what’s the technical definition? what i got from your post was that there is no technical definition for “certainty”. but you know what i mean by “certainty”, so why nitpick about using the word “correctly”? after all, language is just a tool for communication, and i effectively communicated with you using the word.</p>
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i didn’t mean something so conclusive as “clear cut”, i said i don’t see how it can get very ‘deep’. you won’t get too far until you get to the point where all you can do is squabble over opinion.</p>
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by “harm” i mean direct or indirect to any degree. killing yourself when you know people depend on you would be counted as harm, but waving your arm when you are by yourself isn’t. this wouldn’t apply to anything that isn’t sentient (but then what is sentient oooh. although we cannot (yet) clearly define what is sentient or not, there are things that we can clearly label as “sentient”. a person is sentient, a cell isn’t.)</p>
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i know you’re just using this as an example, butt why should you care about something that isn’t sentient? nobody grieves for ants when they accidentally step on a trail of them, so why care about a small bundle of cells without even a nervous system? people like to talk about “potential”, but you don’t see them treating children as mature adults just because they have the potential to become one. so why not treat the uh, thing, for what it is: just a bundle of cells.</p>
<p>as for harming someone to prevent them from harming someone else (in regards to abortion), it can be argued that the mother already has a life and people that love her, etcetc. the fetus has almost no connections. the death of the fetus is going to have a smaller impact than the death of the mother.</p>
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lying in itself isn’t unethical. it depends entirely on the context.</p>
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this is what i was addressing when i criticized deductive logic (which i confused with inductive). sure, you can have a fun discussion on ghosts and angels, but there’s no reason to believe in those things to begin with, other than “i told you so.”</p>
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i don’t understand how this is. the amount of information in the system is going to be the same for both binoculars. only the stronger one will give you more of that information because it allows for a clearer view. it’s like taking a picture with a 1mp camera vs a 10mp camera. the 1mp camera will give you less information about some scene.</p>
‘Certainty’ is an epistemic notion, like ‘knowledge’, but stronger than knowledge. This is because built into the notion of certainty is the notion that you cannot be mistaken about what you’re certain of and the notion that you’re in a position to be aware of this infallibility regarding your particular belief. </p>
<p>So, pretend you see an animal in the field. It looks like a cow to you, so you believe it’s a cow.</p>
<p>You know it’s a cow if 1) you arrive at your belief by looking at the particular animal in question, 2) you believe it’s a cow, and 3) it’s true that it’s a cow. </p>
<p>If you satisfy these three conditions, or criteria, then you ‘know’ that the animal in the field is a cow. But you are still not certain that it’s a cow. Why?</p>
<p>Because to be certain you would also have to be infallible about such a belief, but we’re not infallible about such things. We can be mistaken in identifying animals in fields.</p>
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I nitpicked it because you used the loose sense of certainty in a technical philosophical discussion which didn’t even require the use of the technical sense. </p>
<p>I don’t think I need to defend my nitpicking, but I will. Nitpicking is a virtue in philosophy, because it’s how we arrive at preciseness and clarity. Besides, sloppy talk is just a symptom of sloppy thinking, so clearing up the way we talk is a good way to prevent confusion.</p>
<p>Let’s get to your ‘harm’ principle. Look, those people who voted for Barack Obama will probably end up indirectly harming our country because Obama will likely harm our country. So, was their voting for Obama an unethical thing? What about crazy people? Sometimes they harm others, but they don’t realize what they’re doing – they’re mentally incapable of understanding that they’re doing something harmful. Are they unethical? Most philosophers say ‘no.’ But, according to you, they would be unethical for harming someone even though they cannot understand that they’re harming someone. Are three-year-old children unethical when they play and hurt each other? You see how much work you’re going to have to do in order to spell out this ‘harm’ principle?</p>
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Well, Kant would disagree with you, and I’m not so sure Kant isn’t right, but that’s neither here nor there. My point was to bring about an ethical situation in which your harm principle didn’t apply. Of course you could make it apply by saying that the person you lied to or society is somehow harmed when someone lies, but that’s going to require you to stretch your ‘harm’ principle even further – probably in a way you haven’t thought about.</p>
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</p>
<p>It’s not right to say that ‘there’s no reason to believe in those things.’ Our reasons to believe something is called evidence. But evidence can be either good or bad, or strong or weak. If I tell you that Obama is a Muslim, then you have some evidence for believing that Obama is a Muslim. Now, it’s very weak evidence, but I could provide you with more. The fact that people say, for example, that God has revealed Himself to them, that they’ve seen a ghost, that aliens have abducted them, is all evidence for those claims. You might consider it weak or strong, or insufficient to compel you to believe them, but it’s not right to say we don’t have any reason to believe such things. We do, especially in the case of God, but you might not find all the evidence compelling. Fair enough. People disagree over how strong or weak some piece of evidence actually is. What we don’t disagree about is whether something counts as evidence. </p>
<p>What you want is a deductive argument for the existence of God. That’s just my guess, but I think it’s a good example even if it’s not exactly what you’re talking about. There is no deductive argument for God’s existence, just like there is no proof for God’s existence (in the mathematical sense of ‘proof’), and this is because nothing logically implies God. That’s not to say that God doesn’t exist or that there isn’t strong evidence for His existence – I think there is strong evidence, but it’s not compelling to me, and I gather it’s not compelling to you. </p>
<p>The bino analogy was only meant to capture that someone with a stronger pair of binos (like someone with a keener philosophical mind) would be in a better position to get at the fundamental nature of something – its type, in our donkey case. The person with the weaker binos (like someone with a weaker philosphical mind who looked at things from different perspectives) could observe an object from different positions but will not be able to get at the fundamental nature of something the way the other guy could. The different perspectives might allow him to learn of the sex of the animal in question but not its type. </p>
<p>That’s why I said that it’s more important to focus on strong analytical training than worrying about whether a department places import on looking at things from different perspectives. People who talk of “looking at things from different perspectives” usually are promoting a position which they’re incapable of defending rigorously, and so they harp about the importance of ‘different views’, which really is just code for ‘respect my weak opinions and beliefs.’</p>
what? certainty is the notion that you CAN be mistaken. that’s why people assign values to their certainty. in fact, there’s even a scientific use for it in quantum mechanics. i think you may have mistaken my use of “certainty” for “certain”</p>
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i agree with this, but i was only referring to that specific topic (on certainty). since (i thought) you knew exactly what i meant, i didn’t see a reason to nitpick about my use of language. it’s like people correcting others who use “gonna” instead of “going to.”</p>
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i never actually used the word “ethical” in my description. i said “if something doesn’t harm others, it should be allowed.” it does not, however, imply “if something harms others it should NOT be allowed.” yeah, voting for barack will harm others in some way, but it is offset by other reasons: 1. you were only able to pick between 2 candidates (cause 3rd parties are squished out) and 2. McCain would have harmed our country in some way also. and since we don’t know which one will harm the country “more”, i wouldn’t describe voting for either candidate as unethical. ethics is a combination of the consequences of the action and available choices.</p>
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kant’s wrong!!!1 this is where we will disagree and probably never agree. i believe only the consequences of lying determines whether the lie is “unethical” or not. say you lied to your mom about getting a 4.0 in college when in actuality you got a 2.0. but you continue to be successful and so your mom (or anyone who interacts with her) never finds out you got bad grades but benefits from being happy about the lie. i wouldn’t see that as unethical, though you probably would. now if the mom finds out, then i would say it’s unethical because it does harm the mother.</p>
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my turn to nitpick :]
“evidence for something” is not technically correct. evidence can only be used to go against things. for every piece of evidence, there are an infinite number of hypothesis that will be consistent with the evidence. so it can’t really be “for” any given theory, because it’s equally “for” an infinite number of other theories that go against it.</p>
<p>someone saying barack is muslim is does not count as evidence because there’s no evidence to show that his source is a credible source in the first place. “revelations” from random people does count because their source IS the “special event”, but are not compelling. for one, they can’t be reproduced and also anyone who’s taken LSD knows that you don’t need a “supernatural” force to see crazy things.</p>
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if nothing logically implies the existence of a god, how is there strong evidence for her existence? if the evidence isn’t logical, why even consider it?</p>
<p>what evidence is there for the existence of a deity?</p>
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although this is definitely true, there is also a lack of open-mindedness everywhere. most people won’t change their beliefs despite the amount of logical arguments against them. while seeing things from a different perspective isn’t a logical argument in itself, but it will help some people see why they are wrong.</p>
You asked me for the technical philosophical definition of certainty. That’s what I gave you. You’re either certain or you’re not; there is no high degree or low degree in epistemology. </p>
<p>There is no significant difference between certainty and certain, other than one is a noun and the other an adjective, in their philosophical use.</p>
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<p>Yes, but the “should be allowed” is an ethical claim, so you were talking about ethics. I just put a name to it.</p>
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I realize it doesn’t imply it. But I wanted to be charitable; otherwise, you’d be silent on a whole lot of ethical problems. </p>
<p>Let’s skip the Obama is a nightmare scenario. It’s too complex a situation to help us. I shouldn’t have brought it up, here. </p>
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You should never feel that strongly against anything Kant says – they guy was a genius, and we’re just morons fumbling around with a new toy. </p>
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I hope you’re not referring to me in this “we” because I never endorsed Kant’s view. I said I wasn’t ready to dismiss it. </p>
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This is called consequentialism. There’s a big problem with it, namely that in many cases it goes against our intuitions. </p>
<p>Here’s a counter-example. I’m really sick and a little delirious, and the antidote is in bottle X, which is next to some poison in bottle Y, on the table. Now, you want to harm me, so you tell me to drink bottle X, because you wrongly believe that bottle X has the poison (which it doesn’t). I drink it and I get better. Did you do something ethically good? Are you a good man if these are the kind of action you do? It’s highly unsatisfactory to claim that you’re good even though you tried to kill me. Same problem with saying the action was good. After all, the action was that you tried to kill me but which resulted in saving my life. Are we to just ignore your intentions, here? Consequentialism is a pretty tough sell.</p>
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If you commit a crime and I say I have evidence that you did it, that’s not evidence being used against something. That’s evidence for the claim that you did it. The technical sense doesn’t apply only to negative things. </p>
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I think you’re taking ‘evidence’ to be a stronger notion than it is. Evidence is merely information that could be used to speak in favor of a belief, opinion, alleged fact, etc. </p>
<p>I never said a piece of evidence could only apply to one theory or conclusion. We’re not restricted in the way you say. The fact that everyone has called you Mr. Muffin since as far back as you can remember is evidence that it’s your name. Now, it might turn out that your name is actually Mr. Cupcake, but that’s not to say that you don’t have evidence for the claim that your name is Mr. Muffin. </p>
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[quote]
if nothing logically implies the existence of a god, how is there strong evidence for her existence? if the evidence isn’t logical, why even consider it?</p>
<p>what evidence is there for the existence of a deity?[/qote]
Nothing logically implies that the sun will come out tomorrow, but we have strong evidence for this. You’re using logical as if it excludes all non-deductive logic, again.</p>
<p>There is tons of evidence for the existence of God. Millions and millions of people have reported that God has revealed Himself to them. The world just seems to have a certain design. The very existence of the Universe. Etc. All of this is used as evidence for God’s existence. Again, the problem is how much weight we should give these pieces of evidence. You obviously don’t find it strong enough to make you believe it, although you do believe the Sun will come out tomorrow (even though that’s not logically implied either).</p>
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We pretty much agree on this. People who are truly openminded are a rare breed. Sadly, philosophy majors are no exception. When it comes to politics or religion, I’ve yet to meet someone who changed their mind through argumentation. They usually have to have some profound or revealing experience. I think of Democrats who became disillusioned and became conservatives – neocons. </p>
<p>Question: Are you a high school student, UCLA student, philosophy student, or what?</p>
oh. so is there a philosophical equivalent term for the scientific definition of “certainty”?</p>
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i don’t like fiddling with the word “ethics” so much cause the definition will be different for different people.</p>
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geniuses can be wrong (poor einstein). how does he justify that all lies are unethical?</p>
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good point. although in my scenario, it’s a lie with the person’s best interest at heart. ill just add that to my existing definition.</p>
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yes it is. it’s evidence disproving other hypothesis. which people colloquially call “for” them. evidence is never and can never be used to <em>prove</em> anything. only disprove (to a degree).</p>
<p>for example, think about the atom: it started out as an indivisible blob. later, thomson found evidence suggesting the existence of an electron, which disproved the blob theory. now it’s a ball of positive and negative charges. after him, rutherford performed the gold foil experiment and found evidence claiming the atom was mostly space. that disproved the plum pudding model. and after him bohr found evidence that disproved rutherford’s model. then schrodinger found evidence disproving bohr’s model. it’s all a big cycle of disproving and then creating a new model with the fewest number of assumptions. but none of the evidence is really “for” the new model.</p>
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actually it would depends on how you define “name.” i don’t see how this supports your stance that evidence is for hypothesis rather than against them.</p>
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whaa how?</p>
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“feeling god’s presence” is not even close to compelling evidence for the existence of a god. there are people that depending on what their religion is, feel the christian god’s presence. others feel allah’s presence. and some try but never feel any presence. those claims should be taken just as seriously as claims of seeing invisible dragons. we know that feelings of divine presence does not in any way require anything divine, just as a child’s stomachache going away because he took a placebo doesn’t suggest that the placebo had any direct physical effect on the stomachache. people can trick themselves.</p>
<p>the existence of a universe does nothing to support the existence of a god. i could just as easily say that the existence of the universe supports the claim that the universe came to be naturally. they are completely unrelated.</p>
<p>i believe the sun will rise tomorrow because we have scientific evidence supporting the claim, and the evidence has been consistent with our observations. blah blah. there are plenty of logical reasons, though i do consider the possibility of the sun not coming up. just not in everyday life.</p>
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UCLA freshman in engineering. i don’t really like science and math anymore :/</p>
Of course geniuses can be wrong. It would be silly to content otherwise. What I warned you about was your strong stance that Kant must be wrong about lying being inherently wrong. A little humility will go a long way here. Remember, you’re a philosophical tyro and Kant is one of the greatest philosophers of all time. That’s not to say that you should abandon your own judgment and believe what he believed, but it does mean that you shouldn’t be so quick or so sure that he was wrong. </p>
<p>Your fingerprints on the doorknob to my apartment is evidence that you were at my apartment. This is forensic evidence and it supports a positive claim, namely that you were at my apartment. The notion of ‘evidence’ is used both positively and negatively. Whatever its use in engineering or science, we’re talking philosophy and it’s simply an empirical fact that it’s used the way I say it is. </p>
<p>Your arguments against the existence of God rest on your misunderstanding of the notion of ‘evidence’, so I won’t continue with this part of our discussion because it’s a dead-end for us.</p>
i was kinda of joking about my accusation, hence the 1 at the end of the exclamation marks. but how does he justify his claim? anyways, i don’t see how either of us can be right. everything will go back to opinion.</p>
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my fingerprints on the doorknob does not support the claim, it disproves any claim that says i was not at your house (assuming my finger wasn’t cut off or something like that). it’s simply out of convenience that we say “this observation supports my claim” instead of “this observation disproves any claim that suggests i wasn’t at your house,” which is more of a mouthful. there’s no such thing as evidence for a theory. it’s either consistent with evidence or it isn’t. whether or not this is what you were taught in your philosophy classes, you cannot disagree with the logic of it. does philosophy have a different definition i should know about for “support”, “evidence,” etc?</p>
<p>debates over semantics are so… annoying</p>
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i know we’re probably not going to agree on the validity of “revelations” as evidence, but in what way does the existence of the universe AT ALL suggest there is a god? how is that any different than saying the existence of the universe is evidence for the existence of fairies?</p>
I think our problem is that we can’t agree on what ‘evidence’ is, or at least how it can be used. One of us is wrong about this, possibly both of us, but that seems to be our biggest hangup. </p>
<p>Let me say again, I’m not here to defend the claim that God exists nor the claim that revelations are strong evidence for His existence. I’m only saying that they’re evidence, and obviously the people who have them take revelation to be compelling evidence.</p>
<p>God is offered as a causal explanation for the Universe’s existence. I don’t think fairies play this role in any religion, mythology, or folklore. If some entity (fairy or otherwise) does play this role, then it’s playing the God-role as a creator of the Universe, and some other stuff depending on your religion of choice. </p>
<p>Let me emphasize, I’m not saying ‘God as creator of the Universe’ isn’t a problematic notion on its own, but it is an answer to the question of how the Universe came about in the first place. Whether you think the answer is good or bad, or logically problematic, well, that’s a different matter. People offer God as an answer, and in this sense they offer the very existence of the Universe as needing explanation, an explanation whose possibly only answer is God. </p>
<p>Think of it like this. If you discovered a planet and found a watch on the planet, you’d think that this was evidence that some sentient being had been there. The watch’s existence, in this sense, would count as evidence for your belief that some sentient being had been there. Now, I’m not trying to say that the Universe has a designer because a watch has a designer. I’m just trying to explain how ‘evidence’ comes into play with talk of the Universe and God.</p>
<p>Don’t mean to mess up a terribly entertaining and stimulating two-way debate here, but “fairies?”</p>
<p>The reason the universe is “evidence” (evidence does not = proof, by the way) of God is because, in a very tiny nutshell (because I have other things to do on a Tuesday afternoon), the complexity and ideal nature of the universe for human life is extremely (extremely) unlikely without an intelligent Designer. Now, that doesn’t disprove or prove anything, it is EVIDENCE. It supports a claim.</p>
<p>How does this support fairies? I don’t see how it does, unless you think fairies are the intelligent designers of the universe, which means that you are still supporting the existence of God, but calling him “fairies.” The existence of the universe is not evidence for a Christian God. Merely for God (be he pagan or Allah). The Christian aspect of God is supported by other evidence. Christian apologetics (defense of the faith, as it were) start with one proof consisting of many pieces of evidence (proving God), then move on to other proofs (ie: the reliability of the Bible, the validity of Christian-specific claims, etc.), eventually creating a full picture of evidence that supports Christianity as a whole. The universe-supporting-God bit is merely step one, and does nothing to prove Christianity as a whole. So I think your comment on the fairies was uneducated and irrelevant.</p>
<p>i thought up of an analogy to explain my claim: i write down the equation of a function on a piece of paper, but i never show you what i wrote down. you try to guess what the equation is. if i do not give you any points, any answer is equally probable (0%). so you just admit you don’t know.</p>
<p>but then i give you twenty points on the function. this automatically cuts a large portion of possible equations. in other words, the equations that do not fit are disproven to work. for every extra point i give you, more and more equations are disproven. but no amount of evidence will tell us which of the remaining possible equations is more probable than the next since they’re all either consistent with the points or they aren’t. you see, observations (in this case, the points i give you) cannot support any answer. after i give you a point, each of the possible explanations are equally probable. observations can only disprove explanations. </p>
<p>going back to the math analogy, since there are still an infinite number of possible answers, so how do we pick which equation as our answer? basically, we pick the most simple equation that satisfies the points. we don’t have to say “i dunno” (even though the probability of us being correct is still zero) because not every answer is equally probable anymore. we don’t pick the more complex equation because we’d have to work with extra stuff we don’t know is true.</p>
<p>people (including me) say observations “support” claims because it’s just easier. but i pointed it out just cause we were talking about being nitpicky</p>
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evidence is objective. just because evidence seems compelling to some doesn’t mean it should be compelling for all. if it’s not logically compelling, it doesn’t count.</p>
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not really, since i’m trying to tell you why it’s illogical to believe in god(s)</p>
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people are stupid. just because they think the only possible answer is god doesn’t make it in any way more true</p>
<p>as a little tangent, look up “hawking’s no boundary proposal.” i hear it gives a natural explanation of the “existence” of the universe.</p>
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we already know that watches have creators, so it’s safe to assume that someone made that watch. but we do not know that universes have creators, so it’s illogical to assume ours was created. it’s like saying snowflakes must have a creator because they look so pretty. the explanation is both illogical and irrelevant.</p>
<p>and if you go to the extent of saying “god created the snowflakes,” you might as well give up because no logical person is going to accept your claims. if nothing can possibly disprove a claim, that means the difference between the claim being true or false is unobservable. if it’s unobservable, it doesn’t exist since existence is defined by being able to interact with other objects.</p>
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you don’t know that. nobody knows what the constants of the universe are (or if they’re even constant) so there’s no way to calculate that. for all you know, the probability could’ve been 1. because it is based on a fallacious claim, it does not count as evidence.</p>
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it doesn’t. i made the analogy because from what we know, using the existence of the universe as evidence for a god is just as logical as using it for the existence of fairies.</p>
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faith is defined as “belief without evidence.” it cannot be logically defended.</p>
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see, this is what’s wrong with “proving” religion. first, it cannot be proven. nothing can. second, you start with the claim on the top and then work your way down when there is nothing to support the top in the first place. for example, christians started believing the bible was true. but once science demonstrates the invalidity of some of the stories, christians say “oh well those were meant to be moral stories anyways.”</p>
<p>example: “circle of earth” 40:22. they believed the earth was flat. ancient hebrew had words to describe spheres, but they chose “circle.” this is a blatantly false statement that should automatically cause believers to question the validity of the bible, but people disregard it. they say it’s a metaphor, but if you can take that as a metaphor, then ANYTHING in the bible can be taken as a metaphor. and if that’s true, the whole “word of god” and “truth” of the bible falls apart. not that it doesn’t already.</p>
<p>Well, the way I used it was like “belief.” The “Christian faith.”</p>
<p>I think Merriam Webster hits upon it a few times:
1 a: allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1): fidelity to one’s promises (2): sincerity of intentions
2 a (1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (2): complete trust
3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction ; especially : a system of religious beliefs <the protestant=“” faith=“”></the></p>
<p>I think one can distinguish between “faith” and “blind faith.” Faith in science and faith in religion both can be supported by both objective and subjective evidence. Blind faith cannot be supported by any means and is foolish.</p>
<p>science doesn’t require faith. it is always subject to change and is based on observations that may also be subject to change. it’s universally applicable in any environment based on causality and it even works in environments that may not be based on causality, though to a lesser extent. because it’s universally applicable and adaptable, it is the best way of figuring things out. faith is universally applicable, but is completely unreliable.</p>
<p>look at 2 b2. complete trust (in god). you already admitted that god isn’t proven to exist in the first place. so you are believing without evidence. now if you were to just CONSIDER the existence of a god, that would be a different story</p>
<p>You have faith that science is the only way to know truth, and you have faith that science is truth. Science cannot prove its own infallibility nor can it prove that it is the only way to know truth. Thus, a faith only in science is a philosophy, not an objective truth. Saying that science is the most reliable method of knowing is a statement of faith which you cannot prove.</p>
<p>And as I said, there is evidence for God. You seem to think evidence = indisputable proof. In that case, there is no evidence for macroevolution. Please reconsider your definition of evidence.</p>
give me a more reliable method of finding truth. if it works better than science, i’d drop it. see? no faith.</p>
<p>also, i never said anything about science being the only way to find truth, only the most reliable.</p>
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evidence is something that disproves other ideas. there is no evidence for god. the existence of the universe isn’t, the bible isn’t, the koran isn’t. just as harry potter isn’t evidence for a wizard world.</p>