you can minimize the probability of it happening.

This applies to all belief, not just religion. My example is anti-vaxxers who by justifying their belief in defending personal belief while not caring to rationalize their belief according to evidence, spread their ideas willingly or unwillingly to others susceptible to those ideas. This has caused almost eradicated diseases to come back and threaten the lives of children or even kill them.

If we destroy the idea that "personal belief" is sacred because it rather intentionally or unintentionally has a high probability of causing negative outcomes when that belief lacks rational reasoning; And make epistemic responsibility a virtue while condemning belief that lacks rational reasoning, we have a system of ethical thinking that at a large scale has a positive effect on society and people.

It may sound complicated, but it's really about changing how we handle day to day thinking. If we accept that current morality is positively limiting us and our freedom in thinking so that we function better towards other people instead of harming them, then we can also positively limit our way of handling the freedom and concept of belief in order to prevent harm as a result of distorting reality with that unsupported belief. We follow common morals to the best of our ability, like: not killing, not stealing, not harming others. We can therefore also follow epistemic responsibility as a moral guide towards our handling of knowledge in life, not accepting an unsupported belief that could distort our and others way of looking at reality.

For me, that is a responsibility of what is happening in the now.

I don't know if we can so categorically say that religious faith is a bad thing. Religion has been a cause of many atrocities but they also kept the flame of morality burning until philosophers took the responsibility of studying it in earnest. In fact I'd go so far as to say that moral theory arose from religion, faith based as it is. — TheMadFool

I'm more with Sam Harris when it comes to moral, in that we can find parameters around moral that does not have anything to do with the reasons found in religious text. At the same time there are some obvious truths about what not to do in a society with people within these religious texts, like "thou shall not steal". To say that this idea derived from the religious text seems like an after-thought on moral theory when the idea itself does not need religion to be found sound, as a moral thing to do.

I agree that without religion it would be hard to keep morality in check throughout a history where people needed to make sense of a world that didn't make sense. But I think that as a contemporary argument, with the knowledge we have today, it has lost its reason for existence and is so inferior that it would more likely cause harm than do good. Even when trying to do good, because it's so easy to find different perspectives today, when a parent tells their child "do this" and they ask "why?" and that parent just tells them, "because I say so", this can lead to a fierce counter-reaction, even later in life when that child gets knowledge of the thing not needed to be done as the parent asked. Such unwillingness to explain or justify their belief by the parent, religious or otherwise does no good for the child, both then as an adult.

I would argue that as a sense of calm, meditation, pillow of comfort towards the complexities of life, especially for people who lack the intellect to examine their own ideas, religious belief can be a positive effect. But it can also lead to those people hiding in that comfort and never interacting with the rest of the world, ending up in a negative position both for themselves and others around them. So I think the problem lies more in that we haven't figured out how to find comfort in the meaninglessness of life outside of religious belief.

We need more than just a moral system outside of religious moral theory, we need an entire framework of living without God that keeps our sanity and empathy. This is essentially what Nietschze feared, that we would fail to create such a contemporary framework and everyone would instead become narcissistic assholes. Well, safe to say that he was right about that thing in a if we look at the world today, but he was wrong that it would collapse our society. The most peaceful nations with the highest quality of life are the ones with the highest level of atheism, primarily because they truly separate the church and state. The US, for example, doesn't really have God separated from the state. The president needs to be a believer in God, at least on paper, so that's how corrupt that "separation" is

I think there's a good reason to move away from religion altogether. To create a new foundation for the entire society that is based on rationality rather than doctrines. That realize the long term dangers of unsupported belief and its effect on people.

This is what my argument is about, that the belief itself is causing anti-intellectualism, causing pain and suffering because it focuses our attention on wrong things and distort reality to make monsters out of people. It's also the reason why people like anti-vaxxers keep popping up.

Why do these people hold onto their belief and dismiss everyone's counter-argument and all the evidence around them? It's not only because of cognitive bias and a lack of rational intellect. I think that religion has taught us that personal belief is sacred and that we can believe whatever we want.

I think this is wrong. We always affect other people with our personal belief and that's why the anti-vaxxer movement grew and became a danger to all children. The fine balance, however, is to find a way to steer people into thinking "correct" without going Orwellian 84 on society. It's not about thought-crime, but "thought-virtue".

To make unsupported belief to be unethical and supported belief to be ethical, we have a foundation of thinking about everything that will always focus people on trying to be right rather than just believe. Instead of teaching people that their belief in their own and their religious ideas are a good thing to have, show them that it is wrong to hold on to a belief that is unsupported because it can affect many people down the line, even if you can't see that causality at the moment.

Instead, teach children to think critically, have foundational teachings in school to be that of how to rationally think about things. How to examine your own thought and belief. We don't teach children to think for real, we just fill them with knowledge and leave them to figure it out by themselves or let parents do all the teachings of how to understand life.

It's flawed. That's why my argument demands unsupported belief to be unethical because it will eventually lead to negative outcomes, maybe not for you, but someone else, sometimes even whole societies and nations. Epistemic responsibility should be a virtue for all and unsupported belief should be a sin.

If my observation is not interesting, just forget it and carry on. — Valentinus

No, it is of interest, maybe this far I've seen too many objections without any relation to my actual argument, so I'm a bit on a defensive side. Though I knew belief and religion always rubs many people the wrong way, I feel there are a bit too many apologists on this forum who have another agenda than philosophical discourse. I've seen it plenty of time in the personal inbox of this forum.

Which premise (I presume the one about Pascal and Kierkegaard again?) is it you have a problem with and why? I changed it to pinpoint closer to their ideas. As I understand Kierkegaard, his leap of faith is about taking that leap because faith relates to something unknowable and cannot be reached without that leap. I do not criticize it in this premise, I criticize how people use it to justify not needing to prove some belief, even though it doesn't have to be about specifically God. They use ideas like leap of faith as a "cop-outs" to get out of any reason to explain themselves. Be it a distortion of his ideas, but I've seen it, even if that recall is anecdotal. Pascal's wager is also on point with this premise, people use it to justify not needing to explain their belief in anything. They simply use the wager to argue that there is no other reason not to believe what they believe and therefore they don't need to explain themselves.

So I'm referring to the use of these ideas, it's not a critique of them in their entirety.

The premise's point is that people use ideas like these to justify their unwillingness to prove or explain their belief. This is the premise's point. Maybe Kierkegaard and Pascal might be wrong examples, but I've seen first-hand people using them specifically. So, since you seem to have read them a bit more in detail, you could maybe give me some more insight into what's gone wrong in that premise?

I am defining the ego in Freudian terms, are we on the same page? — nihil

I'm always careful using Freud as a source for definitions as most of his ideas about the mind, consciousness etc. are outdated and updated with a more modern understanding of psychology.
Does your argument hold up when looking into modern psychology research about how we perceive ourselves and also how we delude ourselves?

Also, what must we do? What is the divide you make between could and must? Meaning, how do you define could and how do you define must within the context of your argument?

The point of that premise is not about dissecting their points, but to illuminate on alternatives to belief in which you might even be agnostic, but you believe anyway.

The premise is part of different perspectives on reasons to have faith.

In any case, from their point of view, "you" are the one who is epistemologically irresponsible. — Valentinus

Are you directing this at me specifically? Because in that case, I think you've misunderstood the entire point of the ethics argument I've made.

Anyway, I have updated it now due to some comments and some people's misunderstanding of it. If you can look at that point once more and maybe do the Socratic way of helping me modify it so that it gets to the premise point instead of you ridiculing it?

Not if you are logical. To be the end of the line of explanation, something must be self-explaining. That means that what it is entails that it is. Consequently, its essence cannot limit the unspecified ability to act which its existence. So, the end of the line must be omnipotent, which means it is not limited by space and time, or in any other way. It must be able to perform any possible act. — Dfpolis

You are attaching attributes to what's at the end which is assuming you know what it is and how it works, which isn't a logical conclusion to the argument. And if there's a possibility that time is circular, if the cosmic collapse has a probability of being true, then there is no first mover or cause. A deductive logical argument cannot be false and if it can be false you cannot claim it as truth, evidence or logic. Period.

Any attribute you attach in your reasoning does not have any logical argument for them. Nothing of what you say here proves any God whatsoever.

This is an irrational hypothesis. To be an explanation, it must act to effect what is explained. — Dfpolis

No, because you don't know the answers physics is trying to answer. You don't know the unification theory. You cannot conclude anything about what came before the big bang without knowing and you can't do it with your deduction.

Stop just believing your own words and flawed reasoning and put your argument in front of falsification methods.

Nothing of what you say prove any form of God, that is your invention out of confusing yourself with the logic. You don't seem to see the forest burning because you only look at individual trees.

You are confused. When we speak of lines of explanation, there is an empirical datum to be explained. For example, Aristotle's unmoved mover is the end of the line of explanation for observed change. My meta-law argument explains the observed persistence of physical objects.

Ontological arguments use no data, and therefore can only show how we must think of something to be consistent, and not that what is thought of actually exists. — Dfpolis

Then stop being confusing, you are confusing yourself into not even seeing your own flawed reasoning.

Let me ask you, have you put your argument to peer review among physics? Because your argument seems to involve a lot of physics in its reasoning, so you need to put your argument through falsification methods. Aristotle's unmoved mover isn't God. That is your invention, that is not the conclusion. There is nothing confusing about this.

If you are using data, then you are making a scientific theory, if so, I'd like to look at the peer reviews of your theory. I'd like to hear what physicists have to say about your use of the data.

You may repeat your faith claim as often as you wish, but doing so is irrational unless you are going to argue you case. — Dfpolis

You haven't presented a logical argument yet, burden of proof is on you, and you haven't presented a solid argument for the existence of God. You think you have, but you haven't. I've pointed out the flaws and you ignore them and say that I'm confused and that I have a "faith claim".

You have no argument, so stop pushing convoluted empty arguments. As I said, if you had proven the existence of God, you would now be a celebrity, but you haven't, because only you think you are correct.

You did not look at either Aristotle's argument for an unmoved mover or mine for a self-conserving meta-law. Thus, you objections do not address either the truth of the premises or the validity of the logical moves. These are the only two ways to show that a proof fails. When you address one or the other, I will continue the discussion. — Dfpolis

Aristotle's argument for the unmoved mover as support for the existence of God has been refuted by me and many more, much more brilliant minds than mine and you ignore them all. I did it many times and you just ignore it.

I will tell it again. The unmoved mover is the conclusion, it does not have any relation to the concept of any God. That is truth, that is fact. You CANNOT take that conclusion and say it concludes there is a God because there is nothing that connects between unmoved mover and God in any logical way. To connect that conclusion with God, means that you need to assume that God is the unmoved mover, there is nothing in the argument that logically deduce God to be the unmoved mover.
Your logic in trying to connect them has no connection. It also assumes that other hypothetical explanations for what happens before Big Bang, like that the end of heat death ends up in a cosmic collapse and that time starts over, or that multiverse models are true or that Big Bang was a quantum anomaly from nothing because of infinite possibilities within infinite nothing.

You cannot conclude with deductive logic, a truth if there are any possibilities outside that conclusion and you cannot apply attributes to the conclusion outside of the logic. This is the whole reason why Aristotle's argument has never been accepted as any proof for the existence of God, no one takes that assumption seriously because it is flawed in its reasoning. Just because you want it to be true doesn't mean it's true. Your argument must be hundred percent logical and the deduction must mean it cannot be false but it can and therefore you cannot say it's proof. Period.




Now, present your argument as a bulletproof logical deduction that God exists. Stop convoluting your writing into an incoherent mess. I want the argument, plain premisses and the conclusion, like everyone else does it. If you have a scientific paper on it I want to see the peer-reviewed comments on it. You are aiming for undeniable proof of the existence of God, act like it. I cannot put forth an argument if I only have your self-confused logic as a source.

Even if one were to assume that by doing such things one would acquire knowledge, not many people do this. — Tzeentch

That's why I am of the strong opinion that knowledge in fact-checking should be a primary thing in school.

In other words, a lot of what people believe to be scientific knowledge is nothing more than belief. Such beliefs can be false and even dangerous and should therefore be added to your list of potentially dangerous beliefs. This has been my position from the start of our debate. — Tzeentch

Read my new version of the argument above. I do not include the word "scientific" because then it could be twisted into seemingly deem science as only belief. But I mentioned belief as three types and if type A is within institutions and research it applies.

I know my device works, but how it works is an entirely different matter. I could obtain a plausible idea about how it works by reading, etc., but would I know for sure? No. Not until I did the experiments myself. There's nothing metaphysical about this. It's fact. A lot of what we think of as knowledge is actually just belief. Beliefs that may turn out to be right, but beliefs none the less. — Tzeentch

The example with the device was about putting all science under such a divide that we only have proof or we have a scientific belief that is placed in the same category as religious belief. Many of the results of hypotheses in science can be found within your device, meaning you can't put a scientific hypothesis in the same category as religious belief since a hypothesis demands rational reasoning behind it.

This way of binary thinking makes no sense for this argument and as such you are grasping for straws to counter-argue without even actually look at the argument presented, which is an ethics argument that you can't counter by inventing a super-binary view on different belief-systems, just to make your point.

This is a problem that any judicial system struggles with. One can never be certain about events that happened in the past. Video images prove compelling evidence, but ultimately are falsifiable. How often aren't people convicted to crimes they didn't commit? It happens every day. Why? Because people had beliefs about that person that turned out to be false. In the judicial system it is a calculated risk. The law simply accepts that sometimes it makes wrong decisions and convicts innocent people. It doesn't make the belief that an innocent man is guilty any more valid, though. — Tzeentch

Yes, but your binary argument means that we shouldn't even have a court and attempt at trying to prove who is guilty or not. And if you disagree with this, then what is your counter-argument to the argument I presented?

I argue for always trying to prove your belief, it's not about being right it's about attempting to prove and in doing so exclude all belief that has no rational reasoning or proof behind it, since that belief eventually lead to dangers.

As far as I know, we are still talking about whether people have science-based beliefs and whether they should be added to your list of potentially dangerous beliefs. — Tzeentch

Read my updated argument above, that is the argument this is all about. If you have objections or points, derive it from there.

Measuring the claims of scientists to one's own sense of logic is rather fallible, unless one is a scientist themselves. — Tzeentch

If we educate children in how to fact-check everything around them, be critical etc. they will have the methods. And the attempt at fact-checking what you believe is more important than if you are right. The problem is belief without any attempt at trying to fact-check or hold it to scrutiny.

Who would you say is the more ethical of these two?
1. A man who is not a scientist and aren't that educated in fact-checking, but still attempts to ask himself if he is right in his belief and look into if it seems correct in following this belief.
2. A man who believes something and doesn't care to check if it has any truth to it, doesn't care to fact-check or listen to anyone who challenges that belief?

It's about a basic level of behavior that is not a virtue in society at this time. And in these times, when people hold the act of having an opinion with more virtue than the act of trying to be right.
This is an important ethical inquiry.

For the love of god, man. Practice a bit of self-reflection every now and then. — Tzeentch

For the love of god, man. Practice keeping to the argument without cherry-picking points to complain about that has no real relation to the argument at hand.

Do you know what a fallacy fallacy is? If so, stop making such a point list, it's arrogant. I'm trying to debate my argument with people who don't seem to hold to Socratic methods and they pick fights with stuff that rubs them the wrong way rather than keep their eye on the argument presented. To complain about the quality of answers to such arguments is to essentially complain about the initial counter-arguments. Had you been more precise in your counter-argument, with references to points in the argument it would have been easier. I even asked for a proper dialectic in my first post.

Thanks, alright let's see if this one is better:

• No argument has ever been able to prove the existence of God or gods through evidence. Religious belief is therefore based on belief in something that is unsupported by evidence or rational deduction.
• Kierkegaard or Pascal presented reasons to believe in God not linked to the existence of God, but either through Pascal's wager, in which it's most logical to believe than not to. Or by Kierkegaard, to believe because of belief itself.
• Russel's Teapot analogy points out the importance of burden of proof. If you make a claim or believe in something, you have the responsibility to prove it first. You must do this before claiming it to be true or demand others to disprove your belief or claim. If not, you could possibly invent any belief you want, like teapots in space and conclude it to be true since no one has the means to prove against it.
• By Russel’s teapot analogy and according to premise 1-2; religion or other beliefs can be made into whatever people can think of. This opens the door for people with dark and twisted thoughts and ideas to make up any type of belief they want, which could consist of harmful ideas such as murder, rape, torture and other kinds of harm to other people and themselves.
• If there’s a possibility that hateful and dangerous belief-systems will be created, it has a high probability of happening over a long enough timeline.
• There is no such thing as personal belief since you do not exist in a vacuum, detached from the rest of society and other people. As long as you interact with other people and the world, you will project your personal belief into other people’s world-view and influence their choices. The only way to not affect other people is to isolate yourself, but as soon as you interact you are projecting your ideas into the world.
• Epistemic responsibility put a responsibility on the ones who make choices without sufficient evidence. To choose to believe in something that you have no rational reasoning behind or no evidence for, is to accept something as true, without evidence or rational reasoning behind. This, based on premise 6, can lead to you projecting beliefs into others world-view and influence other people's choices and ideas based on a belief that you have not falsified, hold to scrutiny, proved or rationally reasoned behind.
• Belief can be categorized into three parts:
  A) Belief without rational cause, a belief that is without evidence, accepted as truth and acted upon by the believer.
  B) Belief with rational cause, a belief that has rational reasoning and logic and which has gone through falsifiable reasoning as much as possible, acted upon with caution because it is never considered to be true.
  C) Scientific belief, i.e Hypothesis, educated guess based on observations, previous evidence, careful induction, partly researched, but never accepted or acted upon as true before proven into a scientific theory.

Therefore, religious belief or belief of any kind that is of Belief A (Premise 1-5) will always, eventually, lead to hateful, dangerous ideas at some point in time. The responsibility is on all people who believe something without sufficient evidence, Belief A, and who is rejecting evidence in favor of the necessity of faith or comfort in faith/belief (Premise 2), to prove or put their belief through scrutiny and falsifiability methods (Premise 7) in order to end up with either Belief B or Belief C -Otherwise risk the certain causality (Premise 4-6) of dangerous belief that can cause harm, murder, terror, torture, rape and so on in the name of that belief, Belief A.

Therefore, religious or other types of belief that are of type A, should be considered unethical and criticized. The moral obligation should be to always uphold epistemic responsibility (Premise 7) and prioritize belief type B and C as ethical while condemn type A as unethical. This applies to all people for any belief of type A; religious, personal and in institutions, research and politics.

I'm talking about persons. But if one has to figure out whether his belief is true or not, one has to do the experiment, and after doing that experiment one would no longer be believing, but knowing. — Tzeentch

No, they need to check the peer-reviewed material and look at falsifiable results. Standard methods for a conclusion. Because only doing the experiment means you only have one result.

Standard methods of science counter your idea that you can only know by doing the thing yourself. It's why our standards of science today are vastly better than before the 20th century. We have excluded the subjective contamination of results.

Peer reviews and fact-checking without doing the actual experiments yourself just shifts the belief from one thing to the other. If you read peer reviews or read about facts online, one is back to believing words and pictures again. — Tzeentch

Now you are back in metaphysical land. Stop straw manning about science. You know well how science works. Because you are saying that facts that we have actually built technology and quality of life upon cannot be, because that science was presented in papers. You know that the device you are writing on is the result of science that has gone through peer reviews, fact-checking and other parts of the scientific process. All people involved with making this device took these papers and used it to create the parts of the device you have. If that was only belief your device wouldn't work.

Your point is irrelevant to the ethical conclusion of my argument. Because the point of my conclusion is that belief in anything should be checked by the person believing them.

Are you saying that it's more ethical to not check if your belief has any truth merits? Or are you saying that it's more ethical to just believe whatever you want, regardless of consequences and without any demand of checking that belief?

Which is more ethical?

I'm talking about belief and how it is fundamental to human understanding, including many people's understanding of science. I'd say it touches at the heart of the subject you're presenting. — Tzeentch

I'd say you are making metaphysical philosophy right now and do not look at the ethics of my argument.

Because if we are to go down your line, then how do we prove anyone is guilty in court if anyone could counter it by saying; "this is only belief, we can only know if the person is guilty if we had been there for ourselves".

Of course, as a metaphysical claim, the lawyer would be right, but are you saying that we should decide the innocence or guilt in that court based on the metaphysical reasoning and in doing so make all ethical evaluation irrelevant?

Because, ethics philosophy needs a form of foundation. We cannot jump back into metaphysics to counter everything with Cartesian-like arguments about that nothing is for certain. The ethical conclusion I made in the argument is all about never accepting a belief that hasn't in any way been put through a rational argument, scrutiny or evidence. To say that peer reviewed and falsified evidence in science still is belief when just looking at the result on those papers does not counter my argument... at all.

That may be a theoretical 'true' scientist, but how does one discern one in real life? Lets say you see a man in a white coat on television telling you things about science. How do you determine whether he should be believed? — Tzeentch

Does the man have a name? Does he present a claim with logic? Are you able to look him up? Are you able to search for those who criticized his claims and look into the logic of their criticism against the logic of this man?

How do you determine? By not being a lazy-ass and just accept everything around you, instead look into the information behind what you are presented with. This is essential in epistemic responsibility. You can choose not to do it, but that's what I call unethical since you are believing something without trying to falsify your own belief and that can be dangerous, just like with anti-vaxxers.

As the unmoved mover, uncaused cause, ultimate meta-law, etc., philosophically, God is the-end-of-the-line of explanation. To be the-end-of-the-line, God needs to be self-explaining. — Dfpolis

The conclusion of the uncaused cause could mean anything, it could be a substance of particles that are unbound by spacetime and in that higher dimension produce our dimensional universe. It could therefore just be a dead "nothing". In order to draw the conclusion of the ontological argument, ignoring the general objections to it, you must also prove that the conclusion isn't some "dead nothing" or accept that this "dead nothing" can be defined as God.

In this case, God means nothing and you proved nothing to be God. How then is that different from "there is no God"? You can arrive at that conclusion as well with the ontological argument.

So, for God to do any possible act, He must know all reality -- including us. — Dfpolis

Therefore, by the most logical conclusions of the only arguments that try to point to a God with pure deduction, the ontological argument, it doesn't point to there being any God aware of us. There is no other evidence for any interaction between God and us or God and the universe.

That is a very peculiar claim, given that we can only know that there is no evidence for x is to know that there is no x. — Dfpolis

Teapots in space.

Before we understood finger prints and DNA, a crime scene might be rife with evidence identifying the culprit, but investigators were unaware of it. Evidence is only evidence for those able to recognize and use it. So, if you know of no evidence for x, and do not know, independently, that there is no x, the most you can only claim rationally, "I see no reason for believing in x." Thus, using the non-recognition of evidence to categorical deny x is an argumentum in cirulares. — Dfpolis

We can only conclude what can be proven. If we yet have the capacity to prove there is a God, we have no reason to conclude there is one otherwise... there would be teapots in space.

What you are also saying is that because crime scenes had evidence that we earlier couldn't see, your analogy is that there is, therefore, evidence for God that we have not yet found and ignoring this not-yet-found evidence means concluding there is no God based on not seeing this evidence. This is flawed in its reasoning. You cannot have "not-yet-found" evidence as the evidence for the existence of God.

The burden of proof demands that people prove the existence of something before someone can start attempting to disprove it. Otherwise... there will be Teapots in space.

In the present case, the continuing existence of any and all reality is definitive evidence for the existence of God for those able to see its implications. — Dfpolis

No it is not, in what way is this in any form evidence for that conclusion? This is ridiculously flawed reasoning, no evidence at all.

What is here and now cannot actualize its potential existence at another space-time point, because it is here, not there. Thus, on-going existence requires a concurrent, on-going source of actualization for its explanation. This source is either explained by another or is self-explaining -- the end of the line of explanation. If it is explained by another, then, to avoid an infinite regress, we must have a self-explaining end of the line. This has been explicitly known for two and a half millennia -- since Aristotle formulated the unmoved mover argument in his — Dfpolis

And it proves nothing of the existence of God. Because God as an entity is not defined and the conclusion also assumes there to be an unmoved mover. But what if time is circular? What if after heat death we have a collapse that restarts time at the big bang? Then there is no unmoved mover, only circular time.

Aristotle didn't have modern physics and even so, the conclusion doesn't have data about where it ends up, meaning that it proves nothing, only the process of causality and existence after big bang.

The concept of a telos (end) is that of the reason a process is undertaken. This could be a final state, or it could be for someting that occurs before the final state, with the final state occurring only incidentally. Thus, spiders spin webs to catch prey, not to have the broken by random events. — Dfpolis

As I was saying, there can be a final form within the current system, but the maximum final form isn't what spiders are now, its where all energy ends up at heat death. Until then, everything is changing, through evolution and distribution of energy through entropy. There is no final form applied outside of closed systems and those systems are defined by us in order to understand form and function around us.

Still, knowing creation's final physical state says nothing of what will become of its intentional aspects. I have shown in another thread that physics has nothing to say about intentionality. — Dfpolis

You cannot prove any intention of a creator without proving there to be a creator with intention. First things first.

This makes the assumption that intermediate states are unintended. Do you have an argument for this? — Dfpolis

You must first prove there to be an intention by a creator and before that the existence of a creator with intention, before putting forth an argument that intermediate states are intended before I can create a counter-argument.

My conclusion there is based on normal biology and evolutionary science about how we evolve. No biologist would say that we have a static form as we are now, we are constantly evolving, like the rest of nature. So there is nothing that points to our existence and form now to be intended in any way, biology points to evolution being constantly in progress. You must prove the above about a creator and creator intention and then disprove biology in order to conclude us as we are now to be intentional.

It seems clear to me, from reflecting on the art of story telling, that as much thought and intentionality can be put into the early and intermediate chapters and acts as into the climax. In fact, when I write, I am more interested in the psychology and dynamics that set the characters on a track than I am in where that track leads them. As a result, I have many unfinished stories.

An even more telling example is the work of a machine designer. She may well know that, eventually, her machine will on the scrap heap, but that is not her purpose in designing it. Her purpose revolves around what the machine can do between its production and its decommissioning.

Thus, there is no reason to think the purpose (telos) of the cosmos is its physical heat death. — Dfpolis

I am a storyteller by profession so I also know storytelling.

There is no evidence for any purpose to the cosmos and just saying there is purpose to the cosmos is not proof for there being one.

I agree, texts should be read as a whole. Still, the reasoning behind a holistic movement of thought is found in individual sentences. So, we need to examine its parts. — Dfpolis

Your entire answer here does the same thing again. You babble around specific sentences and you drift in thought without a solid formulated argument. This means that your entire writing falls apart.

Trust me, from a storyteller who works with storytelling, to someone who rarely finishes stories, you need to clean your text up and make clearer arguments because right now I'm paddling through incoherent text that muddies that water and makes most of it incomprehensible.

I think that this assumes something you are the verge of rejecting -- namely, the existence of an optimal state. — Dfpolis

You do understand that I criticized the notion that God would allow evolution if he had the power to create perfection and final forms directly. The oxymoron of him.

(This is the problem with all forms of utilitarianism -- the assumption that there exists a well-defined utility function that can be optimized.) — Dfpolis

This has nothing to do with what I said.

So, in order to make sense of this claim, there must exist an single optimum. What, precisely, is being optimized? And, how are the required trade-offs done? — Dfpolis

You don't seem to understand in what context I wrote that, so you take it as a statement in of itself. This is what happens when you take everything in a text line by line and not care for the entire argument as a whole.

How did you reach this conclusion?

I conclude that there are sound proofs by working though their data and logic, answering all the objections I read as well as my own. — Dfpolis

There is no proof. Where is the proof? Do you think that there would even be a discussion if there was proof of the existence of God? All deductive arguments about God reach a conclusion that is then formed into assumptions based on what the person in question "wanted" the conclusion to assume. The conclusion to all deductive arguments only points to a truth that has no relation to the existence of God.

The relation between the conclusion and a concept of God is invented by those who want the argument to prove the existence to be true. There is nothing within the actual argument to conclude any relation to the concept of God.

You are making assumptions about logic and data, they are in no way proof of any creator, god or intentions by any creator. That is your invention, your assumption and it is flawed reasoning to use that as your "proof".

This is an ad hominem. You have presented no rational objection to any specific proof, let alone a methodological argument that would rule out any possible proof. You have only made the faith claim that there is no evidence for the existence of God. — Dfpolis

I cannot object to any proof that isn't there, because there is no proof. Burden of proof demands you to have real proof but all you have are assumptions. I can agree with the ontological argument for example to logical through a deterministic view, but it never proves any existence of God, therefore I don't have to disprove anything.

You have faith in God and argue that I use faith against it. Flawed reasoning.

Where is the proof?

To be skeptical is to require adequate reasons for believing a proposition true. To be open is to require adequate reasons for believing a proposition false. So, to any fair minded person, they are one and the same mental habit -- what is called a scientific mindset. Such a mindset requires us to reject a priori commitments such as your faith claim that there is no God. — Dfpolis

It is not a faith claim when you base your argument about the existence of God on faith in the first place. You have not presented any, and especially not in any scientific method, proof of Gods existence.

Do not point out flawed reasoning when you have flawed reasoning yourself.

It has been proven for two and a half millennia. What rational objection do you have to Aristotle's unmoved mover argument? What objection do you have for the meta-law argument in my evolution paper? — Dfpolis

No it hasn't. Aristotle's argument doesn't prove a thing about the existence of God. There is no relation between the conclusion and God, the relation isn't there, how do you even see a relation between the concept of God and Aristotle's conclusion? It only proves there to be "something" in the beginning and it also assumes that there are no chance for circular time and great collapse hypothesis.

So there is no deductive conclusion that has any truth value because the reasoning is flawed. You assume a conclusion based on another conclusion without relation.

The analogy is:
Mass of humans : Mass of supporting cosmos :: Mass of capstone : Mass of the supporting pyramid. — Dfpolis

What does this prove?

There are two errors here: (1) there is no claim that we are the sole point of creation and (2) there is no reason to think that God needs to skimp on existence to effect His ends. — Dfpolis

Exactly, so you counter your own point from earlier about intentional form and purpose.

Many see the elegance of a few simple laws causing a singularity to blossom into the complex beauty of the cosmos. — Dfpolis

Seeing elegance in anything proves nothing.

You miss the point: mass ratios are not an argument against intentionality. — Dfpolis

Then write so people don't miss the point, because you are all over the place, seemingly not even coherent with your own writing.

There is no doubt that this is a reason some people believe in gods. There is no evidence that it is either the sole or the main reason. — Dfpolis

It is more proven than any other idea about how religion raised up. Backed up by the sciences and analysis of those texts, by how we function psychologically in groups. It is more solid than anything you are presenting and yet you are dismissing it because... you simply don't agree.

The prophet Jeremiah believed in fixed laws of nature as well as a God relating to humans. — Dfpolis

So? Proves nothing.

Aristotle based his philosophy on empirical observation, but saw the logical necessity of an unmoved mover or self-thinking thought. — Dfpolis

Aristotle also didn't have modern methods of science which exclude the subjective from the process. He also was influenced by the time he lived in and while some of his arguments have valid points and are still relevant, there are many flaws because we know things now in science that he didn't. And ignoring this, taking it word by word as truth is ignoring everything we know about the world and universe today. If you can't realise that your process of argumenting has serious flaws because of this then you are stuck in your own reasoning ignoring anything outside your own assumptions.

Cherry picking explanations, instead of acknowledging the complexity of human thought, is an indication of bias — Dfpolis

And what are you doing? You aren't biased towards the idea that God exist and you twist the conclusion of arguments in order to fit your narrative. Get of your high horse, your argument is full of holes and you cherry pick sentences out of a whole and dissect things without caring for the context they were written in.

Really? What is so unique about the 20th century? — Dfpolis

Are you for real? Are you seriously saying that we haven't reached a much more effective way of studying the facts of the world today because of things like, say, falsifiability?
Do you think the device you are writing on is the result of no progress in science and our understanding of the world and universe? Doesn't the sum of the knowledge we now know about the world and universe, that we've been able to gather with modern scientific methods, have an impact on how to much more truthfully reach conclusions than people before this time-period who were influenced by their limitations in their time? Just the fact that dissections were done on animals in order to draw conclusions on human anatomy shows just how distorted knowledge was before more modern methods. If you can't see how things changed drastically during the enlightenment and 20th century, then you seem blind to the history of science and philosophy. There has been a lot happening since Aristotle and Aquinas you know, should that be ignored? Should all science be ignored because you are "right" in your assumptions about your conclusions?

No, I pointed out the

Was not the recognition of fixed laws by Jeremiah, the foundation of mathematical physics by Aristotle, the discovery of inertia and instantaneous velocity by the medieval physicists, the astronomical work of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Laplace, and Darwin's theory real contributions to our understanding of nature? Or are you claiming that we now have a final understanding of physics? How can we when we have no theory of quantum gravity and do not understand ~95% of the mass of the cosmos? — Dfpolis

I'm saying that everything has led up to a sum of knowledge in which we dismiss the errors, modify when finding new evidence and work with scientific methods far more effective and immune to corruption today than we have ever done in the entire history of man. I am not dismissing anything but you are cherry picking old conclusions to fit your narrative and ignore everything that is problematic for your argument throughout history.

If you cannot use the knowledge that you have and through modern methods that exclude your opinion from your conclusion, reach a conclusion that is valid, you are biased towards the assumed idea of an existing God.

So, you think matters of fact should be decided by examining the motives leading people to study a subject? — Dfpolis

Stop making things up in order to counter them, you are doing serious fallacies all the time. I said that it's easy to see how ideas that have no scientific truth, form out of the comfort of needing meaning and purpose when the notion of it not existing appears.

What you are saying is about motive in studies. Why are you answering in a way that has nothing to do with what I wrote, it looks like the ramblings of a delusional man.

you have offered no rational argument, logical objection or shred of evidence to support your faith claim. — Dfpolis

You have not offered any rational argument, logical conclusion or shred of evidence for the existence of God. If you really had that, bullet proof, you'd be on TV right now and people and scientists would study your findings, but you aren't because you haven't proved a single thing.

Therefore, I cannot argue against anything that hasn't been proven.
The burden of proof is on your shoulders, just because you think you have proven something doesn't mean that you have. Do you get it?

I'm still waiting for an actual logical objection. Where and what is yours? I have suggested two simple arguments for you to "deconstruct" -- Aristotle's unmoved mover, and the argument in my evolution paper. Have at it and forget the ad hominem hand waving you seem to find comforting. — Dfpolis

I'm still waiting for a logical argument for the existence of God. You need to provide it first, burden of proof. You need to get in the game of modern scientific methods or live in your fantasy land.

You assume the existence of God out of the conclusions. That is not evidence or proof.
Get it?

In the next bit you falsely accuse me of giving no logical argument for the existence of God. I give one in my evolution paper, and add another in my book. I have also referred you to a number of arguments by other thinkers. — Dfpolis

I will not read your book just because you say that I cannot argue against the existence of God because I haven't read your book.

If you cannot present your argument here, plain and simple, the logic behind it, without convoluted drawn out text that makes your entire point incoherent I cannot counter argue it.

Right now you make the argument like this: "You cannot prove that I'm wrong because you haven't read my book".

Make the argument here, right now. What is the argument plain and simple. So far you have incoherent text and make connections between conclusions and premiesses that have nothing to do with eachother before making a conclusion that comes right out of your assumptions. If this is how you try and communicate your argument in your book, then it's Depaak Chopra level of arguing.

X is Y because of the fundamentals of X has been proved by Z to correlate with Y in such ways that no one can object because of T.

You are confused. — Dfpolis

No, you are, a lot. If you weren't, as I said, you would be on every television with the news "God proved to be real". If you sit on the high horse believing you have proven Gods existence and you reject objections by saying "you are confused", while not convincing anyone of any rational mind that you are in fact proven right, it is you who are confused.

I called the concept of God you reject a straw man because it is not that of classical theism, but your personal construct -- which I reject as well. A straw man argument occurs when one ignores the actual opposing position and substitutes one more easily attacked. That is what you have done. — Dfpolis

Like you straw man every line I've written in my argument? Substituting your own convoluted interpretation of what I wrote instead of what I actually wrote in the context of my entire text?
While not proving any concept of God other than one that is so open to interpretation that there isn't any definition that can create a precise concept at all. The arrogance when you try to explain what a straw man is, without looking at your own text and how you change my text into twisted interpretations.

Really?

Have you any documented examples of this? You seem operate in a Trumpian faerie land in which facts don't matter or are manufactured on whim. — Dfpolis

And you talk about Ad Hominems? Are you for real?
Church and institutions have changed their stance on everything from where the sun is in the solar system in relation to earth, how we are created by God to trying to shoe-horn in evoution into explaining creation. Do you not know about the history if science?

Lay of the Trump-like Ad Hominems, it's downright disgusting and an insult to my intellect. Maybe you should look in the mirror and realize that you write exactly in the way you try and criticize others for.

Here is another example of manufactured facts. The scientific method, including the need for controlled experiments, was fully and explicitly outlined and applied by Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), Oxford professor, teacher of Roger Bacon, and later bishop of Lincoln, in his works on optics (c 1220-35). He emphasized that we needed to compare theory with experiment. So, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) did his work long after the scientific method was established. — Dfpolis

You describe the historical development of scientific methods. Stop making straw man arguments as you don't want others to do it.

Do you have falsifiability established there somewhere? You know, the most important part of modern science that we have? And the one which took us from the problem of not seeing what is pseudoscience and what is real science, uncorrupted by the scientist's influence.

In his The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, James Hannam makes clear that that the Church not only tolerated but promoted science -- seeing God as revealing Himself not only in Scripture, but in the Book of Nature. Thus, by better understanding nature, we better understand God. — Dfpolis

The historical process of how we ended up with our modern science does not counter the enormous improvements that happened from the enlightenment period to our modern day.

This is why you can't prove the existence of God, because we have much more strict ways of demanding falsifiability and peer review to such claims. If you can't prove exactly the conclusion you make, then you haven't proven anything and if someone counters your findings you cannot just dismiss it and tell them they are confused.

My, my. The ad hominems continue. In my evolution paper I cite well over 50 authors, many of whom are atheists -- some quite militant. The bibliography of my book is 24 pages of 10 pt. type and contains works by many who strongly disagree with me. You would be more credible if you verified your facts before attacking my character and methods. — Dfpolis

And you aren't making Ad Hominems?

You haven't proven the existence of God and you haven't provided an actual argument for the existence of God.

Your reference is your own book and if we don't read your book, you are right. That is essentially your argument.

I want you to present your argument for the existence of God. Right now. Aristotle's unmoved mover does not conclude with "God exists" because that is an assumption and invention out of the actual conclusion. So what is left is your argument and you have not presented it. You have straw manned my text into shreds while calling out straw mans on me, you have conducted ad hominems yourself but complained about getting them yourself.

Your text is incoherent and lack a thread of thought, so it's impossible to track your actual argument or line of thought.

Make the argument, plain and simple instead of demanding people to read your book and if they do not you are right. That is not how you conduct a dialectic.

I'm talking about the belief in science of the average person, so I'm not talking about scientists who have carried out the experiments themselves. Call that pseudo-science if you will. It doesn't matter. It is a fact that most people's understanding of science is completely based on belief. — Tzeentch

Of course, but as my argument points out, epistemic responsibility has nothing to do with specific institutions. It is about every person. If you choose to believe in some idea presented to you, you have the responsibility to figure out if it is true or rational, if not you break epistemic responsibility. This is about ethics for all people, not institutions or figures of authority.

Because in both cases, unless one chooses to verify the claim themselves, one chooses to believe (or not) the words of either a priest or a scientist. One may have good reasons to believe these words, but can one be certain? Only if one does the experiment themselves and comes to the same conclusions. Until that happens, one is doing nothing other than believing the words of a person they deem trustworthy. The trustworthiness of such a person is fundamentally uncertain, and the nature of his findings is as well until one replicates the experiment. — Tzeentch

You don't have to do the experiment yourself, you can fact-check if the study and science have support in peer reviews and falsifiable scrutiny. There's a reason we have scientific methods. If you do the science yourself you will only confirm or deny by one check. This is why hypotheses take time to end up as scientific theories. Scientific methods are relentless with this and it's your responsibility to check behind the curtain before believing in anything.

As I said, this argument is about ALL people acting by the conclusion of the argument. You have, for some reason, changed my argument to be that of institutions and figures of authority rather than every person. My argument is for a core morality on the nature of belief for everyone, not specific people.

How does one discern a "true" scientist? — Tzeentch

Because they do not say truths without a scientific theory and they never assume a hypothesis as truth. A true scientist acts according to scientific methods. If you cannot distinguish between a true scientist and a pseudoscientist you might need to read into the scientific methods and how they form hypothesis and theories as well as interactions between different studies and over time.

How do you discern what is a cup? If you take away the handle and make a hole in the bottom, is it still a cup? If you take away scientific methods and the ethics of doing scientific research, is that a scientist? No, that's a pseudoscientist or an amateur without education into proper methods. Just like the cup isn't a cup and cannot hold its liquid, a pseudoscientist cannot hold a rational idea without the proper properties of what makes a scientist a scientist.

Faith may be a door that let's in hate and all the evils that follow from it but remember it was and is a door opened to let in goodness. Evil just happens to find the door an easy route too. — TheMadFool

Faith was never a door, faith was the result of trying to explain the unexplainable, corrupted into ideas with less relation to rationally explaining the unexplainable, later corrupted into fairy tales that have little to no relation to that initial unexplainable event and in the end corrupted into a tool of power for institutions. Faith still pops up, every time someone with little to no knowledge tries to explain something unexplainable and instead of proper research fall to the comfort of believing something they invented in order to make peace with the horror of the unknown.

Faith, religion etc. has nothing to do with what it says it does. It's like using the bible to prove the content of the bible. Faith analogies like that adhere to religious morality principles, which are outdated in my opinion and easy to corrupt in order to gain power over a group of people that have little knowledge to rationally explain the unknown around them.

There are no good or evils. There is only knowledge, rationality and balance between harm, empathy, and well-being for all which lay a foundation for our ethics. And it does not need to be corrupted by religious ideas with no foundation in the actual reality around us just because it's more comforting for the mind. Morality is hard work, being a truly balanced good person to the best of one's ability cannot be boiled down to easily followed ideas as per religious doctrines. It needs to be thought about daily, meditated on. And this complexity should be a virtue.

The sloth of mankind should not dictate the parameters of ethics.

Och, och. An apologist agenda? You must not presume so much. Perhaps then you'd be a tad less insufferable to discuss with. — Tzeentch

You haven't done a proper argument, you either intentionally or unintentionally confuse what philosophy you are discussing here. You mix metaphysical ideas with ethical and use counter-arguments that fail to stick to the ethical aspect of this argument.

What I'm proposing is that science, to the degree that it hasn't been replicated by an individual, is pure belief. Belief in words and pictures. The individual may believe these words and pictures based on the authority he projects on a man in a white coat. One may observe consistency and therefore come to find these beliefs more plausible, but until one has done the actual experiments themselves, it is still just a belief that the man in the white coat is telling the truth. — Tzeentch

You are not talking about science but pseudoscience. Pseudoscience gets involved in my argument without the need for putting "science" in it. Because pseudoscience is per nature a belief without proper scientific methods. But you seem to mix proper science with psudoscience in your description of science as a whole. But a scientific hypothesis is not pseudo science, it's an educated guress based on rational argument about something. A pseudoscientist would take that educational guess and present it as scientific "fact" while proper science never accept it as truth, only a stepping stone to finding out a truth.

The fundamental difference is that "belief" as I argue being dangerous is when it is unsupported by logic, rationality or evidence, meaning, a hypothesis that is handled as just that and never truth, doesn't break epistemic responsibility. If you believe something and know that you don't have anything to back it up with you can hold onto it but be clear to others that it is unsupported. Then you aren't breaking epistemic responsibility since you are not acting upon the belief as truth and you aren't projecting that belief as truth to others.

Calling things fallacies doesn't make them so. It's quite easy to call everything one cannot find an easy answer to a fallacy, but it's hardly impressive. — Tzeentch

But it is a fallacy if you simplify my argument before answering to it. If you reduce it to a binary position in order to more easily put forth your counter-argument you are essentially making a fallacy, you understand this right?

Believing the priest in church is no different from believing the white man in a coat on television. There is literally zero difference. — Tzeentch

This argument lacks any complexity to the reality as it is. The priest is all about unsupported faith. The man in a coat on television could be a pseudoscientist and in that case the same, but if he's a true scientist in his field and he is presenting a study that has been falsified into a scientific thoery, how can you say that there is zero difference? This is why it's so hard to take you seriously, because this type of argument is the same as anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers hold.

And it falls down further as epistemic responsibility applies to all people, not just the man in the coat on television or the priest. This means that when you watch the priest and when you watch the man in a coat on television, it is your epistemic responsibility to check that they have the proper authority on the presented idea, meaning, does the priest have rational support for telling people they need to pray to the spaghetti monster or else die? Does the scientist present answers that have proper scientific papers behind it and not just pseudoscience.

The responsibility to deny belief that does not have support is not "others" responsibility, it's every single person's responsibility. If all people follow it, no one would believe in anything that does not hold up to cross checking and peer review.

Religious beliefs, in the sense I'm talking about, have two major flaws. They unnecessarily presuppose entities, and they are based upon logical possibility alone.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster shows that that is not enough for warranting certainty in belief.

Unfortunately, this topic uses the term "belief" in an unnecessarily limited scope. — creativesoul

Do you mean that "belief" in my argument is limited? Essentially here's my definition of different beliefs:

A) Belief without support: You do not care for proof, rational support/argument but accept this belief as true.
B) Belief within science, i.e a Hypothesis: You care for proof, rational support/argument in support of your hypothesis, but use it in thought experiments to try and find such support for it, you never accept the hypothesis itself as true before support exist to do so, i.e scientific theory.
C) Belief with support: A general beilef without it being a scientific hypothesis, i.e personal belief but still not accepted as truth unless enough support, rationality or proof exist. You believe something, but accept that you might be wrong and always point out that you might be wrong if you externalize that belief. If that belief has enough support but isn't a proven fact you hold onto it along the line of epistemic responsibility.

In case of A, you risk negative and dangerous outcomes, per my argument. In case of B and C you minimize it and follow epistemic responsibility as best you can. A is unethical because of the risks it can lead to, B and C are ethically sound.

If there is no such thing as personal belief, then there is no such thing as projecting it. — creativesoul

There is no such thing as personal belief because everything you hold personal gets projected externally and therefore it isn't personal belief anymore. I see no flaw in that logic?

You haven't demonstrated that religious beliefs always lead to hateful. and & etc. — tim wood

If there’s a possibility that hateful and dangerous belief-systems will be created, it has a high probability of happening over a long enough timeline.
There is no such thing as personal belief since you do not exist in a vacuum, detached from the rest of society and other people. As long as you interact with other people and the world, you will project your personal belief into other people’s world-view and influence their choices. — Christoffer

Would you say that it's a logical induction that the probability of harmful belief and harmful consequences of belief is very high over a long enough timeline? Meaning, if we don't care about epistemic responsibility, we will always have the rise of some belief that leads to harmful consequences since there is no responsibility of explaining or testing that belief against any form of rationality.

You haven't established that people who believe something are responsible for the hateful & etc. — tim wood

That is not the conclusion. The conclusion is that belief without rationality behind it eventually leads to negative outcomes. If someone believes something that at the time is harmful, but influence people around them and them, in turn, evolve this belief into harmful forms, the irrational belief by the first person is what caused the harmful form it took. Also mentioned in premise 6, personal belief is an illusion because we cannot hold personal belief at the same time as living with others without projecting the result of that belief onto others. So the causality is there, however "personal" someone's belief may be.

You seem confused about what belief is: if you have sufficient evidence, then you know it. — tim wood

In what way am I confused in my argument? A belief in God is unsupported and susceptible to corruption. The same goes for Anti-Vaxxer belief that vaccines cause autism. None of them have any rationality behind them and they don't care for any evidence or rational argument in support of the belief.

If you have evidence, then it's not really belief anymore, right? Then you are following epistemic responsibility. You don't have evidence for belief in God or gods and you don't have evidence that vaccines cause autism, so why hold on to those beliefs when they can be corrupted and lead to negative outcomes. This is my argument.

You seem to fault people for rejecting evidence, without making clear what evidence is being rejected, or what the evidence is evidence of. — tim wood

I fault people for rejecting evidence and not caring for trying to falsify their belief. If any evidence is there, it opens up the belief for scrutiny and if that review of the belief is ignored, it breaks epistemic responsibility. It doesn't matter what the evidence is, it matters that you test your beliefs, otherwise you open the door to spreading misinformation, manipulation and the dangers of corrupted beliefs that might lead to dangerous outcomes.

The point is that unsupported belief that you ignore testing is, per my argument, not only irresponsible but also potentially dangerous.

"Because of this": the "this" has not been established. The rest is incoherent. Why is religious belief wrong for individuals who "agree that harm, harmful behavior, murder and hate to be negative and dangerous attributes of mankind." Even granting your first conclusion, it does not follow that all the bad you've listed comes from religious belief. — tim wood

Is the formulation grammatically flawed here? (I'm not a native English speaker)
The point is that if you agree that harm, harmful behavior, murder and hate are ethically wrong, then you would agree that belief without rational support or proof for that belief is also wrong since the probability of such unsupported belief leading to negative, harmful and dangerous outcomes is very high over a long enough time period. Therefore it is ethically wrong to hold a belief without support for that belief.

If that summery doesn't work help me out with formulating it.

Because his argument only works if science is correct but this is a part of what he was saying. — hachit

But I would argue that it did not need the science to be 100% correct.

- If you believe whatever you want and that ends up killing someone, you had the responsibility of testing that belief in order to avoid the consequence.

- You test your belief and you have doubts, but arrive at a conclusion that was not your initial belief, the man lives. You took responsibility for testing your belief with facts and rational reasoning.

You don't need to reach 100% truth, it's the method of testing belief and not just believe that is the conclusion really. The responsibility is in trying to disprove yourself until you are as certain as you can of the right choice or idea. If you are wrong, at least you can then change. Unsupported belief doesn't work like that, it's simply about believing something and accepting it.

This is where my argument comes in. If belief is so easily corrupted since you are never testing it (falsify). There is a probability that it will eventually and close to always end up in negative outcomes for you, others or people later in history.

Because of this, the conclusion is that belief, because it's so prone to be corrupted in some form or another, is unethical in comparison with living by epistemic responsibility. Belief is like pulling the ring out of a grenade, believing its a dud. Being responsible is evaluating the most possible outcome and not pull the ring. One keeps the grenade safe, the other might explode or it may be a dud until later someone else gets blast to pieces.

So how do you get sufficient evidence without a postules. If there are postules there is room for doubt. ( postules are an assumption). So if you can provide that science is correct without need for a postule I will agree with you. — hachit

Is your counter-argument that if there are any doubts to the conclusion of trying to falsify a belief you hold, then you don't need to falsify or try and find evidence for what you believe?

Because the entire counter argument you have is built upon proving that if you can't 100% prove something you don't need to do the scientific methods at all.

This is a very binary way of looking at this argument and flawed in actually countering my conclusion, since the conclusion isn't dependent on the deduced conclusion being perfect.

You essentially ditch rational thinking if that rational thinking isn't 100% accurate in its conclusion. It's essentially also like saying that because science doesn't know the entire solution to the universe with its unification theory, then we should just throw all science out the window. You are writing on a computer which is probably filled with technology that came out of science that had a lot of doubts during research, however, they did not ditch that and "believed together the computer"
But we have science and this science has doubts and works with those doubts, but the methods of reaching conclusions with the least amount of errors do exist and those methods should be used to uphold Epistemic Responsibility.

Epistemic responsibility is something you can read about more if you want and the validity of my argument for ethics philosophy still stands since your counter-argument here really doesn't counter it's conclusion at all.

Sorry, reversal of entropy so that the arrow of thermodynamics is turned around, making the energy go backwards, into the water from the high entropy state it had before. The energy leaves the water as it distributes into a lesser form of energy, if entropy is going backwards, that distributed energy is going back into the water.

Your entire argument is dependent on the question can anything be known. Because if the answer is no (as I believe it is) it makes all believes dangerous. — hachit

No it doesn't, it depends on the common methods of deciphering if the belief you have has any truth value. If you disagree that there are ways to find out if what you think is true or not, then you are essentially disagreeing with any common science that has produced any results up until this point. You know that you can fly on a plane? That you can write on a device while traveling and communicate on forums like this, you know, science, that made that possible. These scientific methods didn't need everything to be known because that isn't the factor for the ethical claim of this argument.

Like you believe there to be one cookie left in a jar in the kitchen, but you can't check so you lay out the evidence you have, when you bought the cookies and when you last ate, how many you took. You cross-check and falsify with as much data as you have about if you might have taken more cookies at a later time. Then you inductively reason on how many are left; one cookie. The thing to remember is that the method itself is the key, not if you were right. You took every possible way of figuring out if your belief was wrong (falsify) in order to come o a conclusion, then if possible (look in the jar) you prove it definitely.

This is light years away from the belief in, typically, religion, where belief doesn't require any rational reasoning, proof, deduction, induction, falsifiability and so on. It's totally corruptable.

If you want to corrupt your belief in the one cookie left scenario; You skip all the deduction and you believe that there are ten cookies left because you want there to be ten cookies left and you ditch any attempt to figure out how many there are left and you never check. Then your spouse goes into the kitchen and complains that there are no cookies and you continue with saying that you can't see what she is seeing so you still believe there are ten cookies. This is as flawed as a point of view could ever be by a human about the surrounding world. Essentially, this is what unsupported belief is and it's much more dangerous than getting in a fight over the number of cookies left. Because unsupported claims/beliefs about the world can influence others. Like if your belief has you wanting to restrain gay rights; that will have an effect on the community and it could eventually lead to some dark outcomes.

In order to understand the argument on a deeper, you may want to skip straw manning it.

That doesn't make me not strongly disagree with your last three premises. — Terrapin Station

Alright, let's break them down. I mean, I may need to revise them to clarify them better.

If there’s a possibility that hateful and dangerous belief-systems will be created, it has a high probability of happening over a long enough timeline. — Christoffer

This is simple logical probability. If X has a probability of happening, then over a long period of time X will most likely occur at some point.

If someone has an unsupported belief that gays should not have certain rights. And there's a probability of this person influencing someone else who is later on becoming violent against gays and kills a person. There's causality in this that breaks epistemic responsibility.

Essentially, my argument is a form of version of epistemic responsibility, within the context of belief-systems.

There is no such thing as personal belief since you do not exist in a vacuum, detached from the rest of society and other people. As long as you interact with other people and the world, you will project your personal belief into other people’s world-view and influence their choices — Christoffer

Please elaborate why this is illogical? The beliefs you have influence the values, opinions and actions you take externally. You will project yourself into the society you are in, influencing other people. This means that the concept of personal belief, the common argument that "you are entitled to believe whatever you want" is flawed in its reasoning about how people interact and how your thoughts and beliefs affect others around you, even if you don't intentionally project them.

How do you think the epidemic of anti-vaxxers came about. It's because of how someone's belief spread to others. It's a great example of this argument.

Epistemic responsibility put a responsibility on the ones who make choices without sufficient evidence. To choose to believe is to accept a belief without evidence and risk spreading this belief-system. — Christoffer

Epistemic responsibility is a known idea in philosophy. If you haven't, check it out.


Hope that clears things up a little. But please elaborate if you still don't think they hold up.

I'm not some person off the street. I what it is . We are responsible for what we believe. There you happy with that. — hachit

Then why ask something about something that is known to you? Almost all my premises are based on previously established arguments in philosophy.

Science, the way we found works but it still can be false. — hachit

Yes, but there's a difference between knowing the thing you research might be wrong and ignoring it to be wrong accepting it to be true, which is what belief without rational explanation or proof is about.

That difference is the foundation of the ethics conclusion for this argument. (I may need to revise the premises and include this specifically).

This was again unclear on my part. I'm saying that it is just as logically as anything else — hachit

It is the conclusion to the premises in my argument. Premise 1 is true, there's no real denying that. This means that there is no proven or supported truth in the God the belief is about. Just because you believe in God, doesn't mean it is true. It is an unsupported belief. My argument points to the ethical problems with unsupported belief as it will over a long enough timeline always lead to harm against others or the self in some way or another, not necessarily to you directly but generations after etc.
The causality of this is as far as I can conclude, statistically very probable.

Also I have a stance were what we see is your best way of making sense of the universe but it is not actually there. This explains why science works even if the concussion is false — hachit

Even though this is metaphysics, it doesn't really counter the ethical argument. The result of science is all around us. Theories, hypotheses, research and falsifiability have all developed the world and the knowledge that we have. Even though you argue that we make sense of the universe through our eyes but it isn't there, it doesn't really counter the reality of science that is fundamental for this argument.

And if you are doing metaphysics on that idea, post the argument for it under metaphysics. I'd like to see the actual argument for your perception without true reality-hypothesis. :up:

Because adding energy require you to add energy with something, converting energy into new less form of energy along the line of thermodynamics and entropy. Going backward, the less form of energy reverse entropy and there is nothing applied to the water, it heats up by the reversal of energy which left it.

Just like a glass has many more sides after it breaks and going backwards with that entropy, the increased information decrease into a higher, larger form as a single glass.

I'm not sure why you confuse this with adding energy? You know about thermodynamics and entropy?

It is this part of the argument that makes my argument — hachit

You might want to look up Epistemic Responsibility first.

You standing against religion — hachit

Not really, I'm making an argument against belief that is corruptable due to the lack of will to prove or rationally explain it. If you act upon your belief as being true, without proving or rationally explaining why it is true you are susceptible to a corrupted belief, be it your own, or a version of it, or someone corrupts it down the line when you influence the world around you according to that belief.

So even if religion comes to mind and probably is inevitable to be included in this, it's about the unethical ramifications of a truth claim to a belief that is not supported by anything but whatever you invent for it.

This can also apply to stuff like anti-vaxxers believe that vaccines cause autism.

I'm saying that if your correct, science is a based on observations then logical concussions. Observations come from what you see, but what evidence do you have. — hachit

How do you prove that vaccines work and don't cause autism? Some parents don't believe otherwise
How do you prove to your child that drinking gasoline kills you? Some (hopefully not) kid believes it.
How do you prove that honor killings within Islam is wrong? Some fathers and brothers believe it to be honorable.

If this is not solved it counters your frist argument — hachit

Are you writing on a device right now that is the result of scientific research, theories, theoretical physics, engineering ideas etc? Things put together through deduction, induction, trial and error, research, falsifiability methods, cross-checking and so on?

Do you mean to say, that we cannot prove, research and rationally explain things and because of that form and change our world according to it? How then are you writing on a device that is the direct result of science and research?

What do you call that knowledge, research and science?

The extreme demand for defining evidence in simplistic terms or explanations exclude the entire scale of how rational reasoning, scientific methods and falsifiability work. It's ignoring the direct results of theories and ideas for which your quality of life is resting upon. This way, the everyday methods of rational individuals and scientists to explain something to the best of their ability as detached from their own subjectivity as possible, is the kind of "proving" I'm talking about. Because if you mean that there still is no way of proving anything, you wouldn't be able to write on the device you are writing on, since no one can't seem to prove anything.

In other cases, situations where its harder to get pure solid proof, it's the mere moral obligation to at least try and explain and falsify a conviction that you have that is the ethical route. My conclusion is that it's unethical to believe something and ignoring its validity or truth because that inevitably at some time will lead to harm, as per my premises describe.

How do you draw up ethical guidelines for society to work under? How do you prove that murder is wrong? If you believe that murder is right, is it ok to spread that belief, influence and get followers under it? Why is that wrong? It's a philosophical question in its own right, but in the context of my argument. If you can rationally conclude why murder is wrong, why do a belief like anti-vaxxers have, not need to rationally explain why vaccines are bad? Why do believers who won't care for proving or rationally explain their belief be considered ethical in any way?

Because it would make it that the reason there's no evidence be that we can't see the truth. Therefore the evidence may be there but impossible to find. This makes the rest of the agreement mean any believe may be dangerous or not, but we have no way to tell. If we have no way to tell we might as well hold whatever believe we think is valid. — hachit

The premise is still true, no evidence or proof exists of any God or Gods, which means that belief in God or Gods have no truth value whatsoever and should not ethically be an influence on society and other people.


It seems that you take the premises out of context or argue them as an argument in of themselves. Like the first premise, you cannot say it is wrong, because it isn't. The same goes for premise two about Kirkegaard and Pascal, it only says what they presented as reasons for belief.
If you are going to argue against a premise you need to argue against if it's true or not. The fact is, there is no evidence for God or Gods. If there were we wouldn't even have this discussion. So premise 1 is true. Fact is that Kirkegaard presented his reason for belief and Pascal presented his wager, there's nothing to counter here, they did it so premise 2 is true.

So I recommend taking another look at the entire argument. If a premise isn't true, point that out, but so far I've only heard opinions from people and attempts to discredit through fallacies, no real breakdown of the actual argument in a rational counter-argument.

Are you absolutely sure that your counter-arguments are rational and outside of your subjective convictions? That's what I'm after.

The premises are, as I see, still true. I may need to formulate them further in order to clarify better, but I fail to see anything really disputing them so far.

They're both ideas without proof, thus beliefs. That one supposedly is acted upon while the other is not is an arbitrary distinction. — Tzeentch

The difference is the foundation of the ethics in this. To act like a belief is true versus understanding something is only belief and shouldn't be taken as truth is fundamental logic for this. How is this not important for the ethics of belief? And this is also why scientific belief is never called belief, but hypotheses.

You are essentially doing a fallacy by deciding preference of what is important and what is not in order to support your point. You haven't explained why this difference isn't important, you just say that it is.

You've limited your argument to religious beliefs. I suggested we add scientific beliefs as well. — Tzeentch

No, you suggest this because you seem to drive an apologist agenda. You want to add scientific belief disregarding the fundamental difference between the two. It's crystal clear that you intentionally disregard the nuances of the argument in order to shoehorn in something that is critical against science, but you don't understand the fundamental difference between belief claimed to be truth and a hypothesis that is never claimed to be true.

Believing the man in the white coat on the television that calls himself a scientist is the same as believing the man in the church that calls himself a man of god. — Tzeentch

This is a stupid fallacy of an argument with seemingly no knowledge of what science is or how it works. Irrelevant argument and you are talking complete nonsense with that kind of reasoning. It's close to populistic, anti-climate change crap from uneducated people.

Stop doing fallacies, its a waste of time.

There's such a thing as proof in logic and mathematics. ...and questionably in matters of physics. But not as regards ultimate reality or Reality as a whole. So it's silly to want proof of God, for example. — Michael Ossipoff

So if I believe that killing my neighbor is a good thing. Because I cannot prove this to be true its silly not to kill my neighbor?

If you get caught up in a murder, it is silly to try and rationally explain your innocence?
The judge say you cannot use math and logic in order to prove why you are the wrong man?

Do you mean that we cannot prove or rationally explain anything in this world, that science haven't proven anything at all, that the technology that enables your quality of life came out of a fluke luck of the developers of the tech?

This is the kind of rationality and proof I'm talking about.

Evidence needn't be proof. Evidence consists of some reason to believe something. There can be evidence on both sides of a y/n question. You may have your reason to believe that someone else's belief is correct. Without knowing all Theists, and all of their beliefs, and all of their evidence for their beliefs, you can't validly evaluate their evidence. — Michael Ossipoff

The premise you are answering on is about Kierkegaard and Pascal's arguments for reasons to have faith without any care for evidence that it is true or rational. So I'm not sure what your answer is referring to here?

Then Russel was all confused. Religious faith is about the larger matter of what-is, Reality as a whole, ultimate reality. The matter of what there is in space is an entirely different sort of matter, a physical matter subject to such considerations of logic, mathematics, and the standards of science. — Michael Ossipoff

This has nothing to do with the nature of belief and the ethics of it. So I don't see what this is a counter-argument to? I take it you are unfamiliar with Russel? He's being falsifiability, you know, the most important tool for doing science without bias.

7 W (South-Solstice WeekDate Calendar)

...Wednesday of the 7th week of the calendar year that started with the Monday that started closest to the South-Solstice of Gregorian 2017. — Michael Ossipoff

What does this have to do with anything?

I don't see how the fact that they are never acted upon as truths before proven somehow makes those hypotheses special. A belief is a belief. — Tzeentch

You are making a straw man out of this.

Hypothesis = an idea about how something might be, never acted out as truth.
Belief (religious, spiritual or convinced of a specific thing) = An idea without proof, acted out as truth.

If you cannot see the difference between those two, you are intentionally ignoring the differences to support your narrative. That's a fallacy.

Another way of saying "If you don't agree with me, I think you're stupid."

*yawn* — Tzeentch

No, you aren't making any proper philosophical counter-argument to what I wrote. You are making a biased fallacy-driven case that isn't even close to proving what I said was wrong. You are just saying opinion, philosophical dialectic is not about opinion. So stop yawning.

I'm not. I'm pointing out that pictures prove nothing. I could show you a picture of God. Would that be proof that God exists? I think not. — Tzeentch

What does this have to do with the ethics-argument I presented? You are just babbling about other stuff now, focus on the argument.

How is that a nonsense argument? — Tzeentch

Because it has no place in the ethics section, it belongs in metaphysics. You grasp basic philosophy? If you mix everything together and just claim that you can't know anything, then there's no point in philosophy of anything. So what is the point of even talking about ethics? That's why your argument in here is nonsense.

If we were to discuss Descartes and his demon-argument under metaphysics we could have such a discussion, but this is about the ethics of belief. So do the dialectic properly please.

one flaw in see. How do you know that what you see is true — hachit

I fail to see how this relates? My conclusion is that belief without rational explanation or evidence that support that belief, is dangerous.

Someone believes that vacines causes autism. It's based on someone telling them this based on a belief (which was the study that got refuted back in the 90's.). This someone, believe in this idea and ignores any evidence against that belief. This someone does not care to try and prove or rationally explain this belief and in doing all this, this someone's belief leads to their child dying in measles and spreading this further to other children.

The act of believing without caring for proving that belief killed the child and maybe more.

Someone has a belief in God. Someone else tells him that its Gods will to kill another person. The someone does not question god, because of his belief and kills the man.

These two are direct examples of my argument. But it also relates to dsitribution of belief that might become harmful. Like Nils Loc, earlier in this thread mentioned about cultures based on religious belief. There can be acts within these cultures that are downright brutal and murderous, but the belief wasn't invented by them, it was past down through generations. Therefore, belief has ramifications over time and I return to my conclusion, that belief without proof or rational reasons are unethical.


If you are talking about the purely metaphysical aspect of perception, you should go to the metaphysical section of the forum. This is an ethical argument I presented. Otherwise I can murder someone and just try and defend my actions in society with "how do the witnesses know that what they saw was the truth". A counter-argument like this for the argument I presented is nonsensical.

Even if you have reasons for finding an explanation plausible, it is still a belief. Until one has seen the things take place or done the experiments, one is trusting words and pictures. — Tzeentch

Religious faith and belief, or other beliefs that are held without caring to rationally explain or have evidence for them are not the same things as scientific hypotheses, which are beliefs which are never acted upon as truths before proven into theories.

It is fundamental to science that a hypothesis remains as a thought experiment and not truth.

If you can't see or understand this difference I can't help you understand the argument and your misunderstanding of the argument cannot lead to a proper counter-argument to the argument I presented, sorry.

The picture you linked could be a picture of anything. I could believe that it indeed shows atoms. How could I ever be sure without looking through microscopes? I might read some books, come to find it plausible, but it remains a belief. — Tzeentch

You are making a metaphysical claim about the nature of perception itself. It has nothing to do with the ethical argument I presented. It is irrelevant. Please stick to the ethical argument and what it's about. If your way of arguing specific sections of philosophy with "how can anyone know that what they don't see is true", you are essentially making a nonsense argument.

If you want to talk metaphysics, present your argument in the metaphysics section of the forum, this is ethics.

One can be told by scientists that matter consists of atoms, but one cannot be sure until it is seen by one's own eyes. Until then, it is a belief. — Tzeentch

How is this an example of belief? It seems you don't know what a hypothesis is? Or how it is used in science? A scientist does not act upon a hypothesis like it is the truth, believers of religion/faith/other does. That is the critical difference here. A scientist proposes a hypothesis with relevant supporting logic to why it might be, but never say "it is true", ever.

If you are going down the Descartes-road about not trusting anything but your own mind, then you can't even trust your own senses viewing those atoms so your example falls flat with that as well.

If you mean that nothing is true until you, yourself has seen it, that's just ignorance and ignorance of logic and evidence. Are you unable to write on a device that was invented because science proved things that enabled developing parts of that device? You didn't see scientists develop the internals of the device you have, you don't even know how it works or has seen inside your own device, so are you saying that you are writing on a device that is existing even though it's based on just a bunch of science-beliefs? Just because you didn't see any of it?

Are you talking about modern scientific methods with falsifiability and cross-checking? Or are you referring to outdated methods?

Also, for the example you put forth:


I'd like to hear a proper counter-argument to the ethical argument I made. If your point is that belief outside of just religion should be viewed in the same way, I'm totally with you on that, but that requires you to understand the difference between how science views a belief/hypothesis and how believers that won't care for the burden of proof, does.

not sure what this adds - will withhold judgement — Rank Amateur

That belief as a justified existence has been made by Pascal's wager and Kierkegaard's idea that faith/belief should exist because it isn't proved.

Challenge - Russels argument has nothing at all to do with rejecting evidence in favor of faith. Its sole purpose was to place the burden of proof on the person making the claim. If one is holding a view by faith that is in conflict with evidence that is just a fool. And fools do all kinds of things. In the argument, what Russel is saying is, if I make a claim that there is a teapot between the earth and the sun, the burden is on me to prove that, not on you to disprove that. — Rank Amateur

Essentially, it's in the same realm as my premise. Point being that if you do not follow the burden of proof for your belief, then anything could possibly be believed without demand for evidence.

If someone starts believing and following a belief of harm against humanity being good, if it's ok to reject evidence or the process (burden of proof), you can't argue for why this is wrong except when its too late.

Challenge - I don't see how Russels argument has anything meaningful to say about what people say they believe - based on anything. The only thing it would say is the burden of proof for any truth claims they make is on them. People are capable of all kinds of evil, and can find all kinds of basis to justify it. Not seeing the direct or unique link between religious beliefs per se and the evil. — Rank Amateur

The direct link is that without the burden of proof or demand for rationally explain the belief you have you are free to form whatever belief you want without anyone having the right to criticize it because of the freedom of belief we have.

not sure what you are saying here - there is a surety that hateful and dangerous belief systems will be created, and they will be justified by all kinds of things, including religion — Rank Amateur

I'm saying that if there's a possibility of hateful belief-systems being created because we have no demand on such created beliefs like, burden of proof, to justify that belief, it will over the course of a long enough timespan, happen, and people will get harmed.

We are free to believe and think all kinds of things - why is the simple act of belief without proof something to be avoided? — Rank Amateur

Because it eventually leads to harm by distortion of truths. I think you take the premise out of the argument instead of looking at the premises as supporting the conclusion that summarizes why.

I understand that religion, has and might well again cause real evil. But the causal relationship is, religion is a act of man, it is a human organisation, and evil is part of the human condition. I don't see you made any kind of case that says faith leads to religion that leads to evil. — Rank Amateur

My conclusion is that faith/belief eventually leads to suffering and harm because of its ignorance of truth and evidence for its claims. You can't take good sounding parts of religious writing out of context as an example of something that disputes this.

Belief is neither connected to any current religions or religion at all really. The conclusion is about all belief. The point is that if someone has a belief and ignores the demand to justify that belief, it can lead to harmful behavior since it ignores the possibility that it might be harmful. It might not even be the person creating this belief that does the harm. The belief, as I mentioned about personal belief impossible to be kept personal, can influence and spread into harmful forms later in time.

If a belief is created and it does not care for truth or rational explanation, it has a great potential for creating harm. Therefore, it is unethical to hold on to a belief that isn't explained rationally or proven. That is the point of my argument.

Do you add energy to the water and heat it up again? No, you travel back along the line of energy, backward thermodynamics. The water starts to heat itself up when the energy is coming back into the water. That is what happens if you turn the arrow of entropy.

My point is essentially to think of time in terms of energy distribution and entropy instead of time as the concept of events. It might help thinking about the topic of time and time travel.

Science, to the extent that one hasn't carried out the experiments themselves, is a belief. One may consider it a "rational" or "logical" belief, but that's an oxymoron. — Tzeentch

Need an example of what you mean.

Far as I know, no real thinker has ever claimed direct evidence for the existence of God, such claims being the domain of the ill-informed, manipulated, fond, ignorant, stupid, pointy-headed, and so forth. — tim wood

I'm talking about Pascal's wager and Kierkegaard argument that belief is supposed to be without any evidence. This is the road most religious people take when arguing for their belief.

Nah. This conclusion doesn't hold. Further, belief in something without sufficient evidence is required to get out of bed in the morning, and into it at night. — tim wood

Please form a better argument than "Nah". It's not enough. What is not working with the conclusion? Have you actually gone into depth with all the presented premises?

Religion as passively accepted faith (inherited lifestyle) is not something one might necessarily choose. It happens to you as a consequence of cultural pressure or personal revelation.

If you are born in some Mormon family, love or respect could be conditional upon accepting certain ways of doing things. You don't really need believe at all. You just need to act as if you believe, follow rules, otherwise you get exiled (let go).

Some Muslim households will even kill their children if they have transgressed an interpretation of religious law. — Nils Loc

These are examples of why my conclusion seems to holds up. And it supports the idea of epistemic responsibility.

It is only because of different competing values, by which society is ordered, that religious beliefs are registered as dangerous, or harmful. — Nils Loc

Which is why belief in anything that you cannot rationally back up can lead to dangers down the road. Personal belief does not exist unless you are in total isolation from the rest of humanity. As soon as you start to interact with others you will influence them and affect them in certain ways. Your spiritual/religious/other personal belief might seem harmless to you, but the causality of it down the line might build up something that harms people.

The competing values have their roots, sometimes harmless roots, which become harmful. It's not always competing though, like with honor killings.

It might be universally desirable to do no harm if we have the choice but a sense of "having the choice" might itself be a belief that is gifted to us and that we think we ought to gift to others. — Nils Loc

Can you back up the choice with rational ideas about what might be the best for other people? Because if you can argue, prove or rationalize something as true or logical outside of your conviction, it's not a belief that follows premise 2.

The gift of free thought surely permits us to advocate for the devil in the same way God would advocate for his believers, by appeal to choice or fate. — Nils Loc

But can you back up your thought rationally? If its only a belief and you start acting on it, projecting it onto the world, you are acting upon unsupported belief like in the argument presented.