What does it tell you when someone says "I don't believe in evolution"?

boing
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I don’t care to go back and quote lines from your many posts in this thread. I felt it was fairly clear that myself and others argued with you not about people who blindly accepted anything they read in a science textbook because they were told to, but about those who tend to accept conclusions that come from reliable sources because they have confidence in the outcome of the scientific method. If this was a source of misunderstanding then let’s be perfectly clear, and let’s do away with the “semantic” argument as well by talking about “belief without proof.”

(1) People who blindly accept their religion because they have been raised to do so.
(2) People who accept their religion because they have had personal experiences that lead them to believe there is a God/Have a personal relationship with Jesus
(3) People who blindly accept the conclusions of science because they have been raised to do so
(4) People who accept the conclusions of science because they have experience that makes the believe that the scientific method is a good way to find out things
(5) People who accept those conclusions of science that they are able to verify/understand themselves and have a notion of “provisional” acceptance for the rest

If you agree that (1) and (3) are examples of “belief without proof” and (4) and (5) are not, then I can chalk the entire disagreement up to a misunderstanding (even if some of the underlying metaphysical disagreements are not based on misunderstanding). We could still disagree greatly on (2) but that’s not really been discussed.

I don’t think you understand the level on which I disagree with you on this point. I reject “I think therefore I am” as a valid argument. Consciousness itself may be an illusion and we may not be having the experiences we believe ourselves to be having. I don’t mean that I could be mistaken about seeing a ghost, I mean that I could be mistaken about having the experience of seeing a ghost. As I said above, I don’t think think this is a point worth belabouring in this discussion.

Edit: Gah! I got mixed up about what A and B we were talking about so the following does not make sense: The only context I have argued that A and B are similar in is that they are similar in our ability to derive proof from them and thus similar in their relevance to whether or not something is “belief without proof.” Replace the actual A and B that you were referring to in that quote with first- and second-hand knowledge.

If you feel I have been misunderstand your points then it is good that you are clarifying them, but that doesn’t make my argument a straw man. I am responding to what it really appears to me that you said.

In this case, even with the clarification I think what I said goes to the heart of the point and that word “everyone” isn’t really central to what I’m saying. The reality is that the consensus in science is changed by a discussion in journals, not in a laboratory, so your contention that first hand experience changes consensus and second hand experience does not is false. All first hand experience of experiments to verify something could vanish entirely in a series of freak accidents and the consensus would be entirely unharmed. That such first hand experience has to have happened at some time is not much of a point because the second hand experience also much have happened at some time, otherwise there would be no consensus.

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Yes, I was talking about cases (1) and (3) the whole time.

This is getting off-topic but it is an interesting argument. I agree that “I think therefore I am” is a really problematic argument. However, when you say “consciousness itself may be an illusion” I’m not sure what you mean, or even what you could mean. The only understanding I have of the concept of “illusion” is mediated through my conscious experience. In general, the only access I have to anything in the universe is through my subjective experience. Thus, if I concede that my subjective experience is merely an illusion then I simultaneously admit my basis for knowing anything at all about anything whatsoever is predicated on an illusion. If I cannot trust that I experience things (whether or not I believe that those experiences are “true” in any sense) then I certainly cannot trust the inferences made from that experience such as there is such a thing as the universe. If I discount my experience of illusions as merely an illusion then I no longer have a concept of illusion to apply to my conscious subjective experiences.

In other words, I think the position that consciousness is an illusion is self-defeating. If consciousness is an illusion then we have no basis for believing anything at all. It’s no so different from Boltzmann brains or Last Thursdayism.

Sorry, no. In this case you were literally putting words in my mouth. I explicitly claimed that some people have to perform the experiments, not that all people do. You argued against the latter instead of the former. You argued against an argument similar to mine but weaker. That is the definition of a straw man argument.

But the experiments must be performed in a laboratory before the results are discussed in journals so my contention is actually true. (I said first-hand must be prior, not that second-hand experience has no effect. This is another example of you claiming I made an argument I did not. I’ll refrain from using the dreaded “s-word” this time.)

Again, it is a valid point because the first-hand experience must come before the second-hand experience. The second-hand experience depends on the first-hand experience. Otherwise there would be nothing to report second-hand.

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My point was that it is the discussion of results that creates a consensus, not the production of results. Without the discussion of results it would be necessary for everyone to conduct the experiment to create a consensus. Allowing the discussion of results to form the consensus is precisely what allows only some of the people to do the experiment. I was relying on the fact that you said that only some people conduct experiments and contrasting it to the idea of everyone conducting them to make a point.

Let’s take a look at what my “straw man” was actually responding to:

[quote=“wysinwyg, post:118, topic:18722”]
Second-hand reports cannot be used to discredit the current consensus because second-hand reports are justified by that very consensus. Only first-hand reports can be used to challenge the current consensus.
[/quote] (emphasis mine)

If I misunderstood because “first-hand reports” means reports from people who conducted experiments (that is, accounts rather than direct knowledge) then we completely agree that accounts of experiments change the consensus. I took your point to be that only by doing experiments can be change the consensus, not by discussing or reporting on experiments. I disagreed with that because in reality both are necessary.

I must have been born before I murder someone but they don’t put me on trial for being born. Coming first, even necessarily coming first, doesn’t mean it is more important. In science, conducting experiments and sharing results of experiments are both important and no meaningful progress would ever be achieved without both.

I’m okay with that.

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OK. What I meant was that, using your analogy, you must be born before you’re even accused of murder let alone convicted of murder. I never intended to say that you wouldn’t also have to plausibly have committed murder to be convicted of murder.

I think you must admit that plausibly having committed a murder before being born would be quite a trick.

What does it mean to be “okay with that”? Isn’t being “okay with that” just a subjective conscious experience? If it is, and if subjective conscious experience may just be an illusion, on what grounds do you conclude that you are, in fact, “okay with that”?

If your subjective conscious experience is just an illusion then the act of reading words from a computer screen must be an illusion. If that is the case, then what is it exactly that you are “okay with”?

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Epistemological arguments in a web forum! And it seems like you guys are actually trying to understand each other instead of just beating each other up. Awesome!

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Apparently. The point of the comments is not to convince you they are true, but that they’re pertinent to our argument. But you’re dismissing them simply because you don’t contest them from a factual standpoint. That’s nice, but also missing the point. If you agree the two faiths are not equivalent, then no comparison between then will be equivalent either due to the distinctions. This includes “blind faith” comparisons - the differences are still extant regardless that the faith is blind or otherwise.

Not in an equivalent way as religious blind faith, though. In no circumstance is any faith, blind or otherwise, with something that both has been verified by scores of others, the proof documented, and available for scrutiny, the same kind of “blind” as religious blind faith which contains none of these elements. Again, to point to the money-in-the-bank comparison, a certain kind of blind faith is required to believe that a bank actually has your money at any given time. Most individuals do not understand the complex mechanics of how banks work, about how they could potentially lose their money, how the money could still be stolen or unprotected or lost during an economic catastrophe, etc. But having blind faith in a bank whose exact workings you don’t understand is a very different kind of blind faith then believing someone who simply says they have your money waiting for you under a bed in their house, but they can’t give it to you until they think you’re ready. The bank version has verification abilities the house version does not. The fact that neither is fully understood by the layman, offers similarities but never sameness.

Incorrect. This denies what “scientific results” are, which are long-term peer evaluated and constantly challenged knowledge. The peer/group element does change the fundamental make-up of the belief. Nothing can be “just as” blind when there is documented evidence, multiple sources of agreement based on documented experiments, and the free ability to continually verify and challenge.

Perhaps the point of distinction can be phrased in your own terminology to make it stick for you: someone may not understand the mechanics of an individual science, but we all understand the mechanics of science itself, the scientific method. Perhaps not perfectly, but everyone who believes in science, if pushed, could stumble through the laundry list of necessary elements that make scientific method the scientific method and nothing less objective. Because we understand THIS, and no one has yet come up with a more demonstrably objective approach to knowledge gathering, we therefore decide to believe “in science”, which is just a shorthand way of saying we believe in the scientific method. From there, no belief in science that has actually come from the scientific method can be “just as” blind as religious belief. Because we understand and have intellectually accepted the method.

There isn’t really: in both cases the explanation would be the same, you’d either give it because you conducted the experiment yourself or because you read about it/heard about it. But what came out of your mouth would essentially be the same conclusion.

There is, but not the difference you’re suggesting, which is one of trustworthiness. Both examples come with drawbacks in truth and objectivity - the expert who personally tests can get hung up on their own beliefs, results, approach to the experiment, and conclusions. They trust themselves, at the expense of trusting anything more objective, which would be a group consensus. If some third party trusts the group consensus over any individual experiment, then they have LESS blind faith than the person who only trusts their own results.

But it would be disingenuous if you entered a discussion debating the merits between electric and acoustic guitars and said: “They’re both guitars, it’s possible to play any kind of music on one in the exact same way on the other.” Which is not incorrect, but impishly dismisses the entire point of the conversation, which is what the merit of the distinctions are. Pointing out the similarities does not invalidate the distinctions. And the distinctions are not insignificant in the face of the similarities. They do not make electric and acoustic guitars just “guitars”. For practical real-world use and discussion, the differences must be acknowledged and accepted.

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Yes, but this is key you both my and Humbabella’s points - science by necessity contain first hand accounts. Many of them. That makes belief in science very different from any other kind.

Beyond the existence of the group consensus of first-hand accounts, though, while they are necessary they are not continually the most important factor. Once consensus is reached, continually demanding first hand repetitions becomes an outlier activity, individual and trusting only of one’s self, when in fact application and additional new theories that can be tested is much more productive and actually challenging, though these only come about when people accept the original theory and move on. But accepting and moving on requires belief in the consensus. If we didn’t do this, science would never advance.

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Yes, the point you made that I was arguing with was that it was not second-hand reports that challenged scientific consensus. I to argued that first-hand reports were not required. The born-murder example is an example where the latter thing is key and the former is trivial to the issue at hand. A heart attack/cellular asphyxiation example could easily be one were the former thing is key and latter is largely ignored as a simple consequence if our interest is why did death occur. In the case of challenging scientific consensus both experiments and reports of/discussions of those experiments are terribly important and I don’t see how either can be said to be lesser than the other.

As for consciousness being an illusion, time to use the “reply as new topic” button! I’ll see you and presumably no one else there (Okay, maybe Medievalist).

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Here is a list of five possibilities I am borrowing from @anon50609448:

(1) People who blindly accept their religion because they have been raised to do so.
(2) People who accept their religion because they have had personal experiences that lead them to believe there is a God/Have a personal relationship with Jesus
(3) People who blindly accept the conclusions of science because they have been raised to do so
(4) People who accept the conclusions of science because they have experience that makes the believe that the scientific method is a good way to find out things
(5) People who accept those conclusions of science that they are able to verify/understand themselves and have a notion of “provisional” acceptance for the rest

My argument all along is that someone in (3) is in the same exact position with respect to epistemic justification as someone in (1). I agree with you that people in (4) and (5) are not in the same exact position as someone in (1).

If you disagree, why do you disagree? Why is it inherently more justified for someone to believe in science only on the basis of cultural authority than it is for someone to believe in religion only on the basis of cultural authority?

Again, leave aside the fact that, in principle, someone in (3) can move into (4) or (5) by educating themselves. I’m talking about people in (1) and people in (3). If you make any argument about people in (3) that entails moving them into (4) or (5) then you are rebutting an argument that I am not making.

But someone in (3) does not know that what they believe " has been verified by scores of others, the proof documented, and available for scrutiny". They haven’t checked to confirm that this is true. If they don’t know the reasons that their belief is justified then how can you say their belief is justified?

Do you mean you personally think such belief is justified? That’s beside the point. You’re in (4) or (5). I’m talking about people in (3).

It doesn’t deny what they are. It denies that the individual in question knows what they are. Because, by assumption, they don’t know what they are. If a person believes a scientific result without understanding what a scientific result actually is how is that person actually justified in believing it?

I don’t think this is true. The participants in this discussion certainly do but many other people do not.

Simply untrue. Say someone tells me dark matter doesn’t exist. If I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of what “dark matter” means and why scientists think it exists then all I can say is: “Physicists believe dark matter exists” – a naked argument from authority. If I do have first-hand knowledge of what “dark matter” means then I can say: “Astronomers have demonstrated that stars orbit the galactic center at greater velocities than would be expected given the amount of matter estimated to be contained in the galaxy. The most plausible explanation for this effect is a sort of matter that exerts a gravitational force but does not otherwise interact with baryonic matter.” I don’t know how to explain this any more clearly than this: those are entirely two different statements coming out of my mouth.

As I’ve said numerous times, that is not what I’m suggesting.

Again, this is purely a semantic argument that I simply do not give a shit about. If you don’t want to call if “faith” call it “felchwozz” or “lapadop”. Or anything. I don’t really care what word we use to denote the concepts being discussed.

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I disagree that “being born” is “trivial” in the issue of whether or not someone commits murder. Someone must necessarily be born before they commit murder. Saying “it’s trivial” sounds to me like saying it doesn’t really matter whether or not someone is born before they commit murder. Of course it does! They must necessarily be born to commit murder!

Similarly, overturning scientific consensus necessarily relies on experimental results. There is no way to overturn scientific consensus that does not begin with experimental results.

But this analogy seems to suggest that you’re arguing that experimental results are “trivial” with respect to overturning scientific consensus, in other words that experimental results simply aren’t important with respect to overturning scientific consensus. Is this actually what you’re arguing? That the influence of experimental results on scientific consensus is “trivial”?

I am not claiming anything about importance. I am claiming things about priority. Priority != importance (despite conventional usage of the word “priority”).

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A few too many women have died in childbirth for that to be an absolutely true statement.

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chgoliz, I’d call that manslaughter, not murder. (As long as we’re picking nits.)

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[quote=“wysinwyg, post:131, topic:18722”]
(3) People who blindly accept the conclusions of science because they have been raised to do so
[…]
My argument all along is that someone in (3) is in the same exact position with respect to epistemic justification as someone in (1).[/quote]

I think you are overestimating the number of people who are in this group. A large part of the normal science curriculum for children includes examples of ways that scientists have been wrong throughout the years. Although the U.S. education system has been degrading for some time, I really doubt there is a large population of people who couldn’t easily name at least a handful of high-profile cases where the conclusions of science were later found to be wrong or incomplete. Some of the incidents they would name probably wouldn’t be completely accurate (like the “world is flat” story of Columbus), but still…

If all you were saying is that someone in authority believes dark matter exists, that would be an argument from authority. You can go farther than that, though: you can say that physicists believe it based on the available evidence, and that for someone to say it doesn’t exist they would need to contradict that evidence.

This doesn’t require you to know what that evidence is; in either situation, you’re pointing to the evidence. If you don’t directly know the evidence then you’re telling the person to go argue at someone who does know the evidence. If you personally wanted or needed to argue with your hypothetical opponent about it, the only rational way to do so would be to seek out that evidence yourself so you would be armed - which you are capable of doing, because the evidence is available and being discussed and tested by others.

And just because those scientists may be wrong doesn’t mean that accepting the current scientific understanding of the available evidence is the same thing as blind faith.

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The real difference is that when you cite science, you explicitly ACCEPT that the statement is current-best-understanding and subject to refinement over time – and that it is theoretically possible to demonstrate that the statement is in error. If it isn’t testable (at least indirectly), it isn’t science.

If you cite religion – at least as it’s usually cited – you’re asserting that the statement should be taken as absolute and irrefutable, and you aren’t providing any direct mechanism for testing it. If it’s properly testable, maybe it isn’t religion.

Two very different sets of boundaries around the belief.

Yes, many people accept scientific statements unquestioningly, trusting others to do the checking. But that’s not a failure of science, it’s a decision on whether to trust that others HAVE subjected it to that scrutiny and that, since it’s continuing to be tested on a regular basis, we’ll find out about any breakage soon enough. Cold fusion was analyzed reasonably quickly; the “faster than light” particles error was resolved even more quickly. Science is self-correcting.

Religion used to be self-correcting, to some degree. Judaism has a long history of deep analysis of the writings, taking nothing purely at face value and being very aware of when a base concept is being extended – and being willing to reconsider those extensions, and expecting that people can legitimately disagree but that you’re expected to be able to defend your disagreement. Christianity actually started with some of that same tradition – it was, after all, essentially a messianic Jewish cult spawned by a religious reformer – but some (not all) branches thereof have gotten very defensive about insisting that all received wisdom, not just the core, must be equally true and must be protected from evidence to the contrary. American fundamentalism, as I’ve said before, seems to have some specific historical reasons for why it went quite so far off the rails, and the problem is that having gone there it burned all the bridges that might let it correct those institutionalized problems.

I can’t speak to how well Islam, or Buddhism, or any of the other religious systems deal with discovering that the primary books are not necessarily absolutely literally true. My impression is that they don’t have much trouble with that aspect; it’s just that some of their believers don’t want to accept social changes. That’s a matter of practice, and isn’t accessible to science-based arguments unless you can convince them that the costs of retaining it are higher than the costs of letting it go.

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Yes, I disagree. Because I do not believe that anyone can believe in science only on the basis of cultural authority - because of the nature of science, that is inherently impossible, due to everything I’ve already argued and what @Nonentity and @anon50609448 have argued. Science, being something derived from the scientific method and not something simply spoken from cultural authority, will forever be something with evidence that must be contradicted also using the scientific method in order to be dismissed. To put it another way: science does not exist solely based on cultural authority, but religion solely does. Therefore belief in religion can be only on the basis of cultural authority, but belief in science cannot be divided from its origins, which is scientific method.

Yes, it does. Because it assumes that they can be given based on cultural authority alone. They cannot. Someone can LIE about whether something is science or not, and in that way bestow it based on cultural authority alone. But if it’s science, then no, they cannot.

The number of people that don’t understand - even if they are not eloquent enough to elucidate it - what science is and how it differs from any other random human thought, I do believe is at or near zero. If a living creature CAN understand what scientific method is (not retarded, of age, things like that), then they do. We all understand that science involves experimentation, with physical results or math results as proof. We all understand that this differs from all other belief systems. From there any individual’s understanding of science gets murky, but that’s all that is needed - we know “proof” is involved. We can distrust it, or trust it, but we know it exists and is necessary for anything to be “science”.

Even if you can’t buy the above, there’s also the argument that if someone doesn’t know what science IS, then they can’t believe in it. They can believe in something that isn’t actually science, but then what they believe in isn’t actually science. I can’t say that I believe in the Christian God and then say that the Christian God is a tree spirit. If I did that, I would ipso facto not believe in the Christian God.

@Nonentity put it best above, when he states that you either point to the evidence or can paraphrase the evidence yourself. Either way, you’re still using the same evidence to support your stance. When someone says “Physicists believe dark matter exists”, it is not a “naked argument from authority”, because anyone who said this would be able to include “…based on evidence that is freely available to be scrutinized.” That alone changes it from “from authority” to “based on evidence”.

You’ve said it, but it is still what you’re suggesting. By claiming that personal experience of evidence is different from accepting that evidence has been personally experienced by others, you’re claiming that the former offers a greater trustworthiness than the later. If you think that you can’t know something without personally experiencing it, but that you somehow can know something simply because you’ve personally experienced something you’ve decided is whatever it is you’ve decided it to be, then you are essentially raising the trustworthiness bar on that.

Semantics isn’t just about what word we use - semantics is the study of meaning. If the meaning of what we say is something you don’t give a shit about, then we probably have nothing more to talk about. But I suspect you do give a shit about this.

You want faith to mean something equal in two different contexts, simply because it’s the same word. Our counter-argument is precisely that it doesn’t matter what we call it - faith, belief, acceptance, whatever. It doesn’t matter. But the context does. If semantics = meaning, then yes, we’re all arguing semantics. If semantics = word choice then only you are arguing that a particular word choice demands an absolute definition in all uses.

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I felt I was quite explicit on this. I said that sometimes if things go A necessary for and prior to be B necessary for and prior to C then we don’t know whether A causes C, B causes C or A and B cause C together (or none of these, I guess). I think we agree that first hand knowledge is necessary for and prior to second hand knowledge which is necessary for and prior to consensus. I think this is a case where both A and B cause C, so I don’t think there is any point in privileging A over B just because it is prior or necessary for.

Priority != importance is all I was trying to say. If we agree that priority is not importance, then we are we discussing priority?

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I would think we need to immediately enact a Matricide law. Get those babies to prison!

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Excellent point…no intent (because fetuses have no ability to form an intent).

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Against or for?

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with reference to @anon50609448 and @wysinwyg
Is it possible for the mods to sentence users to one month of commenting only in E-Prime?

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