Meeting with Bishop: Faith is a Choice

[_Themis]

I have answered your questions multiple times and do not intend to keep repeating them I suspect you believe a number of them but are not honest enough to admit to it. You can't even admit I quoted you on what your position was. You want absolute proof which is not what anyone has argued for. I will let others decide for themselves.

[_Hoops]

I have answered your questions multiple times and do not intend to keep repeating them I suspect you believe a number of them but are not honest enough to admit to it. You can't even admit I quoted you on what your position was. You want absolute proof which is not what anyone has argued for. I will let others decide for themselves.

I've never asked for absolute proof. I've asked for any evidence. You've declined or are unable to fulfill.

I will let others decide as well.

[_honorentheos]

You have offered no evidence to show that your five sense give you access to reality.

Hoops, this is a false statement.

Did you mean to suggest that Themis has not provided evidence that his five senses give him perfect access to reality, or absolute access?

It's a significant distinction.

Oh, and you said you'd work on a response to my request earlier in the thread. I am hoping you can find time to get to that this weekend.

[_Hoops]

it is a significant distinction -- that has no bearing on the questions. He must offer evidence that his five senses have ANY access to reality. I'm not asking for perfect or absolute or anything else. I'm asking for ANY. It's logically incoherent to claim that one's five senses necessarily gives one access to reality. He/she is making an a priori claim that I reject solely on the basis of logic. I've offered no religious counter because it's not necessary, we're not talking about religion. The only reason I brought up empiricists vs. spiritualists was in response to a question. But it's not necessary to compare the two to stand the claim of empiricists on its head. My contention stands logically. His does not. Therefor it is up to him to provide evidence for his claim.

[_Hoops]

Hoops, this is a false statement.

Did you mean to suggest that Themis has not provided evidence that his five senses give him perfect access to reality, or absolute access?

It's a significant distinction.

Oh, and you said you'd work on a response to my request earlier in the thread. I am hoping you can find time to get to that this weekend.

Except it's not a false statement. He's offered evidence that he claims supports his view that his five sense give him access to reality. I've shown that one can not make that assumption - which is all it is.

[_Chap]

I find that much of this discussion makes a fetish out of the word 'reality' - sometimes qualified as 'absolute reality'. Pressed repeatedly to tell us what she means by these words, and how one may tell whether something is 'real' or not, so far, so far as I recall Hoops has only given one explanation, which is alone the lines of 'reality is what exists'. That is not very helpful, since there can often be a great deal of reasonable doubt about what exists and what does not exist. And what would correspond to Hoops's 'absolute reality'? 'Absolute existence'? Meaning what?

Since the discussion began from a question that did not involve the word 'reality', I wonder if Hoops can be persuaded to discuss the OP without using this term?

Here is a start: Surely Hoops will agree that the five senses are an extremely helpful set of abilities. I assume that like me Hoops currently has a more or less functioning set of all of them. Through their use I can guide myself through much of my life - avoiding painful experiences and seeking out pleasurable ones, and using them to learn nearly all the things I know. Through them I interact with those I love. Loss of one of them would greatly diminish the pleasure I have from being alive. When I was a theist, I blessed my creator for having endowed me with the ability to perceive the richness of his world, to enjoy it and to understand it. As an atheist, I treasure them even more than before and dread their loss. They seem to be an extremely reliable guide to actions ranging from crossing the road to understanding how other people are feeling and how they are likely to act. I am sure Hoops sees them the same way.

Some sources of knowledge and pleasure are however non-sensory. If you ask me, for instance, whether the number that when multiplied by itself equals 2 can be written as a fraction with a finite numerator and finite denominator, my feeling of satisfaction in knowing the answer (it's "no" by the way) is not one I can trace to the use of sight, hearing, taste, smell or touch. So some knowledge - in this case that we should not waste our time looking for such a fraction - does seem to come to us independent of the senses. There you are, Hoops.

The question arising from the OP is simply this: if someone says they have a good and reliable guide to action based on a source other than the five senses, there is no reason to disbelieve them outright. But it is perfectly reasonable to ask that the person making that claim should back it up. The five senses set a very high standard for sheer usefulness and consistency. What is more, systematic reflection on what we learn from our unaided senses has enabled us to extend them to an amazing extent by the construction of devices ranging from the Hubble telescope to the scanning electron microscope, from the mass spectrometer to the Large Hadron Collider.

If religious faith is to compete with our five old friends and their children, its advocates will have to make a very good case. Hoops?

[_honorentheos]

Hoops, this is a false statement.

Did you mean to suggest that Themis has not provided evidence that his five senses give him perfect access to reality, or absolute access?

It's a significant distinction.

Oh, and you said you'd work on a response to my request earlier in the thread. I am hoping you can find time to get to that this weekend.

Except it's not a false statement. He's offered evidence that he claims supports his view that his five sense give him access to reality. I've shown that one can not make that assumption - which is all it is.

Not true.

Take the example about blue vs. lightwaves. Even if you claim that the description of the lightwave at frequency "x" is more accurate than using the term "blue" to describe something accessed through sight (one of the senses in question) you are acknowledging that sight provided Themis/Chaps/whomevermadetheclaim access. You seem to want to argue about how exact that access is (i.e. - the access provided by sight is less accurate than the access provided by a combination of senses applied through experimentation and independent verification) but you haven't shown this isn't access to something external to the person. And that external whatever is, I suppose, what is being discussed as reality.

So far as I read it, you are trying to nit-pick their argument on the grounds of exactness without addressing the much more problematic issue - do you have a better tool for accessing reality than has been proposed and if so, how does it work? How do YOU claim to have access to something that is wholly external to your self that is more accurate than the access provided through the senses?

[_Hoops]

Not true.

Take the example about blue vs. lightwaves. Even if you claim that the description of the lightwave at frequency "x" is more accurate than using the term "blue" to describe something accessed through sight (one of the senses in question) you are acknowledging that sight provided Themis/Chaps/whomevermadetheclaim access.

I am not acknowledging that at all. The accuracy of what produces blue-ness is irrelevant to the question. In this instant, you have no evidence that the lightwaves exist external to our preception of them - regardless if these waves are described as blue or measured in some way. You can say, that thing is blue, or you can measure the waves that produce blue-ness, but you are still left with the same problem, and it's a significant one. You are using the same mechanism(s) to come to these conclusions/evaluations. In addition, you have no evidence that what you've accessed through sight exists externally to your sight perception of them.

You seem to want to argue about how exact that access is (i.e. - the access provided by sight is less accurate than the access provided by a combination of senses applied through experimentation and independent verification)

No, I am arguing that there is no evidence that one has indeed accessed reality at all. It's not a question of degree, it's a question of "at all."

but you haven't shown this isn't access to something external to the person.

That's not up to me. That's up to the empiricists.

So far as I read it, you are trying to nit-pick their argument on the grounds of exactness without addressing the much more problematic issue - do you have a better tool for accessing reality than has been proposed and if so, how does it work?

Again, you have no evidence that your tool is effective at all, let alone that one way is better than another. If you can show that empiricism does give access to reality, then I'm happy to compare it to whatever other ways are out there. Until then, as it stands right now, you have no evidence at all that you've accessed reality to any degree.

[_Chap]

Bump. Nothing about 'reality' here for a change ...

....

Since the discussion began from a question that did not involve the word 'reality', I wonder if Hoops can be persuaded to discuss the OP without using this term?

Here is a start: Surely Hoops will agree that the five senses are an extremely helpful set of abilities. I assume that like me Hoops currently has a more or less functioning set of all of them. Through their use I can guide myself through much of my life - avoiding painful experiences and seeking out pleasurable ones, and using them to learn nearly all the things I know. Through them I interact with those I love. Loss of one of them would greatly diminish the pleasure I have from being alive. When I was a theist, I blessed my creator for having endowed me with the ability to perceive the richness of his world, to enjoy it and to understand it. As an atheist, I treasure them even more than before and dread their loss. They seem to be an extremely reliable guide to actions ranging from crossing the road to understanding how other people are feeling and how they are likely to act. I am sure Hoops sees them the same way.

Some sources of knowledge and pleasure are however non-sensory. If you ask me, for instance, whether the number that when multiplied by itself equals 2 can be written as a fraction with a finite numerator and finite denominator, my feeling of satisfaction in knowing the answer (it's "no" by the way) is not one I can trace to the use of sight, hearing, taste, smell or touch. So some knowledge - in this case that we should not waste our time looking for such a fraction - does seem to come to us independent of the senses. There you are, Hoops.

The question arising from the OP is simply this: if someone says they have a good and reliable guide to action based on a source other than the five senses, there is no reason to disbelieve them outright. But it is perfectly reasonable to ask that the person making that claim should back it up. The five senses set a very high standard for sheer usefulness and consistency. What is more, systematic reflection on what we learn from our unaided senses has enabled us to extend them to an amazing extent by the construction of devices ranging from the Hubble telescope to the scanning electron microscope, from the mass spectrometer to the Large Hadron Collider.

If religious faith is to compete with our five old friends and their children, its advocates will have to make a very good case. Hoops?

[_honorentheos]

<snip irrelevent information> you have no evidence at all that you've accessed reality to any degree.

Hoops, you either misunderstand the nature of evidence or are just stuck in an elementary school state of argumentation. You've admitted evidence has been presented (the blue - wavelength matters ARE evidence of something) even if you argue there is a problem with this evidence. It's not sufficient to claim that just because someone perceives blue or measures a wave that it's not evidence of some real event. You can claim the person is being deceived by the evidence into seeing/measuring something that is in fact not real. Or you can claim some other reality exists that is missed by this evidence. But to claim there is "no evidence" presented is just plain ignorant. You don't have to agree with the evidence. But to ignore it is dishonest. Is this the reality we should be more aware of? That you are dishonest? Hmmm.

So if you are sincere in what you said above you need to demonstrate your better way of accessing reality. You have something against which to compare it provided by Chaps and Themis. Get to it. It's not like you have NBA games to waste your time on.