Ground Rules

Hi Phage0070, In other words, you recognize that agnostic is the logical conclusion, but that it is not subjectively satisfactory - people like answers, not indecision. One thing we can do, is adopt a "working hypothesis" that {X} does not exist, and operate on the basis that this is true until contrary evidence becomes available.Another thing that is involved is the relative importance of {X} in our world view. If it is unimportant to our view of things, then there is no practical purpose served in spending time on further investigation. All knowledge is inherently tentative. So in essence you are asking that if {A} is believed, it must be tentatively believed, and is this sufficient cause to believe in {A}?Is the possibility of error justification to not believe? It seems to me that we are back at the start, where agnostic is the logical conclusion, but that it is not subjectively satisfactory - people like answers, not indecision.Enjoy.

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Sorry Woodsy, but this is a fallacy: So because I like green, but have no reason to prefer green over pink, no evidence that green is superior to pink or any other color, I should still be compelled to like pink?No, what it means is that I can't criticize anyone for liking pink.Now, I'd agree that if I try to convince you that green is superior to pink, it means that then you can question why you should consider it over pink.You are free to acknowledge my preference for green, you are free to express your personal opinion on what color you like, but you cannot say that my preference for green is foolish because I don't like pink equally.Enjoy.

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Hi Phage0070I keep meaning to come back to this, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to get back to the topic: It took me a while to parse this out, hence the delay in response: {A} is tentatively believed, according to your ground rules, and {A} contradicts {B}, can one that believes {A} then consider {B} a valid viewpoint?I'd have to say yes - the tentativity would demand an open mind to contradictory possibilities. This too is logical, as there are no self-evident truths, no a priori knowledge, thus at some point we are dependent on agreed assumptions. We agree that what we live in is called reality, and yet it all could be illusion. I'm fairly sure that I like green and that 2+2=4 in an integer number system with a base ≥ 4, and would be rather surprised to wake up one morning to find I like pink and 2+2=3. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I though gnostic was still a religious\spiritual belief system:

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noun
4. (initial capital letter) a member of any of certain sects among the early Christians who claimed to have superior knowledge of spiritual matters, and explained the world as created by powers or agencies arising as emanations from the Godhead.

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Who were persecuted by other christians and had their texts burned by those christians.Hence agnostic is a-gnostic is not-gnostic. Except saying that there is not enough information to make a decision (with certainty), is the same as saying there is not enough information to make a decision (with certainty) that there is not enough information to make a decision (with certainty). I don't see how you get there. We can certainly make decisions, based on the information we have, with the caveat of your ground rules that we must recognize that there is tentativity in any conclusion reached.If you say you are an atheist, having reached the decision that there is no logical or evidential cause to believe in the possibility of god/s, then according to your ground rules you must be agnostic, as the necessary tentativity demands that you consider that the contrary point of view can be valid.Likewise, if I say I am a deist, having reached the conclusion that there is no logical or evidential cause to not believe in the possibility of god/s, then according to your ground rules I must be agnostic, as the necessary tentativity demands that I consider that the contrary point of view can be valid. And I am back where we started.Perhaps a better word would be skeptical, rather than agnostic, as agnostic is still referential to religious thought, and we are talking about the approach to any topic, such as gravity etc, and skeptical would cover the same necessary tentativity of any conclusion reached, no matter how solid the evidence and experience.Thus we end up with a skeptical open-minded approach to any topic. We can make decisions based on how we think things work, but we cannot eliminate the possibility that we could be wrong.Enjoy.

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Rebel American Zen Deist
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Hi Rahvin, And we will keep going at it until you guys realize it. Exactly: you knew what the fallacy was. Thus a person who believes in {A} does not need to believe in all of {B}. Which is irrelevant and does not keep the other from being a logical fallacy. Faith is illogical, by definition, ergo pointing out that it is illogical is just stating the definition.Too bad you equivocated there, plus tried begging the question by referring only to "arbitrary unsupported belief" when in fact belief is not arbitrary, nor is belief entirely unsupported - it just doesn't have sufficient support to meet your personal criteria. Let's look at some examples from just this thread (apologies to InGodITrust if this liberty is unwarranted): Message 21

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Phage, I hold steadfast to my faith. I have had doubts from time to time, but keep returning to the belief that God exists. My faith did not come from weighing the Bible against other religions and science, and then selecting the Bible as the rational choice. My faith came through prayer.

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and Message 26

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Phage, when I was 17, I was at the Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif., when a Jesus freak came and started preaching to me. He was annoying, but for some reason I didn't want to be rude and tell him to get lost. He rambled on and on about Christ, and finally he said he was going to pray that I would feel God's love. I was thinking, good, he'll leave after this. I don't remember the words, but he prayed for about 1 minute that God would show me His love. And then I was overcome with an indescribable feeling of love. This rapture blindsided me, and lasted a few minutes, and it was a defining event in my life.

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I have read the Bible, and do not understand much of it. There are many interpretations and many denominations. But there are number of points that most denominations have in common. And the prayer that showed me the light also makes me accept the Bible.

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This faith is not arbitrary, it is not unsupported, and you can tap any person who believes and get similar responses. It is belief.Enjoy.

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Hi again Woodsy. So it's okay for you to state what you believe, and to rail against all religious people with a broad brush, but hypocrisy for me to just state what I believe?And here I thought that the "ground rules" in this thread did not allow for absolute decrees ...Enjoy.

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Hi Rahvin, No, I don't see that: possible does not mean equally probable. Not necessarily, as certainly the viewpoints that are, or seem to be, contradicted by evidence need not be considered as possible until it is shown that the contradiction doesn't exist.We do not need to consider that the earth is flat, we do not need to consider that the sun orbits the earth, we do not need to consider invalidated ideas. This still leaves us with all the concepts that are not invalidated by evidence as possibilities.Certainly if one were being logically consistent, then one would have to keep an open mind to all such possibilities, however people are not logically consistent, and they like having answers. Thus decisions are made based on one's world view on what is probable rather than just possible, and we use this to narrow our view of what is likely to be true.Think of it as a spectrum:

-10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 00 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7 +8 +9 +10
___|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|___

Where -10 denotes an attitude of complete refusal to consider any concept and +10 denotes complete acceptance of any and all concepts. Obviously neither extreme leads to valid investigation of reality, so what is needed is some mixture of open-mindedness and skepticism.Different people will be at different points along the scale, and people will be at different points on the scale for different concepts, based on their personal world views.It is impractical to investigate all concepts equally, so it becomes a decision based on one's personal evaluation of probability which concepts are investigated fully, which are left untouched, and which are toyed with from time to time.In a similar manner we can (and do) limit our scientific investigations of reality to those aspects we consider most likely to produce results. Thus we arbitrarily decide to ignore the possibility of some concepts, not because they are not potentially valid, but because we don't think investigating them will produce useful results. If new evidence shows this assumption to be in error, then we can start looking more closely for results. If there is no evidence contradicting it, then it must be -- according to the ground rules of the thread -- considered a possibility, however, this does not mean that we need to consider it a likely probability. The simple fact that you even mention this, shows that it can in fact be considered (even momentarily) a possibility, the fact that your tone is somewhat mocking\incredulous\dismissive means that you do not consider it a probable explanation. Again, evidence that invalidates a concept means we do not need to consider it a possibility at this time. I see nothing in the ground rules that requires falsehoods to be considered. I see this as being counter-productive, waiting for a concept to be supported. Let us take an example of a Sudoku game: there is one real solution, there is some evidence (existing numbers) to show\imply what that solution is, and there are blank squares where the specific solution is not known. By assuming that each possibility is invalid, we can't even make a start. Why enter a number until there is more evidence that the number could be correct?By taking each possibility as a valid option we can test the possibility and see if it leads to the solution. With a computer and the appropriate program we can, by brute force, evaluate all the possible numbers in each blank square and eventually arrive at the solution when all the non-solutions have been invalidated.And we can also look at the different probabilities - squares that have limited possibilities due to the other evidence, and by starting with those, we can generally arrive at the solution much faster than a brute force method.In both of these cases we consider the possible validity of a specific number in a specific square until it is invalidated. Parts of creationism, the parts that are invalidated by evidence (geocentric, flood, young earth, etc).We consider the possibility of theories and test them for invalidation, just like the sudoku numbers, when one number is invalidated we try a different theory. You are certainly free to express your opinion. There are two problems with this statement, (1) there is no dichotomy involved, as both could be false, both (taking creationism broadly to involve any supernatural creation) could be true and (b) parts of some aspects of some creationism (YECreationism) have been invalidated.But yes, according to the ground rules you need to (a) acknowledge the tentativity (possible falsehood) of evolution and (2) the tentative (possible truth) of a creation. After all, if we consider this on a scientific basis, then invalidated concepts are either discarded or modified to fit with new evidence. Creationism as a whole cannot be ruled out just because the earth is old, all we can rule out is the concept that the earth is young. Actually, yes. The only thing dreadful to me about it is the color, but that's a personal opinion. No I don't dread fictional concepts, yes at some level one should consider the possibility that somewhere somewhen they could be real. Probable no, possible yes. Not something I need to consider as a practical possibility until I see more evidence. Consider that there currently is a glove orbiting the earth, there are people orbiting the earth, there will be a space station full of people orbiting the earth. At some point in time there is a distinct possibility of a teapot orbiting the earth, if for no other purpose than a practical joke, but there none-the-less. And curiously, this still is not evidence of the absence of god/s, or are you now claiming that absence of evidence is evidence of absence ...? That is the basic assumption, yes. Another way to put it is that what we experience is all a god-dream and we won't know until the dreamer awakes (if then). For practical purposes our reality is the god-dream and that is all we can sense. It is, for practical purposes, indistinguishable from your physical world reality. Again, not all of creationism is contradictory to evolution or even all of science, even though certain aspects of certain creationisms are, mostly those that are already invalidated by other evidence. Interestingly I have high confidence that a power outage will not shut my computer down, as I have battery backup. Intriguingly, what you are more skeptical of (hold to be more tentative) will differ from what other people are more skeptical of, there is no absolute scale to measure unknown possibilities, just a lot of personal opinions. The degree of tentativity of a concept would likely be harder to define than life.Enjoy.

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Hi Rahvin, I'll have to be brief and hit the highlights, due to the pending shutdown\transfer. If I miss anything important we can come back to it. I'd say it must be a sliding scale - valid does not have the absoluteness of true. We consider unfalsified theories to be valid - tentatively true until demonstrated otherwise, and as you say, the more they are supported by new evidence the more we can have confidence in the continued validity.I'd say "valid" means a logical concept "not demonstrated to be false"Valid Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com

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4 Logic
a. Containing premises from which the conclusion may logically be derived: a valid argument.
b. Correctly inferred or deduced from a premise: a valid conclusion.
American Heritage Dictionary

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Note that it does not necessarily rely on evidence the way theory does, so the validity of a theory is a subset of valid concepts. I often have that reaction when the argument is supported by evidence, when I consider the argument to be weak. Yes, that thought occurred to me while writing that. The difference is that we have evidence that invalidates the concept that the earth is flat, etc. It would take a massive restructuring of what we know as reality to make a flat earth a valid concept - you would have to throw out all physics and astronomy.We could likely group concepts into three broad groups, with the caveat that there are likely definitional problems at the junctions (like the definition of life):

1. invalidated concepts, concepts that are contradicted by objective, verified, evidence that is apparently of reality, based on our current knowledge of reality,
2. vindicated concepts, concepts that are vindicated by new evidence that conforms to the concepts predictions (ie tested theories, the understanding that the chair in my room is a part of physical reality), and
3. all the concepts in between.

I'd say that "valid" includes concepts in (b) and (c) categories. No, the "ground rules" as I interpret them (it's not my thread), would apply to any concept with no contrary evidence, such as evolution and the existence of sasquatch\etc. Science is by definition tentative and this tentativity is specifically included in the ground rules as statements where it is understood that tentativity is part of the concept. Likewise any concept based on weak or inconclusive, possibly anecdotal, evidence would also by definition be tentative. The only place where I think we can draw the line on tentativity, is where there is objective, verified evidence that shows the concept as stated is contradicted. It's a matter of frames of reference, and curiously there is a challenge to show that the earth is not the center of the universe, however whatever mathematical gymnastics that are employed to describe the universe with the earth at the center, will necessarily default to the same results as are found by the simpler formulations that don't make this arbitrary point of reference. This in essence comes to the same issue as the reality vs illusion\dream discussed earlier, where the net result is that it is for all intents and practical purposes the same thing - it is what we live with. This is basically how you arrive at your opinions, and different people stop at different places on that journey. Curiously, I don't think the existence of a deity would be significant to me, mostly because I don't see that there is any difference with or without, when the god/s are outside.skipping down ... We start with subjective experiences, and this has importance to the observer, while those who have not had the experience cannot have the same perspective - hasn't this been hashed out on the other threads?and again ... First we would need to trim {B} down to eliminate the parts that are invalidated, and then consider the remainder - as this is what we would do for any scientific concept\theory - and then consider the remainder. Part of the problem with this example is that "creationism" is not a single concept, but a compilation of many concepts, with a number of different varieties and types. To be honest, I don't know. Logic tells me that there are many ways god/s could not possibly be consistently evidenced in our universe in a way that could be confirmed, and thus are immune to our understanding on an objective level. My personal faith tells me there is "something" spiritual, but I don't really conceive it as god/s per se, as that is too anthropomorphic (and egocentric) a concept.... all for now (with 20 minutes to go ...)Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : tpyo

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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Rebel American Zen Deist
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