mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Well, I act as if the universe is natural, but I don't know with evidence or truth.
Well, I act as if the universe is from God, but I don't know with evidence or truth.
What are your thoughts about those?
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Claims vs. Beliefs
- Thread starter Trailblazer
- Start date
Well, I act as if the universe is natural, but I don't know with evidence or truth.
Well, I act as if the universe is from God, but I don't know with evidence or truth.
What are your thoughts about those?
I'm not so certain. The claim that I believe Bigfoot exists is not the same as Bigfoot exists. The former is about the persons thoughts on Bigfoot and the latter is just about Bigfoot. You can argue the latter based on evidence, but the former has little evidence outside of what the person has claimed. I suppose if the person of the former lives in a house full of Bigfoot memorabilia and presides over meetings of the I Believe in Bigfoot organization, that would be evidence supporting that they believe.
Thinking in terms of how some religious people seem to think they can know their own members and that claiming to be a member is not good enough to be included as a member. In Christianity, for example, how would one Christian know that another claiming to be Christian isn't? All they have is the claim of the other that the person believes in Christianity. Maybe the second person is being honest, but not as good at it as the first person. If you see what I am saying here.
Claiming to hold a belief is not the same as the validity of the belief being held. It is a claim, but also a statement that may be a fact and one with limited knowledge to challenge. Kent Hovind claims to be Christian. He may very well be. Not a good one in my view. Or he may not be at all and just saying so to keep his income. I have no real way to know with much certainty. I would leave that question and focus on other reasons to challenge and dismiss Kent.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
No, that's agnosticism. If you don't know you aren't an atheist.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
No, that completely dishonest. They are not facts, the so called facts are themselves theories.Theories are explanations of sets of facts and are supported by evidence, in the form of facts.
Without facts, there is nothing to explain and nothing to go by.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
Actually a large portion don't stay with their parents belief system.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
And I can predict the understanding of truth, evidence, real and all those words based on at what time and where the person grew up. You are not different that the majority of people as you are also a product of culture. So am I BTW.
If all Theists did was believe what (so called) messengers of God tell them, I doubt atheists would be insisting they provide the burden of proof. In my experience with Theists, they not only say they believe, but they also try to insist I need to believe also! When they do that, they need to give a reasonable explanation of why I should believe these people, and that usually involves providing evidence that what these messengers say is true.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Yeah, but that is not limited to theists. It is also the case of philosophical naturalism/physicalism/materialism and other claims about the truth of objective reality.
Nimos
Well-Known Member
But in that case, me saying "I believe in God" is not a claim either. Also I could say "I like God" would not be a claim either, despite in that statement one could argue that I acknowledge the reality of God. Because its not really possible to like something which doesn't exist, even if it is just a concept, like me saying that "I like Harry potter" even though he as a physical person doesn't exist, I still acknowledge the concept or idea of him existing. So I would say that it is a claim, and I agree with you, that it is also a personal preference.
But that preference comes from my experience or exposure to God or Harry Potter, because I could just as well, say that I don't like them. But this belief could be based on me misunderstanding things about them which made me draw the wrong conclusion. So the idea is the same as I see it, because you could equally ask me why I don't like Harry Potter, and I tell you some reasons and from your perspective I got it wrong and present the real meaning or whatever, which would make the foundation of my belief wrong, or said in another way, the claim I have based my argument on is wrong.
I don't think personal preferences just come out of the blue, it is equally based on experience or an exposure to something. Unless we talk about something that we are born with obviously.
I disagree, because its sort of like ignoring the word used.
Not really sure if this explains it, but its like me saying.
"I like red cars" and then you say, "Well you like cars"
No, I said I like red cars, not specifically all cars. So by ignoring the word "Red" you changed the meaning of what I said, if that make sense.
Equally,
A: "Life exists elsewhere in the universe" (<- This is a truth claim. The person claim to know that life does exist out there.)
B: "what evidence supports that?" (<- Therefore asking for evidence to support that claim is rational, because why should you believe such claim to be true.)
A: "I believe life exists elsewhere in the universe" (<- Believe is simply to be convince of, or find something the most plausible explanation.)
B: "why?" (<- Its perfectly fine to ask why, but what you are interested in is the arguments that led to the set belief. And these as above, might be irrational.)
As I mentioned to @Trailblazer or someone else earlier as well, can't remember. There is a difference between a logical claim and a non logical one. A logical claim is either true or false. Either there is life out there or there isn't. Both can't be true at the same time.
But me saying that "Strawberry tastes better than chocolate" is still a claim, but not a logical claim, because it can't be answered with true or false. And a belief in something is not automatically a logical claim in itself. It might derive from one and I might even have misunderstood the logical claim which made me reach a irrational belief and the same goes with a none logical claim. Just to take it to the extreme, I might have gotten a strawberry wrong and thought about an apple, and when you show me a strawberry, I say that is not what I meant, clearly my original claim is wrong, due to that misunderstanding. But it doesn't change the fact, that even if that is the case, there is no way that we could conclude that "Apples/Strawberries taste better than chocolate". It is merely my believe that it is the case.
But you can easily demonstrate whether or not Life exist elsewhere in the Universe, if someone were to make that claim and wanted to be taken serious, because they could simply show it.
So the word "Believe" does matter in regards to what meaning the sentences have, just as "Red" did in the above example with the cars.
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Describing objective reality has the advantage of being based on facts, so the truth is vastly more accurate and reliable.
Really? My justification for empiricism is that it works. Ideas gleaned from generalizing on experience that allow accurate predictions of future outcomes are considered correct whatever is true about the reality underlying those experiences. I could know for a fact that none of those things listed are correct and continue to successfully rely on the inductions generated from experience.
The issue would be on how you got from that evidence to your conclusion that a divine designer was necessary. You didn't rule out naturalistic explanations accounting for that evidence. You just simply dropped them from you list of candidate explanations for that evidence. The Kalam cosmological argument is a classic example of that. Somebody argues that if the universe had a beginning and all beginnings are caused, there must be a god to account for that universe. Craig goes on to add multiple attributes to that god on the basis of nothing more than that there is a universe which appears to have had a beginning. What happened to naturalistic explanations such as a multiverse? The same as what happened in your case: the possibility was ignored without being ruled out. That's a logical error that makes the argument it occurs in invalid and the conclusions arrived at unsound.
But you've never explained why you don't consider expressed beliefs claims. Others do. You simply insist that they are not, that you are not claiming anything when you express a belief, and assume that others should know why. But what do you give them other than repeating your claim that your expressed beliefs are not claims, and providing definitions that don't support that.
I think it's the other way around. You deny that your expressed beliefs are claims so that you don't need to defend them. You never need to defend any of your beliefs, especially if you don't care if others share those beliefs. Why else are you so averse to calling your expressed beliefs claims? It's common usage. And why else can you give no reason for holding that opinion? Because it's not based in anything other than that you want it to be true because you think you need it to be true in order to express beliefs in a public forum without having to defend them.
Why not? I suspect that most others consider it incoherent to say that one believes something but is not claiming that he thinks it's true. Or why adding that one is not certain or may be wrong makes it any less a claim of belief. All of my claims are beliefs that I know may be wrong.
You still don't explain why you claim that stated beliefs like that one are not claims. I've already inserted an implied "I believe" before every sentence, and nothing changed in my understanding of those words.
And here it is again. More words that don't address why you don't consider expressed beliefs claims. I don't think you have a reason other than that you think you have to defend claims but not expressed beliefs. You don't. You can consider them the same like everybody else and still not defend your expressed beliefs.
One wonders, however, why you want to express them if you don't care if others believe them as well.
Why would they consider your expressed opinions not claims? And why would you object if they do?
So what makes the expressed beliefs of these people claims rather than just beliefs according to your understanding of the difference that makes only some expressed beliefs claims?
But to address this particular comment, the evidence for all people claiming to channel deities is the of the same type and quality - words and deeds that are not transhuman, words that you or I could have written or spoken, and deeds that you or I could have performed. It seems arbitrary that you point to some of these people and say that their contribution is evidence of a deity but not the others. I don't see a qualitative difference.
Lot's going on in what you say here, and much of it exposes the language tricks theists will use when making claims. A person can say they like Harry Potter and that could mean they like the character in the stories or even how Radcliffe portrayed the character. Without clarification the statement is vague. As far as liking God, well, this word covers thousands of versions of God, none of which can be said to correspond to any real and actual being. The exception would be Gaia which sees earth as God, so in that sense God exists. Of course we see theists do language tricks that would exploit the differences here, and by saying Gaia is a God and God exists, therefore since God exists Jesus is the savior of man.
Of course this is a statement that is an inherent claim in Christianity. A person can be taking a poll asking if they accept Jesus as savior or not, and answering yes isn't assuming the claim, but only expressing the position that the larger claim within Christianity argues.
But as you hone in on the precision of language saying that you like cars is a general statement that makes no specific qualifier. He didn't say ALL cars, you interpreted that part and then dispute what you added. This is the dilemma of our habits of imposing meanings onto what other say.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Yeah, that is your belief system. I have another and no, I am not religious.
True, but if we see religion as progressive not final, then a few hundred years after Jesus Muhammad appeared and revealed the Quran in 23 years during His own lifetime. And there is more written in the Quran about Jesus than the Gospels.
For those who accept that God sends other Prophets, we see in the Quran authoritative facts about Jesus and also some corrections about things like Christ’s Divinity, that He was a Prophet not a physical son of God and that the trinity is a misconception.
As humanity has evolved, scriptures have been better recorded so the Quran we know is authentic, then came Baha’u’llah Who wrote with His own Pen and signed and sealed His Tablets.
So latter Prophets, if They be sent by God, would have accurate knowledge of past Words of Jesus etc. So from Muhammad and Baha’u’llah, we can verify the accuracy of ancient scriptures.
Nimos
Well-Known Member
I see what you mean, but I don't think I would personally call it a trick as if they are somehow trying to manipulate things. To me, its more a matter of lack of clarification and laziness. Not aimed at the religious person, but in regards to both parties in the discussion.
When I chat with someone and they say they are a Christian, I assume certain things about their position, even though I shouldn't, equally they might assume certain things about me as an atheist. But getting a full clarification of the other person's exact position can take a very long time
So I have no issue with people assuming certain things about each other for that reason, and if something is clearly misunderstood, then simply clarify that specific thing.Obviously others might see it differently, but I don't have a problem with it, and again I don't consider them or myself as trying to trick anyone. There are so many different views and beliefs, so some generalizations are perfectly fine by me.
It was just an example of what happens when we start to add or ignore words in sentences.
Because "believe" is a specific word in that case I would say, or a descriptive word which simply can't be ignored.
If I believe something to be true, it is not the same as me saying that I know something. Both are important for what exactly I mean, if I claim to know something, I don't have to also state that I believe it, because believe is sort of automatically implied in the word of knowing something. It would be extremely weird or irrational for me to say that I know that my car is red, but I don't believe it.
Whereas I can say that I believe my car is red, but I can't really remember if that is actually the case, or whatever.
A: "Life exists elsewhere in the universe"
This is a claim of knowing something. So as above it include to believe it as well.
A: "I believe life exists elsewhere in the universe"
This is not a claim of knowing, but merely of being convinced of something, whether there is a good reason for it or not.
But there is no reason to believe something, if you know it. If that makes sense. because its automatically or least should automatically include it.
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A Vestigial Mote
Well-Known Member
But unfortunately, as I have already pointed out to @Trailblazer, she does NOT always use the qualifying terminology "I believe..." Her statements are very regularly more along the lines of "UFOs are real." As in - she formats her wording in that sort of way about God or messengers extremely often. I have even posted a specific example, where she claimed that God is not on the hook for anything He decides not to do, even if the resulting inaction is detrimental to anyone/everyone (the "detriment" part is gleaned from the context of the conversation this was lifted from):For instance, as @Trailblazer in her example, I could similarly make the statement. "I believe UFOs are real" that is not a claim, that is merely a belief. Even in your example I don't think I would call it a claim or at least a logical claim
Here it is again, in case you are interested:
Now... even in the event that her CLAIM that "[this] is logic 101 stuff" is correct, the statement that "An Almighty God, the creator of the universe, needs no excuses for what He chooses not to do." is STILL A CLAIM MADE. This was stated definitively, and in the form of "UFOs are real." NOT in the form "I believe UFOs are real."
And again, the presence of the "That is logic 101 stuff" qualifier, even further demonstrates that not only does she believe this, but she literally expects the reader to believe it as well.
Nimos
Well-Known Member
I agree, there are situations where claims and believes get mixed up a bit
"An Almighty God, the creator of the universe, needs no excuses for what He chooses not to do."
This is a claim about knowing something about God, no doubt about that. And Trailblazer and me have had long discussions about it before, and what evidence are, proofs etc. but I think most of it could be solved by spending the needed time to flesh out clarifications and definitions first
But she is still my Bahai expert
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
The multiverse doesn't explain anything. It just kicks the can up the road. You still don't have a naturalistic explanation for the universe.
stvdv
Veteran Member
Your lucky day, I found it...Good old Google. Even using the exact same (translated) words.Unfortunately, I don't think we have anything like that in English.
I could be wrong though.
D) Kijk niet een gegeven paard in de mond
E) Do not look a gift horse in the mouth