Faith
2007-01-05
I said the other day that I wasn't an atheist. I phrased it as a 'thing that you didn't know about me', which may look odd - giving such a broad and negative answer - but it's generally been the case the people have assumed I am. I was tempted to follow up with a little explanation, but I decided to leave it at that and see if anyone asked (thanks Matt ;-)
Here, in all of it's verbose and tiresome glory, is the follow-up.
Firstly, a question. For what manner of sentence A and predicate P do you agree with the following?
To believe in something is to be convinced that it is true. I think that's a fairly safe statement. Different people take different amounts of convincing, perhaps depending on the claim being made.
Without getting too deep in epistemology (I'm more a metaphysics man myself) I claim that 'I believe that A is true' if and only if 'I believe that I know A to be true', for all observers 'I' and sentences A. In effect I'm claiming that a [sane] person who is convinced something is true also believes that the conviction is justified.
This starts to cause me problems, personally.
I don't think one can choose what to believe. That's not an assertion of my philosophy (yet), but a statement of personal 'belief in likelihood'. [If you catch me on a less rigorous day, you might find me using the word 'belief' in that looser 'I believe it likely that' sense, rather than 'I believe it true that'.] Instead, it seems likely that each possible truth is washed through whatever individual belief systems a person has and a value for belief ('I do', 'I don't', or perhaps others) falls out, and the individual has no conscious control over the process.
(This question is a point of contention among philosophers, and one that I haven't done much reading on. If anyone wants to recommend anything I'll consider checking it out).
The problem I have is that I'm a very logical person. Not flawlessly (the word 'person' is still there, after all), but very, arguably excessively. The belief system I have developed is one of proof, based on what things are true by definition, convention or otherwise, what things can be derived from them, what things look likely to be derivable in future or not otherwise inconsistent, and so on. If you look too closely, everything I 'know' to be true has implicit definitions of scope restricting it to fields for which such knowledge is an issue of low contention, and everything else works in differing degrees of likelihood, since just about anything could be proved wrong at any time.
Maybe everyone else is the same. I don't know.
So anyway, I can't believe it to be true that there are deities (I'm going to use the generic plural 'deities', because I'm not just denying western monotheism), because I can't prove it to be true. And I'm of the opinion that anything less than absolute faith isn't really Faith at all. By Occam's Razor, if it doesn't need to exist, it may as well not exist.
So there you go, I don't believe in deities. Does that make me an atheist? Chambers says:
Let us return to my first question, the one that seemed to make no sense at the time (and perhaps still doesn't, if you don't like the notation):
Take predicate P to be 'I believe that' and sentence A as 'deities exist'. (Strictly speaking, P is the function that returns the truth value of the sentence that is the concatenation of 'I believe that' and A, but I think most of my readers followed the sloppy version better).
The question is whether it is true that I believe there are no deities, because I do not believe there are some. My answer is that to assume so is an abuse of the law of excluded middle: if I must be able to prove (if only to me, by my standards) that something is true in order to prove it, then clearly I must be able to prove it is not in order to believe it is not. I cannot prove there are no deities any better than I can prove that there are some.
So I'm agnostic, and I must admit, somewhat proud of it. I grew out of being an atheist, because eventually I realised that according to my belief system that would need the same kind of spark of extra knowledge (from nowhere, as it were).
That said, I have no problem with people who do have faith in something (indeed on occasion I've wished I had). Just as we add axioms to logical systems to make them cover more, it may be that a particular observer's experience of the world can't be resolved down to a system that doesn't include one or more deities. Likewise, certain outlooks on the nature of existence may demand that Occam's Razor be an enforced requirement rather than a heuristic tool: if they aren't evident, they cannot exist.
I'm not claiming that other people should believe what I do. I'm just explaining why I do.
Oh, by the way, I think I promised a Funny Story (same provisos apply). Here goes:
When I lived in south London, we had a brief visit from some manner of doorstep proselytizers: Jehovah's Witnesses, I believe they were. Since I had the fortune (for good or bad) to open the door the first time, I became the main target and my flatmate was all but ignored on subsequent visits. Now, if you've got this far through this post, it may be clear to you that an earthly man is unlikely to change my beliefs. There is little that can be done to tell me God exists, because I already accept telling with a large pinch of salt; such a paradigm shift would need some kind of evidence, and it's unlikely to be provided by the local zealots.
Besides, blood transfusions save lives, but I digress...
After a little discussion, the regular person realised that I was 'a man of science' and that he didn't have the technical background to make me budge on any of my points. Akin to first-line technical support, he said he would come back with his colleague, who was also a technical person.
His colleague turned out to be a 17-year-old (I was 19 or 20 at the time) who presented as a credential the fact that he was doing some manner of BTEC course in 'Science'. I felt like I was facing an adversary whose idea of an air strike was to load paper aeroplanes with little water bombs and launch them in my general direction.
I bet you wished you never asked ;-)
Here, in all of it's verbose and tiresome glory, is the follow-up.
Firstly, a question. For what manner of sentence A and predicate P do you agree with the following?
¬P(A)=P(¬A)
To believe in something is to be convinced that it is true. I think that's a fairly safe statement. Different people take different amounts of convincing, perhaps depending on the claim being made.
Without getting too deep in epistemology (I'm more a metaphysics man myself) I claim that 'I believe that A is true' if and only if 'I believe that I know A to be true', for all observers 'I' and sentences A. In effect I'm claiming that a [sane] person who is convinced something is true also believes that the conviction is justified.
This starts to cause me problems, personally.
I don't think one can choose what to believe. That's not an assertion of my philosophy (yet), but a statement of personal 'belief in likelihood'. [If you catch me on a less rigorous day, you might find me using the word 'belief' in that looser 'I believe it likely that' sense, rather than 'I believe it true that'.] Instead, it seems likely that each possible truth is washed through whatever individual belief systems a person has and a value for belief ('I do', 'I don't', or perhaps others) falls out, and the individual has no conscious control over the process.
(This question is a point of contention among philosophers, and one that I haven't done much reading on. If anyone wants to recommend anything I'll consider checking it out).
The problem I have is that I'm a very logical person. Not flawlessly (the word 'person' is still there, after all), but very, arguably excessively. The belief system I have developed is one of proof, based on what things are true by definition, convention or otherwise, what things can be derived from them, what things look likely to be derivable in future or not otherwise inconsistent, and so on. If you look too closely, everything I 'know' to be true has implicit definitions of scope restricting it to fields for which such knowledge is an issue of low contention, and everything else works in differing degrees of likelihood, since just about anything could be proved wrong at any time.
Maybe everyone else is the same. I don't know.
So anyway, I can't believe it to be true that there are deities (I'm going to use the generic plural 'deities', because I'm not just denying western monotheism), because I can't prove it to be true. And I'm of the opinion that anything less than absolute faith isn't really Faith at all. By Occam's Razor, if it doesn't need to exist, it may as well not exist.
So there you go, I don't believe in deities. Does that make me an atheist? Chambers says:
"atheism - noun - the belief that there is no god."
Let us return to my first question, the one that seemed to make no sense at the time (and perhaps still doesn't, if you don't like the notation):
¬P(A)=P(¬A)
Take predicate P to be 'I believe that' and sentence A as 'deities exist'. (Strictly speaking, P is the function that returns the truth value of the sentence that is the concatenation of 'I believe that' and A, but I think most of my readers followed the sloppy version better).
The question is whether it is true that I believe there are no deities, because I do not believe there are some. My answer is that to assume so is an abuse of the law of excluded middle: if I must be able to prove (if only to me, by my standards) that something is true in order to prove it, then clearly I must be able to prove it is not in order to believe it is not. I cannot prove there are no deities any better than I can prove that there are some.
So I'm agnostic, and I must admit, somewhat proud of it. I grew out of being an atheist, because eventually I realised that according to my belief system that would need the same kind of spark of extra knowledge (from nowhere, as it were).
That said, I have no problem with people who do have faith in something (indeed on occasion I've wished I had). Just as we add axioms to logical systems to make them cover more, it may be that a particular observer's experience of the world can't be resolved down to a system that doesn't include one or more deities. Likewise, certain outlooks on the nature of existence may demand that Occam's Razor be an enforced requirement rather than a heuristic tool: if they aren't evident, they cannot exist.
I'm not claiming that other people should believe what I do. I'm just explaining why I do.
Oh, by the way, I think I promised a Funny Story (same provisos apply). Here goes:
When I lived in south London, we had a brief visit from some manner of doorstep proselytizers: Jehovah's Witnesses, I believe they were. Since I had the fortune (for good or bad) to open the door the first time, I became the main target and my flatmate was all but ignored on subsequent visits. Now, if you've got this far through this post, it may be clear to you that an earthly man is unlikely to change my beliefs. There is little that can be done to tell me God exists, because I already accept telling with a large pinch of salt; such a paradigm shift would need some kind of evidence, and it's unlikely to be provided by the local zealots.
Besides, blood transfusions save lives, but I digress...
After a little discussion, the regular person realised that I was 'a man of science' and that he didn't have the technical background to make me budge on any of my points. Akin to first-line technical support, he said he would come back with his colleague, who was also a technical person.
His colleague turned out to be a 17-year-old (I was 19 or 20 at the time) who presented as a credential the fact that he was doing some manner of BTEC course in 'Science'. I felt like I was facing an adversary whose idea of an air strike was to load paper aeroplanes with little water bombs and launch them in my general direction.
I bet you wished you never asked ;-)
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