Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. — Jesus of Nazareth addressing Doubting Thomas, the Apostle
:fire:memento mori
"What you find hateful [harmful], do not do to anyone "
"Amor fati!"
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
memento vivire
Courage — 180 Proof
Not at all. I'm fully aware there are Nobel laureates who are religious (Francis Collings is a case in point). My point is that the lacking faith accusation (which I've seen often on religious forums) seems to me ad hominem and I wonder why many religious people think that accusation is perfectly OK but would be insulted with Alex's counter-accusationYou also seem to feel a lack of respect for people who disagree with you in that regard. You cast doubt on their intelligence. — T Clark
I'm asking people who believe what Chris says is OK but what Alex says is insulting to explain their reasoning. — Art48
I don't accept the idea you can chose what to believe. — Art48
And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith ... (Galatians 2:16 ...)
Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and do not doubt ... (Matthew 21:21)
... many Christians say faith is a gift of God. — Art48
I don't accept the idea you can chose what to believe. — Art48
Faith is a matter of choice. Intelligence is not. — Fooloso4
doxastic voluntarism (the belief you can decide your beliefs) — Hanover
The facts as I understand them determine my belief. — Art48
If you deny doxastic voluntarism (the belief you can decide your beliefs) outright, then what triggers your belief other than a deterministic force,
— Hanover
The facts as I understand them determine my belief. — Art48
Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3}individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.
Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.
1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.
2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.
{4}
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm#P1
As many things are not certain or are not clear, room is left for choice. How you choose is up to you, which allows for an expression of preference.
If you choose to disbelieve that which lacks sufficient proof, as you deem "sufficient" to be, that is a choice. — Hanover
O think James' theory of doxastic voluntarism is the most adequate one and it always applies. — baker
works — 180 Proof
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