Re: belief, faith, truth

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 18:04:31 +0100

Le 02-févr.-06, à 08:43, Daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden (Tom) wrote:


>
> Bruno:
> >To believe in something in spite of refutation is "bad faith".
> >To believe in something in spite of contrary evidences ? It depends. I
> >can imagine situations where I would find that a remarkable attitude,
> >and I can imagine others where I would take it again as bad faith.

> I agree.  I think part of this is a matter of preference of terms. 
> Meeker et al want to use "religious faith" for what Bruno says is "bad
> faith", and I agree that is bad faith.  I'm content with leaving off
> the word "religious", and just use "faith" to refer to holding to the
> possibility of the truth of a certain proposition until it is refuted.

I agree that "religious faith" today is akin to bad faith. I already
explained that this is due to the stealing of theology by political
power since about 500 after jc.
To infer that all religious faith is bad faith is like throwing the
water with the baby.

Note that by incompleteness there are some faith, that is holding the
possibility of truth of certain proposition, which will never be
refuted nor proved, like our own consistency, or like our own
consciousness.
Nobody can prove its own sanity, except the insane who can prove
everything.
  cf: ~Bf -> ~B(~Bf)


> >> (Brent meeker:)That would be an unquestioning certitude that there
> is a reality
> >> independent of all opinion?
> >
> >Well, that is the bet, or hope, of the non solipsist scientist. Popper
> >said that faith in reason is faith in your own reason but above all
> >faith in the reason of the others.
> >And then Platonism is the faith in a reality independent of all
> >opinion, indeed, like the faith in the fact that 17 is prime
> >independently of us.
> >
> >Bruno
> And here we have a couple of things (reason and reality) whose
> existence we should all have faith in.  So none of us should be scared
> by the word "faith" (in reason and reality).  By this I mean simply
> that we should not abandon our pursuit of truth.  If all there is is
> opinion, then we're all wasting our time.


I agree. To believe that opinion can be separated from the search of
some truth would lead to absolute relativism, which Descartes already
showed to be inconsistent.
And then, the very notion of truth, appears to be, from a machine (or
stronger loebian entities) point of view, to be unnameable,
unsophisticated, etc. It has all the negative characterizations of the
"one" of the negative neoplatonist theologies.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri Feb 03 2006 - 12:07:50 PST

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