(Feb 25, 2018 02:59 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ] Just hit me, all these years I've been asking believers in everything from deities to Sasquatch to do the impossible....
PROVE IT. A belief, IMHO, can only maintain that status as long as there isn't any proof of it.
However I feel justified asking for proof whenever there are unsubstantiated facts written in to the language of the belief. I ask if this also an errant approach? Are unsubstantiated facts also beliefs and should I feel justified asking for their verification? It's a double edge sword. I'm practically forced to accept all the tenets of a belief unquestioningly*. I guess what bothers me is that God is a belief but so is a 'loving' God and I shouldn't question either. Seems to me that overall, people must be content in just believing, proof not being considered an option. Should believers be left alone to their own devices or am I wrong thinking this is an epiphany of sorts?
* don't think I've ever typed this word before...lol
I think it's all about intentionality.
"
Intentionality is the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs."
John Searle said it best when he said that our mind has the capacity to represent. It does that in a variety of ways and belief is one of the most important. Belief and desire are sort of matching concepts because with belief we represent how things are or how we think things are. That has a direction of "mind to world" fit. The mind is supposed to fit the world, but with desires we represent, not how we think things are, but how we want them to be. This has a "world to mind" direction of fit. The world is supposed to change to match the mind. Well, how then does all this work in regards to intentionality.
Beliefs are characteristically justified. Beliefs require justification in a way that desires and hunches don’t. Beliefs are characteristically justified by a position within a network of other beliefs, and other intentional states, and above all, a network that contains perception.
The remarkable thing is that with beliefs there’s a peculiar rational constraint in that the belief is not only caused by perception, which is often the case, but the belief itself is subject to rational assessment depending on, not just what you’ve seen, but what you’ve read, and what you know otherwise, what seems reasonable, and what evidence you may have. So, the belief may only exist within a big network of other beliefs and other mental states. One part of the network, such as my belief that I’m in the United States only makes sense in relation to the whole network. I have to believe that the United States is a country. Belief is part of a vast network of intentionality. You can really only understand it by seeing how the network works, and how it’s constrained by rationality and by perception.
The whole system works against a background of presuppositions. I think that for a lot of people the belief in god is a kind of background presupposition. They make sense of their lives on the presupposition that there is a divine force. There was a period in my life when I accepted something like that when I was a small child, but later on I realized that there was no rational ground for that whatsoever. A lot of people think that they don’t need a rational ground for it, and that it’s about faith, but faith is not a reason, not a ground for accepting something. My acceptance that there is a world that exist independently of me is not at all like the belief in a god. It’s not specific to this or that view. It just says that when you investigate how things are there’s a way that they are that enables you to investigate. The belief in god presupposes the belief in an external reality.