20181221
1/ Re: your original post, belief and faith are the same thing. Your last sentence basically says “believe in belief” or “have faith in faith”. Perhaps you mean “have faith in religion.” That’s why I say serious confusion.
Further, validity is just a way of saying that your…
2/ … conclusion logically flows from your previously accepted premises. All premises are the starting point of an argument and presumably correct.
But we must remember that all premises are a matter of faith. Because all premises are derived as a conclusion…
3/ … a reasoning from first things…basic, foundational beliefs… and they ARE beliefs.
And this is where the confusion lies… An understanding of what beliefs are.
Beliefs are ideas we hold in our mind to be true. The truth value is unknown at the outset…
4/ … it is just accepted as such. Knowing is the same thing as believing with the exception that we have greater belief, greater acceptance due to confirmation upon examination, sometimes by logical cross reference to other knowledge and sometimes by external evidence.
5/ The bottom line is this: believing, knowing, and faith are the same things. The only issue is means of justification and level of confidence. Reason is nothing more than a means of justification. Validity and rationality are nothing more than synonyms for…
6/ …level of confidence.
We delude ourselves if we think that any line of thinking is anything more than an extension of reasoning from first principles…basic beliefs.
And those basic beliefs are pure assumption…pure PREsumption. I’m not saying that they are not valid..
7/ … but until they’ve been tested, they’re pure presumption. Thankfully, they prove themselves out… by producing “true” conclusions… they produce a body of thought that does internally coherent and corroborated by external reality.
The problem we have as…
8/ …theists vs. atheists is that we forget that we all reason from first principles. The divergence results from either a difference in first principles or later Divergence in the reasoning process.
9/ reiterating my first reponses… religion is “faith”, but so also is atheism…a set of beliefs arrived at by reasoning from first principles… and this is essentially the definition of religion.
You reject religion as irrational, but I imagine what you really mean is…10/ …false religion. Nobody wants to be a dupe, falling prey to a lie, especially if it demands a particular way of life or enduring hardship. But if a person were to find True Religion, he might be willing to endure these things.
And make no mistake … atheism IS a religion.11/ Atheism qualifies in that it is a set of beliefs… and it is just as irrational on some level as other religions.12/ by the way… atheists often crow about science, science, science. But they fail to realize that science is rooted in a biblical theistic understanding of reality. The basic assumptions of science come from the biblical framework… that external reality actually exists…
13/ …and that it is knowable, discoverable and comprehensible. These require an assumption, or belief, that external reality is persistent, consistent, and systematic… independent of human perception. That brings us to perception… perception of external reality…
14/ … at least physical reality is accomplished through the 5 physical senses. Science requires that we trust our senses to be working properly, that is, to provide accurate and reliable information about external reality so that our minds can construct an accurate and…
15/ …reliable perception of that external reality. Common experience confirms this for us when we reach out to pick up a cup of coffee and raise it to our lips.
It gets more complicated when we start dealing with issues beyond the reach of our physical senses…
16/ things on a “galactic” scale(too big and far away) or microscopic scale(too small for the naked eye). Our instrumentation, telescopes and microscopes, are modern marvels, but nothing more than enhancements to extend the reach of our senses.
17/ getting back to my “by the way”… the basic assumptions of science are “rooted” in biblical theism. Science “stems” from this root and has borne great “fruit”, as evidenced by have a great expansion in knowledge and the many Modern Marvels of engineering…
18/ …that come from it.
Atheism loves science because it is a stem that produces beautiful roses. But atheism is like a child who sees the rose, cuts the stem, and brings it home to put in a vase of water. Even a plump nascent Rosebud will blossom in this condition…
19/ … but eventually the Blossom will fade and the petals will fall. Without the root, the stem will dry up and die.
20/ The point is this… science is not rooted in atheism. Science is the adopted and accepted tool of the atheist because it “works”. Atheism presumes that it’s correct because the “flower” blooms within the confines of the atheists' water and vase.
Atheists “believe” in…
21/ …the actuality of external reality, its knowability, etc, etc. But they have no justification for it other than that it works!
Like the child who cuts the stem from the root and wonders why the flower eventually fades, the atheist lacks the self-awareness of own…
22/ …of it’s own limitations. Atheism forgets that it severed the shoot from the root… and mainly because it objects to the thorns that pricked it in the tangle of all those Wild Rose stems. That single stem Science still has its thorns, but isolated, the atheist…
23/ … can avoid them or nip them so they aren’t quite so sharp.
The proper care of roses involves trimming away the Deadwood… and recognizing that many of the Thorns encountered are really thistles that have grown up and become entangled in the stems of the Rose.
24/ for instance…Reason is faith in Your Capacity to think and applied to external reality is faith in the capacity of your senses to accurately perceive. But both the capacity of reason and the existence of external reality are Western Concepts rooted in biblical theism.
25/ Eastern thought is an entirely different animal.
Hindus would say that external reality is a figment of your imagination. Buddhists would say your thoughts are Just an Illusion.
Hindus deny EXTERNAL reality. Buddhists deny INTERNAL reality. They do so in an attempt…
26/ … to unify all of reality into one category. But in doing so, they end up acknowledging one category and denying the other.
This leads to all kinds of incoherency and contradiction within both systems, so they can’t possibly be “true”.
27/ In the West, as Dualists, we acknowledge both inner and external reality, but this is a matter of faith… an acceptance of first principles, basic beliefs.
(Btw…by inner vs. external, here, I mean non-material vs. material reality)
By dividing reality in this way,…
28/ …Western thought has the capacity to categorize phenomena in one or the other group, and then examine the phenomena and interactions between the categories, using reason to play them off one another. In doing so, we can resolve much of the incoherency and contradiction…
29/ … endemic to Eastern thinking. And in this sense, Western thinking is measurably “more true”, that is, it has greater explanatory value.
Eastern thinking requires one to hold logical contradictions as simultaneously and equally true. This is irrational to the…
30/ … Western mind. But to the Eastern mind it’s perfectly reasonable… it’s just an accepted fact of life, which in their minds makes it “rational”. And this goes back to one of your original statements … reason and rationality are not the same thing, because logic…
31/… and rationality are not the same thing. Logic is a process of inference that requires validity in its elements and validity is really a matter of acceptance.
Rationality has nothing to do with logic, per se, but directly relates to acceptance, i.e. validity.
32/ In other words, logical reasoning qualifies as rational, but it’s not the only form of, or tool of, rationality(acceptance).
For example, basic beliefs, or first principles are nothing more then accepted axioms. They’re accepted as axioms because we can’t dig any deeper…
33/ … and this is rational, “reasonable”, and we may think “logical” but not necessarily so. It IS logical in the sense that since we can’t dig any deeper, it’s the best we can do. It’s like Dirty Harry said, “a man’s got to know his limitations”…but this is a matter…
34/ …of acceptance, not logic.
It is not logical to presume that just because we reached the end of the road, as far as we can tell, that the road doesn’t continue on. It’s entirely possible that the road DOES continue on, but the bridge is washed out. From where we stand…
35/ … we can’t see it. And because we can’t see it, we can’t bridge the gap. We can try… But we have no way of knowing that our bridge-building efforts are up to the task or perhaps a bridge to nowhere. For all intents and purposes, we’ve reached the end of the road. But…
36/ … to presume there’s nothing else out there is not logical. It may be rational, “reasonable”, in the sense of practicality and acceptance, but it is not purely logical.
37/ We may find ourselves willing to make an attempt to build the bridge, gambling on the proposition that our resources will carry us successfully to the other side. Or we may stop where we are, conserving our resources and not taking the risk. Either decision is rational…
38/ in the sense of accepting or rejecting the risk. But neither option is logical because of the unknown element… You don’t know what you don’t know.
39/ So… acceptance of first principles is rational … but not necessarily logical.
… is quite evident.
You asked me to make a rational argument. I did. It may be wasted on you, but that’s okay.
I had to revisit many of those thoughts anyway, so thanks for the prompting. 😊😇
Merry Christmas.
Tl;dr?…😄😄😄 that’s why you remain confused.
…clearly lacking an understanding of the terms you throw around… conflation, redundancy and presumption run amok.
Your ignorance of… or perhaps more gently, biased understanding of… the historical record…