You insist that all align to your judgment. — BitconnectCarlos

Cobbler's awls. No, I hope for a bit of conversation, some intelligent disagreement. I'm not insisting on agreement so much as enjoying disagreement.

Perhaps.

I have intuitions. I make judgments, for sure. — BitconnectCarlos

Cool. So it's not that people make judgements that is problematic when you say"

I get it. You, like many others, have very strong intuitions about how things should be. — BitconnectCarlos

So your point remains obscure.

Kierkegaard saw something profound in it. You see nothing. — frank

I saw quite a bit in the story, on which I have been expounding.

It was my reading of Kierkegaard that first brought this line of thinking to me. The Knight of Faith is not someone I would look up to.

You, like many others, — BitconnectCarlos

So... you think you do not have very strong intuitions about how things should be?

Then why did you respond to my post?

There are those amongst us who see faith, understood as submission, as a virtue. I am questioning that. I suspect you might agree, broadly speaking.

What do you make of this? — Hanover

Someone's made a model of my desk...

So Abraham was faking it? He knew all along that god would not allow him to kill Isaac, but went along so as to garner favour from the Lord?

Moreover, such deceptions are somehow admirable?

Or are these comments just designed to mitigate the discomfort of taking the story literally? Indeed, some fairly extreme rationalisation is needed to maintain that a god who loves us and one that demands child sacrifice are the very same.

So the stories are indeed preposterous, as you say. The lesson one is supposed to take away is, as says, thoughtless obedience. This is not admirable.

I don't think nationalism is functionally all that different from religion. — ChatteringMonkey

That was my point.

Well religion is the institutionalisation of these values, how they get propagated in a given society, how and who can change them over time. — ChatteringMonkey

Those values are not necessary, let alone peculiar, to religion. Nationalism is an obvious alternative. Both are somewhat parochial, even anachronistic.

This thread is at least in part an exploration of the difference between faith and mere belief. Saying that faith is just a belief in some set of values ignores quite a bit of what has already been said about faith.

Cheers. I hope what I have said makes at least some sense.

Faith then is the believe in a set of common values — ChatteringMonkey

There's no argument here for that interpretation. You say religion is the believe in a set of common values, then in the next sentence replace "religion" with "faith".

Came across this, from @Wayfarer long ago, while browsing...

ENRON CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your public-listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt / equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows' milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.

Elon's fortune is of this ilk.

Anyone who thinks abandoning your own reason is ever right or good, is a fool, or not a functioning person. Faith is not opposed to reason. — Fire Ologist

Is it reasonable to truss up your son and ready the fire? Read this again, and reconsider:

They arrived at the place God had described to him. Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He tied up his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to kill his son as a sacrifice.

No, this behaviour is abominable, unjustifiable.

If a person performs some ritual, to praise God and bring blessings, they are using reason throughout, as necessary to complete any task successfully. — Fire Ologist

Madmen rationally justify their acts. What is described in Genesis 22 is madness.

Biblical interpretation is a field unto itself — Hanover

Indeed, bending over backwards to justify the unjustifiable. In the place of all those words, see a man preparing a fire, fettering his son and taking a knife to his throat. Judge that.

Stop with the literalism, becasue the literal story is of an horrendous act. One needs sophistry to move beyond that.

Topics such as this require that we take great care with the language we use. So even if faith were necessary - and it isn't - that would not make it a virtue; and somethings being justified is not the same as it's being determined.

Well at least now you are beginning to address what I actually argued rather than what folk expect or want to think I argued.

Faith, understood as belief without or even despite the evidence, is not a virtue.

Faith, understood as trust, might foster commitment or dedication and these are (perhaps) virtues.

The Binding of Isaac and the Trials of Job speak of acts of cruelty, where unjustified suffering is inflicted in the name of faith. Moreover these are held up as admirable, to be emulated.

I don't agree. I hope other also disagree.

I have argued that they are not good in virtue of or due to their faith — Banno

You may have been unable to recognise the argument.

I pointed out and gave an example of faith, defined as subjecting a belief to its consequences, leading to dreadful and terrible consequences.

Hence it does not follow that acts done in faith are always good. And so it cannot be that acts are good in virtue of being done in faith.

You haven't addressed mine. — Fire Ologist

Fabricate? Platonic good? We have no choice but to act. And I have been at pains to say that our actions are not determined by reason and science. If I did not address you argument, it was becasue I did not recognise that it was proposed to be an argument.

That is all off topic. Law speak is more akin to science. You need reason to sift through laws and commands, like reason navigates through physical laws and necessities. — Fire Ologist

You seemed interested in the topic, since you responded to Frank raising it. You argued that what is good is what is the law, or something along those lines. But if you want to leave that topic, I'm happy.

It's not at all clear what the argument or counterpoint here might be. if there is one.

There are good people of faith.

I haven't said otherwise.

I have argued that they are not good in virtue of or due to their faith, and that faith is capable of abomination.

You sound to me like you have no idea what faith is. And no curiosity. — Fire Ologist

So you are affronted, and feel the need to denigrate me, rather than to address the arguments presented. You are not obligated to reply to me, nor to read my posts. If it makes you uncomfortable, go do something else.

Again, ethics is not about law, but about what is good.

Curious that some folk have such difficulty with this: that what is good and what is commanded are not the very same thing. But consider: of whatever is commanded, it makes sense to ask "is that good?".

It's pretty naive to suppose, unargued, that the only form ethics can take is that of a series of commandments.

I wonder where such a view might originate.

Oh, and I don't agree that it was faith that delivered us to our present sate of enlightenment; recent history shows how fragile that enlightenment is; longer history shows how faith worked also on the side of darkness. We might do well to drop the myth of the inevitability of progress and put our backs into it.

...you spend most of your time with yourself... — Hanover

Of course, believe whatever makes you feel good - whatever gets you through the night. (Should I link to the John Lennon song? Is it still sufficiently well known?) I'll work hard to set aside any jokes about onanism.

But be aware that what others see and are aware of, and so all that they can judge, are our actions. So it might be best to give them due regard.

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

You have heard of the Euthyphro? Is an act good becasue it is the law, or is it the law becasue it is good? You seem to be saying that what is good and what is the law are the very same. Yet there are bad laws.

Perhaps you are thinking of divine command theory as the source of the ultimate law, or perhaps some form of deontology. But recall that there are alternatives that do not explain what is good in terms of what is commanded. Consequentialism is one alternative. But better in my view is seeking after virtue.

Laws present us with a codified and tested guide to what we might do. And following those laws is a good idea. But if a law leads to turpitude, it ought not be followed.

What is legal and what is good are very different things.

People wrote the law, whether they thought they were writing the will of god or not.

But, and over, that, if the law is unethical, you ought not do what the law says.

Hence, the law does not tell you what you ought do.

Yep.

It's odd how folk keep imputing scientism to what I have said. First and now.

Again, science does not tell us what to do.

I guess folk as so used to thinking in terms of science versus religion that the idea of questioning both as a guide to ethics doesn't occur to them.

I pointed out that it has already been falsified. How is that irrelevant? — T Clark

Just to be sure, I am here relating aspects of Popper's falsification, as elucidated by his student and supporter, Watkins. This is not a rejection of falsificationism but an elaboration on it.
Deciding something is false is different to it's being logically falsifiable.

The issue is that there are parts of science that are logically unfalsifiable — Banno

For Popper, basic statements ("protocol sentences") are unfalsifiable. And they are part of science. They are observations that might be used to falsify a theory - a "theory" here being some universal statement such as "all swans are black".

There are other examples.

As I understand it, conservation of matter and energy has been established as a valid principle in physics. That doesn't necessarily mean it's correct, but we are justified in using it unless it is falsified in the future. It's not metaphysics, it's science. Determinism is metaphysics and can be useful. — T Clark

Science and metaphysics are not mutually exclusive... Following Popper in calling ideas that can be neither falsified nor verified "metaphysical", there are bits of science that have a logical structure that bars them from falsification by a basic statement, and so count as metaphysics. This is the criticism of Popper that Watkins is confronting. Indeed, I suspect that Watkins might well be the source of the very view you are attempting to articulate.

How is saying that all events have causes not describing determinism? — T Clark

"All events have causes" is a different proposition to "events have causes", since the second allows for uncaused events. So saying "things have cases" is not the same as saying that physics is deterministic. Science accepts that things sometimes have causes, not that they always have causes. It allows for events that do not have a cause: Norton's Dome, the three-body problem, Schwarzschild Singularities. Statistical Mechanics is built on this idea.

We're just sporting around on the shoulders of those giants. — frank

So what...

The science we have now is far beyond anything they considered.

Yep.

Take another look at the beads. I've claimed that {1,2,3} is extensionally equivalent to "...is red". Now, do you agree with this? Seems most folk do, and so we can move on. If folk do not agree, we can have a further conversation - perhaps about colour blindness or differences between screen settings. But the point is that if there is agreement we need explain nothing further.

Some folk insist that Pluto should be included amongst the planets. There's a conversation to be had there, as well.

Notice that this is not about correspondence, so much as what we take as granted. Not meaning, but use. We use "red" to refer to {1,2,3} and "Planètes " to refer to the planets.

This is to say we reach agreement, faith or no faith, in the vast number of instances. — Hanover

Quite so. And it seems we agree that the belief is not of much import, it's the acts, what one does, that is to be counted and evaluated.

But I will push back against being characterised as seeing science as a replacement for faith in some religious doctrine. Science describes how things are, it doesn't tell you what to do about how things are.

Rather, we can't know what to do, and yet have to act anyway. The only thing I can offer by way of consolation is something like Tolstoy's three questions.

Is there any intermediary step that would show this to be true? — J

I don't see a need. Planets = Planètes = {mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune}.

But are you entitled to the phrase "say the same thing" without explaining what it means? — J

The explanation is that they are extensionally equivalent. Planets = planètes.

Folk find it difficulty to accept uncertainty. Others like the neatness of having god only on Sunday - they don't have to think.

Which is pretty much my problem with faith. There is no act so barbaric that it can't be justified by an appeal to faith. As a way of deciding action, it is very poor and entirely unaccountable. — Tom Storm

Yes; and yet by some it is elevated to such heights that it is seen as the greatest virtue.

:angry:

What it means is that my being here under a purely causative explanation will have occurred without purpose, — Hanover

You are treating purpose as something you find. It isn't. Rather, it is what you do.

It's not as if reason evades the faithful more then it does the faithless. — Hanover

Well, is that so? I think it worth considering the logic of faithful propositions. Can we think of the adults in Elizabeth Rose Struhs' life as putting their faith to the test? Are they checking to see if their faith is justified? Well, no. It is open to them to conclude, not that god was not willing to save Elizabeth Rose Struhs, but that one or more amongst them did not have sufficient faith to satisfy god's needs; that their faith was insufficient; or that god is further testing their faith in him by court trial and prison sentence, as he did for Job.

There are no circumstances where their faith must be "rationally" rejected.

It's this incapacity to reconsider that marks an act of faith.

So faith might be seen as subjecting a belief to its consequences, except that nothing can be learned here, in that the belief cannot be shown to be in error.

And this is the culpability of faith, when it encourages folk to cruelty.


it’s how we think and approach knowledge that truly shapes our journey.

What I think might be useful is to attend to the fact that waste heat only is 'lost' (unable to do more work) relationally or contextually. — Pierre-Normand

I was thinking that Meta conflated energy and entropy in such a way that he things the energy of a closed system must constantly decrease as the entropy increases. Of course this is he same as the amount of energy being constant while the amount of energy available for work decreases over time. SO I think ChatGPT and I have diagnosed his error in much the same way.

seems to be on a similar path. I wasn't able to make much sense of what @DifferentiatingEgg had to say.

there is a something -- meaning, sense, content -- that can persist despite differing verbal articulations of it. — J

Well yes - the planets.

We may end up with "The number of the planets > 7" and "Le nombre de planètes > 7" both referring to the proposition, while neither of them is the proposition; and then it is the proposition that refers to planets and perhaps to numbers. Why multiply entities unnecessarily? Both "The number of the planets > 7" and "Le nombre de planètes > 7" are about the number of planets, without the need for a proposition as intermediary. What they have in common is not some other entity we call the proposition, but that they say the same thing about the number of planets.

This is a good question. What would you say? — J

So back to the distinction between properties and attributes and classes.

(41) yields a result comparable to (29)-(31) and (40). Most of the logicians, semanticists, and analytical philosophers who discourse freely of attributes, propositions, or logical modalities betray failure to appreciate that they thereby imply a metaphysical position which they themselves would scarcely condone. It is noteworthy that in Principia Mathematica, where attributes were nominally admitted as entities, all actual contexts occurring in the course of formal work are such as could be fulfilled as well by classes as by attributes. All. actual contexts are extension& in the sense of page 30 above. The authors of Principia Mathematica thus adhered in practice to a principle of extensionality which they did not espouse in theory. If their practice had been otherwise, we might have been brought sooner to an appreciation of the urgency of the principle.

Beads {1,2,3} and the beads with the attribute "being red" are extensionally equivalent. In the domain of beads, being red just is being bead 1, 2, or 3. Any "why" as to those beads and not 4, 5, or 6 or 7, 8 or 9 is for extensionally besides the point.

Can they explain the origin of the universe? — Gregory

Who is "they"? Is there someone you think can explain the origin of the universe? You?

It seems odd for you to quote Russell, of all people, while apparently maintaining the inadequacies of science.

Thanks for the conversation — Gregory

I hope you found it helpful.

A good mind believes in miracles — Gregory

A better mind explains them.


(How long are we playing this game for?)

Truth is neither subjective nor objective, but just how things are. As such it doesn't give a fuck about what you or I believe, faithfully or otherwise.