Do you? Do you see my point about stealing the concept? Because I just don’t think you do.
But we have.
Because faith is belief without evidence or in spite of evidence to the contrary. I don’t have that. I have evidence or necessities. Faith is for the weak-minded. Faith is what you use when you wish. Faith is believing true that which you know isn’t true. It is deliberate self-deception.
I will wait until you attempt to engage my counterargument. Until then, the current discussion between you and I is over.
As opposed to your failed attempt at stealing the concept? Sorry, but it doesn’t work like that.
This is your own definition of faith. Faith is believing in something not entirely proven true. You have it, we all have it; I’m sorry you can’t handle it.
No, that is what faith is. It is not believing in something not entirely proven true. Please do not project your weakness onto me. I will not have it. I don’t care if you don’t like the fact that faith is the lazy way out. NMP.
Are you suggesting that ‘believing’ in the existence of, say, the chair you are sitting on, is no different than believing the (bad) fairy tales of christianity, judaism and similar scams ?
Only different in degree, and not kind. If you ask me, “are you sitting on a chair?” My response will be, if I know I’m sitting on a char, “yes, I’m sitting on a chair.” You would probably then follow up with, “are you sure?” If I say “yes” then that constitutes knowledge, or assumed knowledge. If, on the other hand, I said, “I don’t know, it looks like I’m sitting on a chair,” then there’s no certainty. I merely think I’m sitting on a chair. The latter is not knowledge, while the former, IF TRUE, is (here, one may ask, probably a philosopher, “how are you so sure?”)
How can something be partially proven? Things are either proven or not. Evidence does not mean proof, if that were the case, then belief in GOD would not mean faith, and I would be ‘absent of all faith’ just like you. I could say, well, the universe once didn’t exist, but now exists, and since things cannot create themselves, but rather need some kind of creator, the universe must have had a creator. That creator is what I call GOD, you can call it whatever. If you’re saying things require empirical evidence, then you’re a positivist, and not Austrian.
Its amusing that if you really are silly enough to doubt the existance of the chair your sitting in, your willing to say that a magic immortal laws-of-nature-breaking vengeful/forgiving angry/kind omnipotent/makes mistakes god probably exists.
The Knight of BAAWA is actually bearing witness to the dialogical nature of proof. Someone presents a argument and someone else accepts the argument. We hope that they both apply rigorous standards. We hope that neither one makes a mistake (more likely if the presenter and acceptor are the same person). And we hope that the standards (which represent a snapshot of the paradigm of the day) are appropriate. Very picky mathematicians will use “proven” to indicate that someone has presented a pretty good looking argument and “proved” to indicate that the result was checked and accepted by an independent referee, though this defies everyday usage in which the two words are treated almost identically as past participles. This is reason “as it is” instead of “as it should be”. In fact, in ignoring the “as it is” you might run the risk of walling yourself off as surely as any skeptic.
Which brings me to something I was thinking about this morning. How exactly does the existence of God make automatic moral law? Couldn’t an evil God have created the universe just as much as a good God? Couldn’t the evil God be beaming immoral reasoning into your head disguised as moral reasoning? Oh yes, an evil God would not create the universe, but just because God did one good thing can we abstract from this one data point that he’s completely and thoroughly good? Or perhaps God is good, but immersing his creations an impenetrable illusion is part of his good plan. The illusion may even be so complete as to prevent us from seeing how this is a good plan. You can be a theist and still essentially a radical skeptic. This brings us back to the position of having to make an Aristotelian dodge to establish God’s nature (recap: “If we’re screwed, we’re screwed, so to make progress, assume not screwed.”) with the existence of God issue being just a detour from the same problem, changing the conclusion from “the universe hasn’t screwed me” to “God hasn’t screwed me, because He’s good in the way that I understand”.
If, as you say, it required faith to assume “not screwed” then I guess I can accept that, but the above considerations suggest that the possession of faith and the belief in God are entirely independent.
No, Descartes’ showed, using the a priori method, that if there is a God, he must be all good and not a deceiver. The cogito proves this.
Yeah, they are. The belief in God is one form of faith, the belief in science is another.
I’m glad that it’s amusing. Keep working on that straw-man. I never said “god probably exists.”
OK, I checked up on this, and I think you are talking about Meditation III paragraph 38. If that was not the culmination of the “proof” please direct me otherwise, because it looks to me like he is projecting his own conception of the “good” onto his God, deeming it “highly probable that he in some way fashioned me after his own image and likeness” i.e. he and God share similar notions of “good”. The argument, seems to me, creates God in Descartes’ image. Now, if I misunderstand MIII/38 or should be looking elsewhere, of course, I would appreciate the reference.
I’m referring to the evil demon hypothesis, namely that the universe is controlled by what we would consider an evil all-powerful being (an evil god), who’s bent on deceiving us. Here’s my take:
His method of doubt leads him to a self-evident conclusion: If he’s being deceived by an all-powerful demon, then he must, by definition, exit; for how can a non-existing entity be deceived, or even think for that matter? Thus, since he is deceived, and is able to contemplate his existence, he must then exist. This proposition, namely I am, I exist (the cogito), is necessarily true every time it is expressed by him, or conceived in his mind. Uncovering a single a priori truth must necessarily destroy the evil demon hypothesis, since an all powerful being, bent on complete deception, would never allow Descartes to reach even this position, and yet he is here.
[1] See Descartes, Meditation Two, part 3.
Let me first point out the obvious issue brought about by his having to address in MIII what you claim he address in MII. Surely if D thought he’d worked out the demon issue in MII he would not need to revisit explicitly it in MIII, but he does. Now, if you direct me to MIV or tell me how I am not reading MIII or its purpose correctly, then we can proceed.
But be that as it may, the only part of the evil demon hypothesis that I exist or any single apriori truth destroys is that deception means meant on complete deception. The machines running the Matrix had some good reason (to the extent that humans are better batteries) to keep their humans in a state of existence while in a world of illusion. All-powerful demons can have designs upon us that we do not know and cannot guess. It is not inconceivable at all (in fact quite plausible) that it is more evil to have existence as your one lone solitary fact than to have absolutely no other facts at all. A perfectly honest person always tells the truth (correlation 1 with the truth), but a perfectly dishonest person does not always lie (correlation 0 with the truth as opposed to correlation -1 with the truth). There is some kind of all-or-nothing fallacy at work.
Because you’re wanting 100% proof in a reality that only has that for the a priori. That we have need of epistemology means that we aren’t infallible, and to demand that we be or else we must have faith is the Infallibist Fallacy.
But this argument as it was put forward fails because it is impossible to conceive of yourself existing apart from a physical body. Descartes claimed we could imagine ourselves existing apart from a body, but he was wrong. So maybe be do know for certain that we at least have a physical body. Although I understand this is not really an argument against your claims at all.
There are still arguments against your position however. Based on faith, you believe in an immaterial soul/mind that effects the body and physical reality governed by the law of the conservation of mass-energy. Now you can either believe in a soul/mind that effects the physical body, or you can believe in the validity of the law of the conservation of mass-energy. You cannot believe in both, and you can only pick one. So which do you pick?
My apologies, it seemed implied that you are religious.