Evo said:
No, see, you can't get away from the need that *you* have for faith, so since you personally seem to need that, you think everyone needs that, and it's not true.
I've been asking you to stop making these blanket assumptions and trying to impose your beliefs on others. People that lack belief are not trying to say that others have to be the same, so why are you trying to impose your need on others?
The reason why you assume I am "imposing blanket assumptions" is because you understand faith as meaning something distinct from everyday belief in the most basic realities. In other words, you only consider as "faith" faith in things whose validity is questionable. To me, faith at the most basic level just describes the fundamental relationship between epistemology and ontology (i.e. between thinking about something and experiencing it as real). You may claim that you don't have to have faith to believe that your thumb exists, but my question becomes what psychological mechanism allows you to experience it as real then? I certainly agree that your thumb can exist without anyone believing in it or even perceiving it, but at the subjective level, it is possible to perceive it with varying degrees of faith. To use a tired old example, the movie "the Matrix" explores an example of withdrawing faith from the reality of everyday life through construction of an alternative explanation that renders apparent reality a mere simulation of something that once may have existed. The point of this film is not to confound existence but to demonstrate how the subjective side of ontology affects one's orientation to reality. In short, reality appears quite different when you don't believe in it faithfully.
There are many people who either can't or won't step far away from their subjectivity long enough to observe it as a real process affecting their perceptions. Usually they are too afraid that they will go mad or otherwise lose their clarity regarding the objective universe outside them. This nevertheless biases them against recognizing the role their own subjectivity plays in how and what they exercise "faith" to believe in.
Gokul43201 said:
I'm not sure I follow why this is the only or even important difference. But that might be a result of my not quite understanding what you are saying. But in any case, what I have been talking about is virtually a reproduction of definitions that I have quoted and cited from other sources.
Ok, I was just trying to make sense of the difference between not believing in something and saying it doesn't exist. The only thing I could come up with was a distinction between subjective and objective ontology. Beyond that, I was trying to figure out how you thought about that distinction to address your repeated claims that this distinction is important in terms of (dis)belief in deities or the supernatural generally.
Whether or not I am playing on this argument, I agree with this statement (subject to what you mean by "doesn't matter"). It does not matter that a majority of people disbelieve in evolution - it still describes pretty well how life changes. It doesn't matter now, when a lot of people understand it very well, and it did not matter in the 1800s, when virtually nobody did. You can say the same about virtually every new phenomenon that has been explained by science, from germs to volcanoes.
Maybe, but in terms of subjectivity it doesn't matter what a "majority," many, or some people believe. It ultimately comes down to the subjective experience of the believer. Someone can receive a preponderance of evidence and theoretical support for evolution and still fail to experience it as true. The mechanics of evolution might even be directly influencing their lives and bodies. Yet at the subjective level they might still just not be able to feel convinced that it is true. Call it being thick-headed or whatever you want but you can't get around the fact of subjectivity in whether or not someone believes in a particular explanation or ideology in either direction.
It also didn't matter that most people in the middle ages believed in witches, in the sense that this did not affect the truth about whether or not someone was a witch. The only way that it did matter is in that some people were then burnt at stakes.
It also mattered for the people who may have felt doubt and guilt about burning innocent people as witches. As long as they maintained faithful belief in the reality of witchcraft, they could possibly accept that witch-burning was more than senseless slaughter of innocent people. I think the same could be said about many modern forms of killing and relative deprivation, such as war, capital punishment, poverty, servitude, etc.
You do not have to believe in germs to catch the flu.
And you don't have to believe in God to experience creative power or morality. The point is not whether reality can operate in the absence of subjective belief, which it can. The point is why some people get fixated on denying the existence of subjectivity completely just because they like the fact that objectivity can circumvent it. A more interesting question, to me, is how the psychology of fetishizing transcendent objectivity works.
That is not the same statement as the one that precedes it. You should recognize that there is a very big difference between a scientific observable/measurement, a subjective perception, and a belief independent of evidence. How can you clump these together as though indistinguishable?
I don't. I say that to understand them, including your own subjective ability to distinguish between them, you have to understand human subjectivity.
There's a saying popular within the experimental physics community, that goes along the lines of "If you didn't measure it, it didn't happen." That's a very different thing than saying "If you don't believe in it, it didn't happen."
Those two things actually mean the same thing in practice. They are both a denial of objective reality outside of human attention to it. Your physicists are saying, "if a tree falls in the forest and you don't measure it in some way, it didn't fall." Measurement is qualitatively very different from belief, but both come down to a fundamental belief in reality to transcend human existence.
This is confusing. Did you say "could", when you meant "couldn't"? But I still think I might be missing your point. An atheist, as I've repeated several times, is not required to make any claims of non-existence.
You're right, that sentence was poorly written. I was saying that you have to have faith to believe that something doesn't exist. Specifically you have to have faith in your ability to extrapolate what potentially exists from your knowledge of things you believe to exist. Saying, "I see clouds therefore I believe in clouds" requires less faith than saying, "clouds exist everywhere in the atmosphere" because the second statement makes a claim about something you haven't and cannot sufficiently observe without generalizing from particular observations.
