That's what I'm saying YJ. The truth that nothin is known is the gateway to true belief and faith. I said that near the start of the thread and I'm saying it again now. There is no concrete. There is only faith.

When you realize that you have had faith all your life, you will become confident to believe what appears to you, and inspired to do your best to become aware of the world around you. Through faith.

Again I hope you will start with "why is there something rather than nothing?"

Now wait a second, just so we're perfectly clear, when you say faith you mean what, exactly? I remember I liked what you said way back then but I didn't get around to actually looking it over carefully as I promised I would.

*chortle* start with a question only slightly less obtuse than, "what is the meaning of life?"

Maybe I should be fair and re-read that before I make you explain it all over again.

So yeah, it umm... just looks like you're saying that faith is the exacty same thing as belief. Fine. But first be aware you're just going to irritate and put off atheists if you insist on saying "faith" due to the connotation. You might get your point across faster if you avoid that word.

Now, if what you truly mean to say is that, "When you realize that you have held beliefs all your life, you will become confident to believe what appears to you, and inspired to do your best to become aware of the world around you. Through belief.

Which is basically utter nonsense. No, I think you mean something a bit different when you say "faith." Care to try again?

And while you think about it, I will of course agree that nothing is known, and that everything that I consider *knowledge* for practical purposes is just belief that I really really think is probably knowledge.

None of that makes your questions any more interesting to me. Should they?

Well yes actually. If you believe that humanity amounts to more than just a temporary and transient species not destined to split along racial (or genetic if you prefer) fault lines. If you believe in every event having a cause. If you believe that somethings such as murder and rape are absolutely wrong. If you believe in love and compassion not requiring reciprocation. Then, go on, jump in and add that last belief to the set. I fear, however, that you are just a super-troll with his fingers firmly stuck in his ears, unless of course you do not actually believe these things.

Interesting discussion. I gather the Christian posters are basically saying that in order to believe in God, you already have to believe in God. So for someone like YJ, the procedure that would have worked is something like this: Close your eyes, forget everything you know, jump in the dark, and acquire faith. Once you are on the other side, you will realize the truth, you will be happy, things will now make perfect sense.

Easy to say this if you were brought up on the other side. But please appreciate how hard it is coming from this side. Try this: Please try to think about converting to Islam. How easy does it feel?

YJ _ When Thucy talks about there being no concrete, only faith, and that you have had faith all your life – I would assume that he is talking about meta-physical stuff. Ie there is no apple, there is only the perception of an apple -> collection of molecules -> atoms -> subatomic components -> the unknown. We perceive and apple, we have faith that other likewise perceive an apple and that an apple is an apple everywhere else, too…but it is all tken on faith and the only thing we “know” is what we perceive…with our eyes -> collection of molecules -> atoms -> subatomic particles -> something etc. And when you break the universe down to the infinitely small (or infinitely large/god if you are so compelled) then you have a greatly different thing that what you think…perhaps??

Sound right?

Hey fulhamish, how nice of you to drop in to insult me again. Should I bother responding, or would you like to save me the effort and scamper off with your prehensile tail between your legs as you did the last few times?

@krellin I think thucy is talking more about how nothing we believe can be sure to be knowledge. It's all just beliefs in the end that we hope are true. That part I agree with. What I don't follow is why that makes any of those other questions more interesting.

I'm terribly bored with the big "why" questions. I'm more concerned with the "how," of things, because we can use something more than just speculation.

Science is the search for the "how" and philosophy the search for the "why". Fact versus truth. Observation versus force behind what is observed. If all you want is how, then that is fine. But some of us seek a deeper understanding than science can give.

+1 Draug's post. I'd add that religion has supplemented both of those at times, it has had many deficiencies in the how, but particularly has provided a why to people in very desperate times. I admire more areligious philosophy, but it had its place. Likewise science has sometimes attempted to tell us why, sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly.

I equate philosophy, religion, and spirituality in the same large group. Philosophy encompasses religion and spirituality and religion and spirituality have some overlap.

@yellow thank you for your non-answer. Par for the course.

Why does it seem that all the answers to the "why" questions seem to be central to the human condition? Is it because people as a whole are proud and selfish and need to assume God/the universe has something special in store for us? Is it because all the questions are proud and human-central to begin with? I can't help but feel that the questions that God and religion answer are so constricted in their context that they would never even fathom the possibility that humanity is inconsequential to the grand purpose of everything. This rigid context makes religious study generally inaccessible to me, as I feel all questions/answers involved are biased to the human condition and can't take a step back from that assumption that humanity is relevant to the how and why of the universe.

y2k - if humanity is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things...the murder and mayhem are also inconsequential. The notion of being nice to each other loses all meaning - in the grand scheme of things - and you will never be able to argue otherwise *IF* humanity is inconsequential.

Because if 10 billion living beings...and however many billions have come and gone and will come and go, are inconsequential -- then it sure as hell doesn't matter a whit if I ass rape you and kill you and take your shit.

If God does not exist, then anything is permitable...

And the de-evolution of YJ's thread has begun...

Y2 has given a very honest answer from the atheist perspective. On that honesty, at least, he should be congratulated.

Ah, but the truly big one is *not* homo sapiens centric or even earth centric. But why questions are centered around us is because we haven't met any life forms outside our own planet to give us reason to question the earth centric view.

"If you believe that humanity amounts to more than just a temporary and transient species not destined to split along racial (or genetic if you prefer) fault lines."

I don't believe this, on such a reductionist level.

"If you believe in every event having a cause. If you believe that somethings such as murder and rape are absolutely wrong."

This does not require religion

"If you believe in love and compassion not requiring reciprocation."

This does not require religion.

"Then, go on, jump in and add that last belief to the set."

I'd rather not, because there is not evidence for it and quite frankly it is irrelevant.

"I fear, however, that you are just a super-troll with his fingers firmly stuck in his ears, unless of course you do not actually believe these things."

And this bit is just plain childish.

Alright alright aright everyone let's not let this get out of control. I would like to respond to YJ.

But YJ, krellin is right and you are right about what I am saying here.

There is a fundamental *mystery* to the world, because we will never be able to apprehend the true nature of things. We are across a divide from it. Krellin's apple is fundamentally mysterious. Many thinkers, artists, and so on, saw the *real world* as "strange place". Reality really IS stranger than fiction, because, who knows anything about it?

There is a deep mystery about what underlies our perceptions of things.

Are belief and faith the same? In a quick answer I would say yes but as you say the connotations are different. Let me sketch the difference:

Many, many people in this world have not thought for very long about the proposition that nothing is known. Most just brush it off the way Hume did: "Philosophy would render us entirely pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it." They basically say, yeah well, it still seems like I know certain things. If they even get that far.

So far the large majority of people many think that what they believe is often not just a faith, but is actually true.

There is a nuanced difference between believing something, but understanding that it may not be true, and "simple" belief wherein you are closer to thinking you know something. Ask your average Joe if he knows it's the year 2014 and he'll say yes.

Which, as I have hopefully demonstrated, is nonsense. The Joe believes its 2014 and nothing more, and what does 2014 mean anyway?

And when you realize this, you begin to see that belief is more like faith than knowledge - it is a hope, rather than much of anything else, that something is true.

If you are deciding to accept what appears to you to be true as your beliefs, then we are pretty much on the same page. I can't imagine what else to choose to believe. What use is it to, say, believe I don't exist, when it sure as hell seems like I do?

Okay, so I assume we are still on the same page up to this point. Nothing is really known for sure, all belief is essentially faith (you call this an irrelevant distinction but you do agree at least), but what we decide to believe should be based on what appears, not on something else. Either way it's a shot in the dark but it feels like a REAL shot in the dark if we just believe something other than what appears, for no apparent reason.

Alright.

But now I want to challenge you on what is appearing to you, and this is the hard part, because you are going to hear some of what I say and recoil because it may sound anti-science.

I want you to shed for a moment the science/religion dynamic. Forget it. Leave it behind. We're searching for Truth. Who cares what camp we end up in. Forget what science teaches. Forget what religion teaches. Come back to your appearances as a child learning everything for the first time. Tabula rasa.

So here you are. What is true, then? What appears to be true, at least?

If you are anything like me, some of the first things that bubble up into your mind will be things along these lines:

"Well, I see that I exist, and inhabit a body. I see that I am in control of my body, for the most part. There are other objects around me that I'm not in control of, but it seems like there are other beings, humans, that are more or less like me in that they exist and control their bodies, too."

Would you agree up to this point? Don't start going on about the scientific method or studies show or whatever just yet. We're not there yet. All that stuff has a foundation, and we have to build that foundation first.

When I am trying to piece together an accurate worldview, as a pyrrhonist, I find that there is a general rule of thumb that makes sense to go by, I usually refer to is as a "hierarchy of appearances."

What this basically means is that some "appearances" that we would point to are weaker, or further removed from direct experience, than others.

I'll throw out a couple examples so you can see what I mean.

All of these are true, but they aren't true to the same degree:

-It appears that the stars in the sky are like other suns.
-It appears that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old.
-It appears that I am 23 years old.
-It appears that my eyes are the place from which I see.
-It appears that I am typing into a computer at this moment.
-It appears that I exist and have not yet died.
-It appears that I woke up from sleep about two hours ago.

Do you see how most of these appearances are actually based on entirely different things? Some of them are "learned" from science, which, when you think about what is happening, is actually just you trusting the testimony of experts, rather than actually experiencing the appearnce yourself, in a lot of cases. You read words written by someone with a PhD, their words align with your notions of how science is done, other people agree, it is published in a reputable journal, and so you take it to be true.

There's nothing wrong with that, but you must admit that from this pyrrhonian perspective that is several steps further removed than "I exist and have not yet died" is. That appearance is *direct*. I can't really prove it any more than I can prove anything, but it appears to me front and center, with almost no mediation, unlike many other "facts" I know.

Are we still on the same page?

I would argue that my own existence as a being, and my free will as a being, are both basal appearances (again, forget what science teaches a moment, and focus on your appearances, because that is what we have agreed to take as the ultimate indicator of truth) and not only that, without free will as a being, I actually don't exist, at least not in the same way.

What is a rock? A collection of particles. It is acted on by the world and obeys physical laws. It doesn't act. Whereas I, as a being, have the sense that I both act upon the world and the world acts on me, despite feeling that I am also made up of particles from nature.

So in some sense the rock doesn't exist, because it's really just something I named. In the absolute, there is nothing to distinguish it from any other clumps of particles of arbitrary dimensions. This feels different for me and other beings though. There is something going on there - there is something to point to as the source of agency.

What more I know about this, I can't really say. I don't know much more than that it seems to be true. But that's the case with everything. Nothing I believe has any "real" basis or evidence, it just boils down to "it seems like it's true." So I don't feel like I'm exposing myself to criticism for admitting that this is why it seems true. It just does, seem that way that is.

I am arguing that free will is a more basal appearance the are the suggestions of science that there is no free will. This is not just because the free will appearance is literally inside my head, and the science appearance is based on a huge artifice of learning, any point along the way being vulnerable to re-consideration and error.

It's also because, without free will, as I said, I have to also sort of admit that I don't even exist. And I certainly feel that I exist.

Let me take another tack for a moment, to explain this is a slightly different way.

If I am a devout Mormon and science begins to suggest that Noah's flood didn't literally happen and that Israelites never lived in North America before Columbus, I have a problem. Because there is no real appearance of the things that I believed, other than Mormon teaching. If I, as this Mormon, am still coming from the same philosophical position I outlined above, I'd be forced to abandon those beliefs, because it doesn't appear that they're true.

I wager you're going to argue that it's the same with the beliefs about free will, discrete existence as a being and an agent, and so on: the evidence we do have contradicts those beliefs, you would say.

However these two scenarios are not equivalent in the slightest. The Mormon has no evidence that Noah's flood literally occurred, other than the testimony of his elders. The scientists also relies on testimony but has a pretty solid system of logic and proof to be fairly convincing to the rational-minded, most of the time. So the scientist would win out.

But when all science can do is *suggest* there is no free will, simply because "Occam's Razor" or, basically, "scientific intuition," what is really going on there is fundamentalism. The scientist has begun to build a set of metaphysical beliefs, which have served him well, and is applying those beliefs to the areas where he still has not discovered the truth, such as with the nature of consciousness. It's an illusion, they say. Free will and consciousness are illusions.

But here is where I am not like the Mormon: no they aren't illusions. Maybe the Mormon God is an illusion. That is relatively easy to accept. He never appeared to me. But my own existence? My own agency? That is not in doubt. It is as basic an experience as my eyesight or my memory, indeed, even my thought life is predicated on this appearance.

Are you with me so far? I don't want to keep barreling ahead because I feel like you are unpersuaded.

@fulhamish. You do know that you sound like an idiot when you say, "thanks for the non-answer," when you never posted a question. I mean, you can see that right? Did you learn this logic in Bible school? Did Jesus have a little speech bubble coming out of his mouth in the big picture book where he said, "Blessed are the non-sequiters?" Fuck right off, fulhamish. Fuck right the fuck off.

@y2k I also appreciate that comment.

@krellin we're still holding it together... barely

@thucy I was pretty much with you until you said that rocks don't exist. After that it got pretty disjointed for me, to be honest. I don't care about free will, and no scientist I know actively dismisses it or even really cares about the question (at least not that they've mentioned). Most likely because I really have no idea what it is you're trying to sell me on.

Ultimately, the point I'm coming away with in response is to say it's fine to say that beliefs are the foundation of our interpretation of the world. What I'm not going to accept is that all beliefs are equally justified, or that all epistemologies by which we may analyze the world are equally valid for a given purpose.

I doubt Thucy's existence.

Genuine question for you. Did you ever go through that stage as a child, in long car journeys, where you wondered whether anything beyond the horizon left and right really existed? That the idea that they might not was so troubling you had a distinct urge to just go off at a tangent one day and prove to yourself it was really there?

To boil Thucy's channeling obi down to a simple statement. We know nothing exists for certain because everything is what we perceive, including the perceptions of others. Existentially, the only thing we know for certain is that, on some level, we exist but it may be in a way we don't even understand even to the point of us being God in a self-delusional state because we went insane of millenia and eons of not having another being around us so we made up an entire universe.

For more on this concept, see John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon's Dark Star.