Belief Vs. Knowledge

[alexey]

Being a Christian is like standing behind a plexiglass window and watching people walk over a cliff while you are pounding on the window to warn them and they refuse to hear you.

The Bible says that man is without excuse as to not believing in Him and that is true but only to the christian. After I became a christian the evidence was completely overwhelming!

I was a non-believer before I was a believer. I was blind before my eyes were opened.

It's my experience and I don't expect anyone to believe it because I didn't believe other people's story before I became a born again christian either.

But I will preach it until my last dying breath because I have a duty to warn and spread the Good News!

Seek with all your heart and you shall find.

God bless I hope this helps someone....

If the god of the Old Testament is in charge of this whole thing, that's not good news.

 

The LORD slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man, and the firstborn of beast.

[Elessar78]

I realize that it's now a meme out there on the interwebz, but I find it interesting that we are, essentially, space dust from the big bang. Space dust that somehow organized itself to become sentient and observe the universe. Why is the iron, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in my body alive and the iron, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in a shovelful of dirt inert? 

[PeterMP]

Faith is pretending to know things you do not know. 

 

You would not need faith if you had sufficient evidence.

 

You do not need faith to think that minds are products of brains and that minds die when brains die.  Live your life to the fullest and try to enjoy every day because it's wonderful.

 

Sufficient is a bit of a slippery word, no?

 

What constitutes suffecient?

[757SeanTaylor21]

Out of curiosity, what part of your original post wasn't opinion?

It's up to you believe it as a fact or opinion. In my case I know it's a fact because what I've experienced is out of my control. I know that working in the prophetic was not happening in my wordly days for example. Whether you choose to a accept it as such is all the difference. I can only spread the truth about Him and let His word defend itself that's not my job.

[Burgold]

Faith is pretending to know things you do not know. 

 

You would not need faith if you had sufficient evidence.

 

You do not need faith to think that minds are products of brains and that minds die when brains die.  Live your life to the fullest and try to enjoy every day because it's wonderful.

I'd argue that faith can be based on evidence to.  Sometimes, it's faulty evidence, but evidence non the less.  For example, if you are a farmer and you see your crops whithering because of drought and you pray for rain and then the next day it does... that is evidence.  It likely is also coincidence, but it is evidence of prayer leading to an effect.  Sports fans develop all sorts of weird habits because they have evidence that if they do something or don't do something their team prospers.

 

Evidence is not the sole provence of the secular.  Now, I'd argue that in faith we rarely try to quantify evidence, but it surely is used as one of the the basises of faith.

[Kosher Ham]

Praying for rain is not evidence of anything. That's a terrible example of evidence.

It's an example of believing that is evidence, rather than accepting that it is merely coincidence.

 

I will likely never understand why the "loving God" even puts people that have faith into situations that force them to prove it more than they do already. They have to be down and out or on the brink of failure it seems far too often.

 

Reward the good people, let the bad people perish...

[Burgold]

Terrible evidence is still evidence

 

action reaction is a kind of evidence.  Sure, it's correlative and not causitive, but what the hey.

[Kosher Ham]

No it isn't. It's just terrible. haha.

 

Just because I am craving pizza and by coincidence my wife orders some for us before I get home...is not evidence.

 

I love you J.

[Burgold]

Evidence of her knowing you or telepathy perhaps?

[Botched]

Being a Christian is like standing behind a plexiglass window and watching people walk over a cliff while you are pounding on the window to warn them and they refuse to hear you.

 

 

A person of any other religion could say the exact same thing.

 

They've also found the one true path, just ask them.

[alexey]

 

I'd argue that faith can be based on evidence to.  Sometimes, it's faulty evidence, but evidence non the less.  For example, if you are a farmer and you see your crops whithering because of drought and you pray for rain and then the next day it does... that is evidence.  It likely is also coincidence, but it is evidence of prayer leading to an effect.  Sports fans develop all sorts of weird habits because they have evidence that if they do something or don't do something their team prospers.

 

Evidence is not the sole provence of the secular.  Now, I'd argue that in faith we rarely try to quantify evidence, but it surely is used as one of the the basises of faith.

And when somebody asks "why do you think praying made a difference?", you can answer "Because it rained after I prayed"

 

 

See, when you have evidence, you do not need to invoke faith

 

(when you get better evidence and start having doubts about the praying for rain, then you can change your mind or do the faith thing)

[PeterMP]

Faith is pretending to know things you do not know. 

 

You would not need faith if you had sufficient evidence.

 

You do not need faith to think that minds are products of brains and that minds die when brains die.  Live your life to the fullest and try to enjoy every day because it's wonderful.

 

Sufficient is a bit of a slippery word, no?

 

What constitutes suffecient?

 

***EDIT***

I'm going to make some comments based on what I expect your responses will be:

 

1.  The idea that the world is reproducible is an assumption and the idea that the world what is "extremely highly" (this will depend on your meaning of extremely highly, but I'll touch on that below) reproducibile is based frequently on rejecting evidence that it isn't.

 

For example, earlier in the thread somebody brought up airplanes and the fact that people ride them essentially as evidence that things are reproducibile.  But it isn't hard to find testimony of pilots (and even pilots and co-pilots) that thier planes did something that it shouldn't have done.  There are planes that crash for reasons that we don't know. We regularly reject this evidence of irreproducibility as some unexplained reproducibility.

 

2.  Evidence of reproducibility is based mostly on our "memory" (I'll use memory in this context to indicate external forms of memory too so things like videos).  This evidence though is based on our assumption of reproducibility.  How do I know that books fall of the shelf?  Because my memory tell me they do.  How do I know that my memory is accurate? because if I knock a bock off the shelf it falls.

 

You're boot strapping evidence for an assumption on the assumption.

 

This is especially troubling in the context of individual memory vs. average/collective memory.  If we look at individual memories, it would suggest there is much more variation in the universe then most people would like to accept (e.g. we consider individual eye witness testimony bad because there tends to be a lot of variation).  What evidence is there that individual memories are worse than collective/average memories?  Evidence that assumes average/collective memories are better than individual memories.

 

Now, we can even put this in the context of science.  Going back to the example of a guy with a beer in his fridge.  He puts it on the middle shelf and goes to bed.  The next morning he wakes up, and it is in his potato salad on the bottom shelf.  He tells you he locked the doors and windows and he's got an alarm system and a good watch dog so nobody else came into the house.  You'll tell him is individual memory is bad because our collective memories tell us that beers don't tunnell through fridge shelves.

 

But the fact of the matter is that quantum mechanics tells us that, it does happen at low probabilities.  You've rejected something science does happen based on a set of assumptions of a highly reproducibile universe.

 

It even gets worse if we assume something like the multi-world version of quantum mechanics.  In this case, everything that can happen has happened in some universe.  I've played a good number of games of chance in my life (lived in states where at least slots have been legal a lot).  There is a universe where I've won every game of chance I've ever played.

 

There is also a universe where the guys beer ends up in the potato salad the shelf below every morning even though he put it on the shelf above the night before.  Now, that guy is actually lucky because he can demonstrate it, but there are also lot's of universes out there where it happens every night EXCEPT for the cases where he brings people in to observe it or it happens on a infrequent, but some what irregular basis (maybe once a year)- in which case he's considered a crack pot.

 

Now, the statistical part of me sort of thinks we're balancing between false positives and false negative, and maybe we do lean a little towards the false negative side, which is fine because I'd generally rather have false positives than false negatives.

 

But that assumes that our collective memory is accurate and the things like relationship between mass and tunelling is what we think it is and something like tunelling itself hasn't affected that memory and/or our observations that have led us to that conclusion.

[alexey]

I'd say "sufficient evidence" is when you do not pretend to know things you do not know.

Faith is pretending to know things you do not know. Let's go with that.

As for the poor guy with the beer in his potato salad - we do not know what happened. We can talk about relative likelihood of different explanations or we can go with faith, pick one explanation, and pretend to know.

[Burgold]

Pick one explanation and pretend to know sounds an awful lot like faith to me.

[Kosher Ham]

Evidence of her knowing you or telepathy perhaps?

 

I do have a little ESP talents.

[alexey]

That's just the nature of beliefs. Beliefs are personal, and must be what feels right for you on a level others can't understand. There is no possible way to prove that God doesn't exist, nor is there a way to prove that he does exist. At least not in the ways currently available to humans. Therefore, any attempt to attack the personal beliefs of another is simply silly, regardless of what they may be. They're personal, they exist for that person and that person alone.

Beliefs are personal up until those persons go to the voting booth to take away other peoples rights, interfere with science education, etc.

[Zguy28]

Faith is pretending to know things you do not know. 

 

You would not need faith if you had sufficient evidence.

 

You do not need faith to think that minds are products of brains and that minds die when brains die.  Live your life to the fullest and try to enjoy every day because it's wonderful.

Actually, as a person of faith, "faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen."

A person of any other religion could say the exact same thing.

 

They've also found the one true path, just ask them.

Sure they could. Doesn't mean they are all correct or true. As heat is to cold, so truth is to untruth. The very concept of truth necessitates exclusivity and that there is also a way/belief/concept that is then not truth.

[alexey]

Actually, as a person of faith, "faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen."

Yes, pretend knowledge

[Zguy28]

I'd argue that faith can be based on evidence to.  Sometimes, it's faulty evidence, but evidence non the less.  For example, if you are a farmer and you see your crops whithering because of drought and you pray for rain and then the next day it does... that is evidence.  It likely is also coincidence, but it is evidence of prayer leading to an effect.  Sports fans develop all sorts of weird habits because they have evidence that if they do something or don't do something their team prospers.

 

Evidence is not the sole provence of the secular.  Now, I'd argue that in faith we rarely try to quantify evidence, but it surely is used as one of the the basises of faith.

Or the age-old gospel story of "Doubting" Thomas.

 

John 20:19-30

 

¹⁹ In the evening of that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because of their fear of the Jews. Then Jesus came, stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you!”

²⁰ Having said this, He showed them His hands and His side. So the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

²¹ Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” ²² After saying this, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³ If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

²⁴ But one of the Twelve, Thomas (called “Twin”), was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵ So the other disciples kept telling him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “If I don’t see the mark of the nails in His hands, put my finger into the mark of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will never believe!”

²⁶ After eight days His disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them. He said, “Peace to you!”

²⁷ Then He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and observe My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side. Don’t be an unbeliever, but a believer.”

²⁸ Thomas responded to Him, “My Lord and my God!”

²⁹ Jesus said, “Because you have seen Me, you have believed. Those who believe without seeing are blessed.”

³⁰ Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this book. ³¹ But these are written so that you may believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and by believing you may have life in His name.

 

Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)

Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers, Nashville Tennessee. All rights reserved.

Yes, pretend knowledge

I don't believe you.

[PeterMP]

 

I'd say "sufficient evidence" is when you do not pretend to know things you do not know.

Faith is pretending to know things you do not know. Let's go with that.



As for the poor guy with the beer in his potato salad - we do not know what happened. We can talk about relative likelihood of different explanations or we can go with faith, pick one explanation, and pretend to know.

Okay, I agree with this (and this is related to the point that I made to the other poster about what part of his post wasn't opinion going the other direction).

 

But we all do this to some extent.

 

and especially you

 

Look at your comment about prayer.  Where is the non-knowing talk about relative likelihood in that post?

 

"(when you get better evidence and start having doubts about the praying for rain, then you can change your mind or do the faith thing)"
 

Where is the if in that statement?

 

That is a faith base statement.

 

And you've been doing this for years now, and I've been pointing it out to you.

 

(I've spent hundreds of pages in posts making 3 relatively simple points to you:

1.  That without objetive morals talking about good/bad/better/worse in on any larger scale (e.g. the whole human population) is impossible.

 

2.  That without what is traditionally thought of as free will (not a probability/stochastic/quantum based decision making process that appears to be free will) talking about good/bad/better worse has no utility (e.g. if a person can't choose to do good then telling them that they should do good has is useless).

 

3.  That everything is based on some assumption and therefore has some probability of being wrong, including all of science and in many cases even determining what the probability is very difficult if not impossible (and this is what you've done here).

 

and in most cases, like this, you end up saying something agreeable, but in the next thread, you start all over again as if the previous conversations never happened.)

It's up to you believe it as a fact or opinion. In my case I know it's a fact because what I've experienced is out of my control. I know that working in the prophetic was not happening in my wordly days for example. Whether you choose to a accept it as such is all the difference. I can only spread the truth about Him and let His word defend itself that's not my job.

 

From an external perspective what is less of an opinion in your post than the initial post that you responded to?

 

If it is up to me, isn't that the defintion of an opinion?

[Mr. Sinister]

Faith is pretending to know things you do not know. 

 

You would not need faith if you had sufficient evidence.

 

You do not need faith to think that minds are products of brains and that minds die when brains die.  Live your life to the fullest and try to enjoy every day because it's wonderful.

 

Well okay then...

 

I was actually going to respond to the original post you made before the edit, as if you were somehow implying that my word would come crashing down if I were to face the "True"  realization that there is nothing after death, or that I'm not already "Living my life to the fullest,"

 

It's those kinds of patronizing responses that I was referencing in my post. You respond to me in a way that makes me believe that you think I cannot accept any other alternative, when that couldn't be further from the truth. Like I said, the fact that no one can be 100% certain of what is or isn't out there, is what leads me to come to the conclusion/belief that I have. You don't agree? Cool. Don't patronize me though.

[Zguy28]

I know this is a much used point in an argument, but we'll give it one more ride.

 

An example of an accepted "fact": Do we know or believe that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC? If we asked 10 historians, what would their answer be? Know or believe?

 

According to Alexey this should fall under the same area of "pretend knowledge".

[alexey]

But we all do this to some extent.

and especially you

Look at your comment about prayer. Where is the non-knowing talk about relative likelihood in that post?

"(when you get better evidence and start having doubts about the praying for rain, then you can change your mind or do the faith thing)"

Where is the if in that statement?

That is a faith base statement.

I have knowledge about what causes rain and I made a statement based on that knowledge.

I did not mention any IFs because I assumed the knowledge of prayer-rain connection would turn out to be incorrect. Based on my knowledge about rain, that was a safe assumption.

1. That without objetive morals talking about good/bad/better/worse in on any larger scale (e.g. the whole human population) is impossible.

Can we replace "objective morals" with "agreement"?

Constitution is working out just fine for us, right?

2. That without what is traditionally thought of as free will (not a probability/stochastic/quantum based decision making process that appears to be free will) talking about good/bad/better worse has no utility (e.g. if a person can't choose to do good then telling them that they should do good has is useless).

Yes, I am generally for educating to do good, teaching to do good, etc, rather than just telling people to do good.

The way we treat criminals, people without adequate access to food or education, etc, is not good. I could argue that our traditional understanding of "free will" is responsible for that, and it has caused a lot of harm.

3. That everything is based on some assumption and therefore has some probability of being wrong, including all of science and in many cases even determining what the probability is very difficult if not impossible (and this is what you've done here).

I see a fundamental difference between knowledge systems and simply pretending to know things.

It's those kinds of patronizing responses that I was referencing in my post. You respond to me in a way that makes me believe that you think I cannot accept any other alternative, when that couldn't be further from the truth. Like I said, the fact that no one can be 100% certain of what is or isn't out there, is what leads me to come to the conclusion/belief that I have. You don't agree? Cool. Don't patronize me though.

I am just pointing out that nobody has knowledge about what happens to "you" when you die but we do have knowledge about what happens to your brain and your body.

I know this is a much used point in an argument, but we'll give it one more ride.

An example of an accepted "fact": Do we know or believe that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC? If we asked 10 historians, what would their answer be? Know or believe?

According to Alexey this should fall under the same area of "pretend knowledge".

If would be pretend knowledge if, when asked why they know/believe, they would answer "I have faith"

[Zguy28]

If would be pretend knowledge if, when asked why they know/believe, they would answer "I have faith"

I have evidence (and better evidence than Caesar and the Rubicon). My faith is not in the fact of what Jesus did physically on the cross or healing others. That's the evidence so that we might have faith to believe in who he is. Because of that faith in who he is, I have certainty that Jesus accomplished what nobody else could, that he made atonement for me with God for the forgiveness of sins. The biggest evidence is the resurrection.

 

Come now Alexey, stick your fingers in the nail holes and believe.

[Botched]

Sure they could. Doesn't mean they are all correct or true.

 

 

It doesn't mean any of them are.

 

As heat is to cold, so truth is to untruth. The very concept of truth necessitates exclusivity and that there is also a way/belief/concept that is then not truth.

 

 

If you're saying that some people are wrong about their religion being the "true" one, I'd agree. In all likelihood, they've all got it wrong.