Gabriella,
BHS - you've still got it wrong. I did not ask Ippy to talk about his belief in teapots. I suggest you re-read my posts. I asked him to explain the teapot if he thought it worked for him as a point in this discussion, rather than expect me to look it up.
I did. These ones for example:
If you want to talk about a teapot go ahead
Not a problem for me - I, along with many others I suspect, seem to have got by just fine in life without teapots and Hansal and Gretal but if they are useful for you by all means indulge.
If Hansel and Gretal works for you and is an integral part of your daily activities - feel free to teach your children Hansel and Gretal.
There’s more, but you get the point I hope – telling him he’s free to talk about teapots (and Hansel & Gretel) if they “work for you”, are “an integral part of your daily activities” etc is exactly what you did. At no point though did he suggest that either teapots or Hansel & Gretel were remotely important or even interesting to him – rather he was explaining Russell’s point that non-falsifiability tells you nothing about probability as you implied it did (“I find the concept of a "God that can't be defined" not that difficult to believe in, once you get to the point where you can't rule out the supernatural entirely”). No more, no less.
No, you're wrong - he wasn't explaining anything - maybe he is not capable of explaining it. He told me to look it up. I thought I would help coax him out of his reluctance to post by encouraging him.
Yes he was. Russell’s teapot is a commonplace, especially here – if, say, he’d said, “it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack” he wouldn’t then have to explain how that metaphor works. Nonetheless, others have explained it (myself for example in 21214) only for you to post after that, “If you want to talk about a teapot go ahead - now's your chance. By the way - don't take this comment too seriously - you should lighten up.” (21235).
That’s the point: Russell’s teapot isn’t “about the teapot” at all.
The only time I mentioned a belief in teapots was #21230 because it followed on from my point about the benefit I derived from a belief in God and if Ippy wanted me to believe in teapots etc he would have to come up with similar benefits to practices and rituals as religion provides for the 2 to be comparable. And I did not state that Ippy believed in orbiting teapots. What I said was "if other people, including Ippy, perceive a benefit from the practices and rituals associated with belief in orbiting teapots...".
See above.
A person can perceive a benefit in a belief without actually holding that belief themselves. For example, I can perceive a benefit in believing that Jesus was God walking on Earth or the belief that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, even if I don't hold that belief myself.
Relevance?
See #21230. And I did demonstrate a first wrong.
Nope. You just repeated your rather odd attempt to connect finding a benefit in a belief with the truthfulness of that belief, albeit without troubling with some logic to connect from one to the other.
Also, not really sure what you find difficult to grasp about the phrase "works for you". Ippy is bringing up concepts or ideas - if he thinks they work for him in some way to explain his perspective, it is up to him to elaborate the idea and why.
I don’t. What I find “difficult to grasp” is the bit you excluded – ie, the
teapot. No-one (least of all ippy) suggested that a celestial teapot “works for him”. What does work for him though is the force of the argument that just happens to involve a teapot for illustrative purposes only.
Because a belief that's true for me is based on my personal experiences associated with that belief - it's a leap of faith based on that personal experience. This is not contentious – how else does a true for me belief develop? As opposed to a belief that I want to be true for you, which then needs to be demonstrated as true and if there is no methodology to demonstrate the truth of that belief then I am only left with a true for me belief based on my personal experience.
Again, you seem to be drawing an (unargued) link between epistemology and benefit. The second bit (the “true for you” part) is true but not the first. Why does finding a belief to be beneficial persuade you that that belief must therefore be true?
It’s none of my business why you do that by the way, but I just find it odd. If I felt really happy whenever I contemplated my belief in, say, fairies, I still think I’d trouble myself with the entirely separate issue of their probable truth.
No it's not an error in reasoning. It's much like hiring a tutor. If my daughter perceives that a particular tutor helped her get an A in a Maths test on a particular topic, she is more likely to believe that the same tutor can help her with do well in other Maths topics because she finds the tutor's approach for teaching her Maths works for her.
And that’s another one. She may, but that’s about the effectiveness of a method – not about the truth or otherwise of claims of fact.
In this case the tutor is a book and having found that certain concepts or ideas put forward by the book works for me, I am more inclined to try other ideas in the book and more inclined to believe they might be of benefit to me. A religion is putting forward more than the existence of God. In this case the religion is putting forward the existence of an undefined supernatural entity and stating that there are benefits to adopting certain ideas, practices and rituals.
Doesn’t work. The philosophy bit is fine (if that works for you) but the linking of that to claims of fact isn’t. That a book tells you to be nice to puppies tells you nothing about the value of its additional claims about dragons.
Given there is no methodology to prove the existence of said entity, there is only the possibility that if Option A: belief in the entity together with the ideas, practices and rituals feels more beneficial than Option B: the ideas, practices and rituals without belief in the entity (when both options are tried) then it makes Option A the belief in the entity a more appealing idea based on personal experience.
“Appealing” is epistemically worthless though – for myself as well as for others. I might find lots of fact claims appealing, but that tells me nothing whatever about whether any of them are true.
No it's not. You're using the term incorrectly.
Yes it is and no I’m not.
I am not trying to make an argument against anything or misrepresenting anyone's position and arguing against that position, I am merely making a statement that "I can't make a positive statement that Gods and invisible orbiting teapots don't exist." . You have made that same statement on this forum – that you cannot claim God does not exist. Each time you made that statement were you indulging in a straw man?
But that’s not all you did. What you actually did was to say: “I find the concept of a "God that can't be defined" not that difficult to believe in, once you get to the point where you can't rule out the supernatural entirely”.
I merely ask what you think the connection to be between the two parts of that statement. Once you “get to the point where you can’t rule out the supernatural entirely” (actually you can by the way, for the same reason you can rule out a four-sided triangle – incoherence, but that’s another discussion), why does that make the concept of an undefinable “God” “not that difficult to believe in”?
I find it not that difficult to believe in a God that can't be defined if I am not ruling out the existence of the supernatural. Not sure how to explain that any differently - a God that can't be defined is an example of something undefined that would come into the category of supernatural. I then read the Quran and came across a God that can’t be defined. I did not find it that difficult to believe in this concept of God.
The way to explain it differently would be to drop the
non sequitur part. How does “not ruling out the existence (presumably you meant “possibility” here?) of the supernatural mean that believing in “God” is not difficult? It’s actually difficult for many reasons – impossibility would be just one of them.
I could have said:
Ippy if the thought experiment works for you to illustrate some point please elaborate - instead I shortened it to "if the teapot works for you"
Yes, which is why you were questioned about it. He didn’t say that the teapot worked for him at all.
I have explained that I like the phrase "if it works for you". If you don't like how I express my points I'm afraid that is your problem. I don't intend to change. It's up to you if you want to jump in and and respond to points where I have used the phrase "if it works for you" or if you want to ignore those posts and only respond to others or if you choose not to respond to any, because the words you are reading annoy you in some way.
You’re missing the point again, possibility deliberately? “If it works for you” as a phrase is fine. The problem though comes when you replace the “it” of the argument with the “it” of the teapot.
ETA: BHS - IMO you need to forget about the teapot too. I was aware of the thought experiment. My point was that if Ippy wants a response from me on it he needs to form an argument in his own words, otherwise I choose not to respond other then to ask him to elaborate on his argument, which he declined to do.
If you were aware of the thought experiment why then in your replies to ippy did you focus on the (irrelevant) teapot part and not the (relevant) argument part?
