Gabriella,
Okaaaay…
That’s another of your straw men. I’ve suggested no such thing. What I have suggested though is that it’s quite possible to write statements in ways that are less ambiguous than others. I mentioned a while back to Vlad medical ethicists for example (albeit that the point fell on deaf ears). What they do is to write guidance, codes of conduct etc with as much clarity as possible so that they have practical usefulness in hospitals and the like.
That’s not to say that they cover all eventualities, which is why new situations often have to be considered on a case-by-case basis, but it is to say that they didn’t instead think, “let’s do this in some vague versifying”. You keep coming back to a binary notion of “needing interpretation vs pellucid” when in fact there’s a whole spectrum of clarity in between.
That’s why your references to the UN and the like fail. Yes of course there’s inevitably the risk of ambiguity in their resolutions, as there is in any other attempt to codify behaviours (the Geneva Convention being another example) but at least there’s enough certainty to be functionally useful. Now compare that with “holy” texts that by comparison are essentially palimpsests – you can overwrite them again and again as interpretations change.
No I keep coming back to what I learned when I did a law degree - that when Parliament drafts laws they can't make them too specific as it would mean having to draft millions of laws as the specific law would not be fit for purpose as it would not cover even slightly different circumstances - and that this would make for a cumbersome, unworkable legal system. Therefore a balance has to be achieved between detail and room for interpretation by a judge to allow the law to be used by a judge to apply to a wider set of circumstances and remove the need for constant revisions, amendments or re-drafting.
The Quran is used as a basis for people to add detail to develop a legal system, not as a legal system in itself. Sharia law has developed based on the principles in the Quran, the reported alleged actions and sayings of Prophet Mohammed, the reported alleged actions of his companions who became Caliph after he died, the opinions of scholars who lived about 200 years after Prophet Mohamed died, and who happened to have the patronage of the Caliph of the empires they lived in, which meant their particular schools of thought survived and became popular, and the opinions of other people over the centuries who gained power or influence after these scholars died.
Sharia law has developed in many different directions in many different countries in line with the wishes and culture and infrastructure of those in power at the time in those countries. - there is not one agreed upon sharia law.
I’m still sensing that you think that “God” has a different status to “guess”, and that would make you an unusual theist I think but again OK. I don’t know about Muslim practices, but on the rare occasions I’ve attended Christian ones I’ve always been struck by the way they’re peppered with “sures” and “certains”.
You may or may not have noticed that every single time I have read you describe my faith as a guess I have not contradicted you, at least I don't think I have, because I can see why it could be considered a guess.
However, the way I use the word "guess" is to say "I guess so" to indicate I don't have much interest in the subject matter. So for me this is more than a guess on the basis that I have more interest and commitment and resolve with the concept of a god in an Islamic narrative. So I would not want to use the word "guess" as it doesn't describe the whole picture.
If, on the other hand, your use of "guess" means that if you don't know it as a fact, and you have no demonstrable evidence to justify what you think then you are guessing, then I agree, by your definition i am guessing.
Nope. Again this fell on def ears when I explained Epistemology 101 to Vlad a while back but think of “truth” as an onion. At the centre is absolute truth. Now I’ve no idea whether there is such a thing, and nor how we’d even know we’d found it even if we did but conceptually at least let’s accept it.
On the next layer out there are objective truths. These concerns facts – the speed of light in a vacuum for example – that we accept as true on the basis of reason, evidence, intersubjective experience and the like. Note that there’s no way to bridge the gap to the centre of the onion, but these methods provide provisional, functionally useful truths and so we proceed on that basis.
Then on the outside layer are guesses: leprechauns, gods, unicorns and any other faith beliefs. These things are speculations of varying degrees of coherence, and sometimes enough evidence emerges for them to transition to the middle layer.
The question then concerns first whether there’s any method for faith alone to bridge the gap from outside layer to middle layer (there isn’t), and second what in practice happens when people people think nonetheless that their faith does nonetheless do that.
Whether you personally are one of those people is a secondary mater.
When you say is there any method for faith to bridge the gap - are you asking if faith can make it true for you? Because quite clearly I don't think it can.
Or are you talking about a person's emotion that inspires them to believe without having evidence that they can demonstrate to others, because their feeling/ personal experience gives them a particular emotion/ understanding/ perspective that they were seeking so validates their decision to persist with their belief in something they cannot fully explain or present a coherent concept of to someone else?
