What Does Critical Thinking Mean To You?

Your join date is displayed under your avatar. You've been a member at EvC since December 29, 2003 - a few days more than since 2004. Critical thinking is deliberate; it's honest; it's a search for the truth and not for confirmation.It's our best effort at honesty with ourselves.What does it mean to you? Absolutely!

You say that Critical Thinking may not lead to a conclusion and that Faith is the anchor when the answer's unclear. This says that you believe Faith is something we can arrive at having done a certain amount of Critical Thinking and come up empty-handed.I do not believe that any amount of Critical Thinking carried out successfully or unsuccessfully could bring me to my Faith in GOD. This doesn't mean that I cannot apply Critical Thinking to my Faith, but rather that Critical Thinking is not the engine driving me toward the Faith in any way.On one of your points I do agree with you: Critical Thinking is about philosophy, questioningthings of the mind; Faith is about the soul.

What would those things change your mind about? The stories have a context. There may still be quite a bit of wiggle room even within that context, but it is certainly not the case that they can simply mean 'whatever'. Of the many reasons I have for believing, I can't say that fear of anything is one of them. How is someone supposed to answer that question? The conditions that led me to be a believer were thrown at me without warning and I had no idea that they would lead me down a path to belief. There probably is something that would change my mind, but until I experience that, I really have no idea what that could be; just like I had no idea what kind of an experience would make me believe until I had those experiences.Belief isn't science. We can't say that XYZ will falsify the theory and ABC support it.

In a loose sense, yes.I should have been more clear. I wasn't talking about belief in general as the acceptance of any claim whatsoever, but belief as faith in things that cannot be measured or unmeasured.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

Well, this isn't the Calvinism thread. I don't know what to tell you about that and I don't know what to tell you about other people's beliefs. Depends. Sometimes people just believe what they're told to believe. Sometimes they believe things completely against their best interests. Yes. But from talking to Phat I understand his need to believe developed well after the belief was already there. He didn't start believing out of some desperate need to do so, but once he was a believer then such naturally became an integral part of his identity that he understandable feels is necessary to him being who he sees himself as being. Sure; and we can realize most of that because Mormonism makes plenty of claims about the real world that can be falsified.The same cannot be said about beliefs in entities that are completely outside the realm of the physical, material world and whose interaction with our physical, material world is believed to take place but is admitted to be undetectable and thus not worthy of any scientific consideration even by the people holding those beliefs. Who said I can't? My beliefs are admittedly silly. They make no sense to anyone else and only very little sense to me. They are likely all wrong because, let's be honest, given all the possible answers to questions about God and religion, what are the chances that I stumbled on the right one(s)?But that doesn't mean I should stop believing what I believe.

I guess my head's just a little more resilient than yours.

Nothing.But what is wrong with believing anyway and admitting that your belief is irrational and likely wrong?

You've obviously never tried crossing the Minnesota-South Dakota border.

How can one show they are prepared to accept contrary evidence more than to think their belief is likely wrong to begin with?

There are two things to address with this. Frist, I think RAZD is talking about a hypothetical situation in which the only information is a piece of paper with some squiggles.All the things you mention are evidence that weigh on our assessment of the probability of the bridge being there. If we start to include our past experiences using maps or our history of traveling such roads, then we are no longer working from a point where the information points as much to the presence of a bridge as it does to the absence of the bridge.Ultimately, though, we do not know for sure whether the bridge is there or not until we cross it, but we can have an opinion on the matter that leans one way or the other based on other evidence.Which brings up the second point: our discussion regards knowing things to a degree of scientific (or similar) certainty, and this is a criterion which very few people require their knowledge to meet before acting. We can say that people act with incomplete information and in the face of great uncertainties, and that doing so more often than not works out. But the fact remains that these uncertainties do existhowever little they matter to average folk, and are only fully assuaged upon either discovering the bridge or discovering the unbridged chasm.JonEdited by Jon, : No reason given.

You talked about assigning probabilities to opinions, and the probability we assign to the bridge being present or absent is based on our past experience (= evidence). Those experiences include how often we've traveled the road in question, how many times we've been able to verify the information on a map, whether we think a heavy rain might have flooded out the bridge, whether the gods wish us safe travel, and so on.When people make probability estimates, they don't do it randomly. Instead, they bring other knowledge into the process, even when that knowledge is of questionable relevance or quality. That other knowledge is the evidence your reply assumed but did not credit.Nevertheless, it is there. No. I think what I meant was clear to anyone reading my post with honesty and integrity.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

Yeah; Big Stone is one of the few reliable crossing points.

Are those really the only options?

Tell me about it!