Gabriella,
Nope - you're still wrong and it is not irrelevant. We were discussing using faith to justify claims of fact and we were also discussing subjective experiences that lead to belief. See #29119 where I said it was fine for the evangelist because "The whole point is to try to persuade others that your particular non-religious belief or religious interpretation has a message that resonates on an ethical/ transcendental level.
You replied that "The big price is that they have no method to validate their claims.".
In #28130 I agreed that they have no method to validate their faith but that this was not an issue for evangelists because "They rely on subjective experience - it's a numbers game - someone in their audience may try a particular interpretation of faith, someone may find something of personal value in it"
You then tried to claim this approach does not work for claims of fact about the world. My response #29136 was that "Competing claims of belief aren't necessarily problematic, and people not sharing your beliefs or claims of fact goes with the territory of beliefs that can't be objectively validated as true."
You seemed to be trying to distinguish religious claims of fact from other claims of fact by asserting that religious claims involve certainty. Presumably you are aware that non-religious claims of fact based on what people believe to be true involves certainty?
And your point about being able to investigate non-religious claims of fact is also incorrect. As much as a person can claim you have a soul they can also claim you have success - according to their definition of "soul" and their definition of "success".
My point was that it is not necessarily problematic that people make claims of fact based on subjective evidence.
Very sneaky. In Reply 29133 I said:
"
Which is fine when people say, "I find believing X to be true is useful" and it doesn't matter much what "X" happens to be - your god, another god, whatever - it's basically a game of celestial yoga. The minute though such people overreach into objective claims of fact about the world - there really was a resurrection, there really was a "prophet", there really is a "soul" etc - then it all collapses in a heap of competing (and often mutually incompatible) claims and assertions."That is I expressly opposed subjective claims of ideas and beliefs that people find personally useful with objective claims of fact about the world.
In your Reply
to that post specifically 29136 you said:
"Not sure what you mean by "it all collapses". Competing claims of belief aren't necessarily problematic, and people not sharing your beliefs or claims of fact goes with the territory of beliefs that can't be objectively validated as true.
I can see it is an issue when people try to force their ideas through using violence or intimidation, but using language to seek to persuade others to support an idea through the use of rhetoric and metaphors and similes seems fairly standard behaviour, as we are seeing in the Brexit debate. Lots of competing claims of facts or predictions for the future.
I get that it appears particularly problematic for you that competing religious claims have a supernatural element, but I don't see it as any more problematic than competing claims about national strategic interests. Some people do strange and sometimes horrible things to promote their claims and ideas, but many don't."I then explained your category error of comparing “religious claims” with “claims about national strategic interest” when the religious claims are claims of objective fact (“god”, “soul”, “prophet” etc) whereas the claims you used for analogy purposes do not entail claims of objective fact.
Since then you’ve twisted in the wind by trying to elide the two, but the qualitative difference between them is perfectly clear.
To be frank I don’t care much: either accept that the analogy failed because it was a category error, or that you weren’t attempting an analogy but that the “national strategic interest” stuff therefore had no relevance to the topic of claiming objective facts about the world.
Whereas I disagree with that generalisation…
The “privileging of faith claims over guessing” bit? Why? Are you seriously suggesting that pretty much all “people of faith” don’t think that heir faith is a more reliable guide to truth than just guessing?
Seriously though?
- I don't have a problem with some claims being privileged - it depends on what the claim is about and what the privilege is and whether the claim is deemed by a majority of people to cause demonstrable harm from which people need protection.
That’s up to you, but you’re wrong not to have “a problem” about that I think. It’s a general principle - if in the public square you privilege one “but that’s my faith” over just guessing, on what basis could you then deny any other “but that’s my faith” over just guessing when the methodology (such as it is) is the same in each case –
faith?
How is a person who claims as a fact that they have success "investigation apt" when it can be based on nothing more than their perspective, which that person has defined as "success" while someone else would define as "failure" ?
Easily. There’s a fundamental qualitative difference in principle between “X is an objective fact about the world because my faith tells me it’s a fact” and “Y is a fact if various investigable metrics tell me so”. No matter how difficult those metrics may be to use in practice, the difference between the two positions is a profound one. It’s the difference if you like between “God is because that’s my faith” and “the Higgs-Boson looks likely, and here are the (very difficult) experiments you’d need to do to confirm or deny the proposition”.
I wasn't aware that Alan had claimed objective evidence for his claims of fact about God and souls. He had offered subjective evidence - his experiences - and his reasoning was based on his subjective evidence.
He claims “souls” to be an objective fact about the world. He doesn’t bother with the evidence bit. That’s the point.
I disagree - an idea of a God can be an objective claim of fact.
You misunderstand. You’ve tried to elide “ideas” in general (about strategic planning for example) with claims of objective fact (“gravity exists”, "God is” etc) about the world as if they’re epistemically equivalent. They’re not. There’s a fundamental difference between a claim of something objectively existing/not existing in the world and a subjective experience (“believing in god X makes me feel better about myself” etc).
