When is understanding, better than misunderstanding? When does understanding something have more quantitative moral justification than misunderstanding something? Or if it's easier to answer when worded differently, when does misunderstanding have more moral justification than comprehension? Fundamentally.. I'm trying to figure out how comprehension plays into morality, if it does. Thoughts?
If you never know what's right or wrong how can you understand it? It's like religion, if u grew up in India, how would you know about Jesus? Nah I don't do drugs. I smoke weed.
This implies that understanding is knowing what is right, and what is wrong. Then you compare it to a moralistic convention, releigion, as though its morals are set in stone and absolutely defined. You allude to knowledge of another moralistic system, to contrast with an accepted idol. Do you think your use affects your decision? Hypothetically, if India and Jesus had never been introduced to the Earth as we know it, would you "not do drugs, but smoke weed"? Would that affect the personality you define as 'yourself'? How would you categorize that which you are affected by, and that which is fundamentally you?
Understanding is defined by mis-understanding; and vice versa. Within human existence, one is needed for the other...
Were the columbine shooters "wrong" for what they did? Or, does absoloute relativity vindicate the shooters' anger and resentment?
So, then how can you say it doesn't exist?? For, denying the reality of something presupposes the fact that you know what this something is that your're precisely denying; in this case - being the idea or concept of "wrong".
This is why I believe that logically, we're all agnostics. I can't deny that God (any form) exists, because I just don't know. None of us know for sure whether God is real, despite how much we choose to believe in something with no proof of its existence whatsoever, so how can we be believers or atheists? All we can be is agnostic in our views, until we have evidence that affirms our beliefs. We just don't know.
That's the whole point... if God's existence could easily be shown or demonstrated outright (like some sort of math equation), then there would be no need for faith (yet, there are a vast amount of indicators that can help one to make a leap of faith). And, if you believe that the most reasonable position in the whole God debate is that of an agnostic, because there is no tangible "evidence" to prove it, then are you, by the same criterion of "evidence", a solipsist because there is no tangible "evidence" to certainly validate the existence of subjectivity beyond your own?
What else am I supposed to use besides tangible evidence? Please don't say faith. Faith isn't a virtue. It's merely the glorification of voluntary ignorance. \nAnd no, I am far from solipsism. The only thing I said I was unsure about was God. And I strongly, oh so strongly believe that ultimately, all of us hold this same exact position. That we are all unsure, which coincides with agnosticism, and that is all.
1.) Is tangible evidence validated by the five senses? 2.) Everything beyond solipsism is belief! Freud posited that other minds are not known, but only inferred to exist, he stated "consciousness makes each of us aware only of his own states of mind, that other people, too, possess a consciousness is an inference which we draw by analogy from their observable utterances and actions, in order to make this behavior of theirs intelligible to us."
1) As far as I (we) know, yes. This "as far as I know" plays key, because what I know is limited to my five senses. In the beginning, there were only the five senses. Then came the word and then came the description. I am confined to believe what I believe through my five senses, but I do acknowledge that there may very well indeed be things my senses don't validate, and these may be the things I don't know of. Just as some animals and reptiles can sense heat, such as pit vipers with pits that are heat sensing organs and allow them to see in infrared, or their "6th sense." Or the fact that some people believe in 7 senses, called the psychic and pneumatic senses that are "blocked from conscious control." Not all evidence will be tangible, but it should be falsifiable, testable, and objective. The Doppler effect in electromagnetic radiation is not "tangible" but it is verifiable and easily observed objectively. (Even if the "red shift" doesn't look red to you, the wavelength can be measured and objectively shown to be "red"). What I'm saying is that I will not allow religion to take away my five senses. This is exactly what religion does, and places you on that blind expressway called faith. 2) Yes, everything is belief, Boats and Hoes. But I can believe that if I were on the moon, and I dropped a feather and a brick, they would both fall at the same speed and hit the ground at the same time through falsifiable, testable, and objective measures (i.e. law of gravity). If I mix red and blue paint, I can believe that it would produce purple paint, without even having to perform the experiment, because of falsifiable, testable, and objective measures. Like I said, I do acknowledge that there may very well be be stimulus our senses fail to recognize, or something that is beyond our understanding. But at the end of the day, I do not know, and neither do you, or the rest of us, which supports my original premise, and is again why I respectfully hold an agnostic position on the matter.
1.) You "knowing" that you're limited to your five senses isn't known to you by any of your five senses... oddly enough. 2.) Can one falsify the scientific method, i.e., can the scientific method falsify the scientific method,,,? And, can one provide evidence to show that the only way for procuring truth is by way of the scientific method? 3.) Conflating religion with spirituality is a mistake imo. And, no matter what you're told, everything is faith - induction reigns. 4.) Inductive knowledge is fallible and inherently flawed - the past doesn't dictate the future.
1) No, it is not, that is another world altogether, which is perception and the process of bringing information from the outside world into the body and brain. I don't see what you're inferring here, at all, that can be of any relevance to our topic. If you want to delve into the psychological arena of senses and perception, be my guest. Unless by fallacy of composition you are suggesting that because I involuntarily use my five senses to register information into my brain and body through perception, and that I take what is merely a part of this registering process (the five senses) and apply it as the sole being of the process, that is incorrect. It merely plays a part, but without it, there would be no A to B, and it would be impossible. 2) You're gonna give me gray hairs here. I again fail to see any bit of relevance these questions have to our original argument, or what you bolded. I'm not going to bother answering if one can falsify the scientific method via the scientific method. As witty-minded of a question that it is, I would love to talk about it in another thread, but it simply bears no relevance here. I would love to talk about it on a separate subject though, because it is interesting! 3) Sure, conflating religion with spirituality may be a mistake as you say, but wouldn't this just support my original premise? 4) Either this is a terrible red herring or I again fail to see how this has anything to do with anything we discussed above. Come on B&H, you're killing me over here. You can see that where we are now is completely different from my last comment, and where we left off, and yet you've offered absolutely no legitimate rebuttals, so I'm beginning to believe you randomly decided to talk about a new topic. I respect your posts but this can be frustrating and aggravating, and makes me not want to reply :/ I do respect your numbering system though. I've taken quite a liking to it if you haven't been able to tell yet
We don't know with absolute certainty that God doesn't exist, but we do know that the people that originally embraced the concept did so in an age devoid of science. So in some ways asking if there is or isn't a God is to still somehow adhere to the limited knowledge and fears of ancient man. Imho, there is no such thing as "agnosticism," which is a hedge I think. In science, something doesn't exist until its actually proven and the fact that God's existence can't be proven at the moment isn't an endorsement of God, rather the fact that science has real limitations, whereas imagination does not.
Don't grow grey hairs, my friend... we are here to discuss and bounce ideas off of one another; what I say may not seem relevant to you, at the moment, but, trust me, it is. And, just to add, my whole response to you is about your claim and mention of "tangible" evidence. 1.) My point was to touch on the notion that the one, i.e., the thinker, asserting that all knowledge must be filtered through the five senses (for it to be considered "legitimate") isn't something itself which can be discerned by the five senses. Meaning, how does one experience a concept (like darwinian evolution)? Or the one creating and delineating concepts (such as darwinian evolution)? We experience noise by way of our ears... smells by way of our noses... tastes by way of our tongues and mouths... and so on, and so on - so, the question remains, what and how do experience ideas? By way of any of the five senses? 2.) You said that a claim must be falsifiable for you to consider legitimate; so, my question is, can one falsify the claims of the dogmatists (the claim that all human knowledge is restricted to our five senses) by way of the scientific method? If one asserts the scientific method is the only means for garnering knoweldge... is that an assertion I can falsify? 3.) Religion is as personal as the God I believe in... others shouldn't dictate how I adhere to my faith. 4.) I was touching your example of the mixing of the different colors of paint... you say adding one color to another color will produce another color, different from the two you mixed; okay, so, isn't it a belief to posit that this mixture will always continue the same result?
Induction doesn't allow sciene to "prove" anything... science only approximates (and strictly deals with probabilities). And, by that very same logic, did evolution NOT exist, as a natural process, until Darwin "proved" it?
A "natural process" that people adhered to as mindlessly as religion? Actually no, what I'm talking about are people attempting to understand natural processes objectively and discovering the way they work. I'm not talking about folks fantasizing based on nothing more than fears and superstitions, and doing so based on a lack of information. So far I don't see any data revealing God as Darwin revealed natural processes. Indeed what I see are people who are all too willing to suspend reason in favor of something someone believed thousands of years ago (with zero proof) because they had no other way of knowing anything. Why would we adopt their beliefs if they are not being substantiated by reality, unlike Darwin's?
1.) Reason can only take you so far... just ask Kant; and, why be "reasonable"? For, can you prove to me that reality is logical outside your experience of it (so that I shall adhere to reason)? Quantum indeterminism attests to the reality that logic and reason are merely dependent contrivances, produced by the inherent limitations and insecurities of the human mind, that can't really predict or prove anything... 2.) Yes, the notion that one cannot have a flower without a stem, i.e., without a source, is something that's concluded without any proof... for that's caveman logic and reasoning, right? Doesn't evolution and the big bang allude to the notion of a beginning point? Doesn't all existence, let alone all biological organisms, stem from a single point?