Comments

1. Marcus wrote:

   Let’s take your scenario a little bit further. Ten minutes after you die (let me assume that you died immediately after ingesting the coin), a complete stranger walks by, and glancing up towards your house, notices what appears to be a dead body on the deck. He walks up your driveway for a closer look, and sure enough, you’re dead. Without further ado, the stranger dials 911 on his cell phone, and announces to the operator, “Some poor fellow has died after ingesting an 1848 penny that had lain on his deck for five minutes.”

   The stranger’s belief would be right, wouldn’t it? But would it be rational?

   Belief must be “burdened” by evidence, in order to be rational. It’s perhaps startling to realize, but rational belief is not guaranteed to be true, nor are all true beliefs guaranteed to appear rational. Nevertheless, rationality - the reliance on evidence, and good reasoning, in deciding what to believe - is the best method we’ve found so far for arriving at true belief. We just have to realize that even the most rational beliefs can wind up being wrong. Knowledge is rarely certain.

   If you want to accept as rational beliefs that are completely divorced from evidence, then you must accept, or at least be agnostic about, any belief that’s even remotely possible. But nobody really does that. The evidence suggests to me that people who insist on believing something in the complete absence of evidence have some pre-existing psychological motivation for doing so. In the case of religion, those motivations vary widely from person to person, but in many cases include fear of death, desire for control, and so on.

   Posted 22 Jul 2007 at 3:32 pm ¶

2. lon wrote:

   “If you want to accept as rational beliefs that are completely divorced from evidence, then you must accept, or at least be agnostic about, any belief that’s even remotely possible.”

   I concur. The difference, then, may lie in the definition of “evidence” and the definition of “possible”.

   Let’s take the notion of possible. It needs to be refined to involve the concept of consistency. One example I use frequently is from the Bible. Three men, traveling from the east, were supposidly following a star in the east. Using accepted definitions of “east”, this is wholly impossible. If you’re traveling from the east, your motion has at least some westward component. If you’re following a star situated in the east, your travel will contain no westward component, unless you’re taking a detour. Therefore, taken at surface value only, it is inconsistent and therefore not even remotely possible.

   Unrelated tangent: The idea that this statement is totally impossible only applies if you also subscribe to the original conjecture of people who had no knowlege of astronomy that the star centered itself over Bethelehem and did not move. Given that we now realize that stars in the night sky appear to move due to the rotation of the earth, and in fact, a star appearing in the east or west will actually show the greatest movement, it opens up other potentials. Perhaps the star was generally referred to as being in the east, or perhaps it was seen in the east at the time the story was written, and the writer was simply being unclear. This “eastern star” may well have been in the west during the period of night that the men were traveling. Perhaps the writer was himself located westward of this star, and when he referred to it being in the east he was speaking from his perspective but when he was referring to the men, he described their origin relative to the destination. It is also necessary to consider that at the time, a person using stars to navigate was necessarially more knowlegable than the common populace and by default qualified for the designation of “wise”. Perhaps the writer was just terribly confused with all the talk about what star was where at a given time. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. If you buy the story, it is sufficient to just assume that people who knew how to navigate via the stars successfully did so, and the writer was guilty of attempting to provide details outside of his understanding. If you don’t buy the story, then simply dismiss it instead of trying to use it as proof against anything except the foolish concept of inerrancy. It is in no way a falsification of anything else. Anyway, dammit, now I’ve spent excessive time on this tangent. Back to my original point….

   One point about the whole thing is that there are no beliefs completely divorced from evidence. It is the very existence of evidence which causes a belief to form. Some caveman saw a thunderstorm and came to believe that someone he couldn’t see was angry. His belief in God was justified in the same manner that modern scientists justify their belief in dark matter. Can’t see it, but can see the effects of it. Therefore, it exists. Although, the scientists’ equivalent of actually seeing a thunderstorm was imagining some equations which insisted it was there and forced them to go looking for the invisible stuff. They may or may not be able to call off the search, if they can ever agree on whether fundamental time exists or not and thus figure out whether general relativity is wrong or quantum mechanics is wrong. GR says it doesn’t. QM says it does. Both theories have good evidence, but only one is right as it now stands. At the moment, which one you go with is a matter of faith.

   So, as you point out, nobody believes just anything that’s remotely possible. This is simply because nobody believes in anything for which they have no evidence. The creationist sees the same evidence of evolution that the Darwinist does, the only difference is that they can see it as evidence for their theory of creation rather than evidence for the theory of natural selection. The overwhelming majority of current theologists see evolution and, rather than denying it, use it concieve of things like “Evolution must be a perfect way to accomplish a creation”. Very few dispute evolution; it is an observed fact. Any dispute you see from reasonable people is with the theory of natural selection, and even then many creationists easily accept that at least partially as well as the age of the things as measured by radioactive decay.

   The mention of asserting an age of something by carbon dating brings us to one of the main points. That is, the acceptance of something as evidence. Skeptics always say “show evidence”, and that is fine, especially since it is obvious that nobody believes anything without evidence. The key then, isn’t evidence per se, it is evidence that one finds acceptable. Evidence that meets some personal standard, and they should be held accountable regarding the application of that standard to all evidence presented. A person who says they don’t believe anything unless they see it should be forced to deny belief in the sun at any given instant. After all, someone could be supplying artifical light above the cloud layer, or, in the absence of clouds, the absolute best they can say is that “the sun existed approximately 8 minutes ago”. That may be pushing it a bit far, but hopefully it gets across the point. Everyone has their own standards of evidence. I accept the relative accuracy of carbon dating, but the young earth creationists do not. They accuse me of having insufficient evidence; that radioactive decay isn’t as stable as claimed. I think they are guilty of the inconsistency of refusing evidence that is demonstrably stronger than other evidence they gleefully accept. Fortunately, young earth creationists are such a tiny fraction of believers, constantly decreasing in number, and will be insignificant soon if they aren’t already. Unfortunately, they can scream louder and blog more and generally be more visible than the more reasonable majority.

   Whew. This post is too long, I shoulda just written an essay instead of a comment. Sowwy.

   Posted 29 Jul 2007 at 4:13 am ¶

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