I’m finding it very hard to respect your posts here.
Without at least one initial belief (however that becomes established) we cannot from additional, contingent rational beliefs.
To form a contingent rational belief is to reason “Given X and Y therefore Z” that is we can “believe” Z because we have a justifying argument and we are confident in it and we are confident in the prior beliefs X and Y.
The belief Z is contingent on the already established beliefs X and Y and X and Y are either themselves contingent or self evident beliefs.
How self evident beliefs arise in our minds I don’t know.
The statement “Unless we have foundations we can’t begin building the walls” is either true or false. That truth or falsity is not contingent on who laid the foundations, when they laid them, what equipment they used.
A builder can begin building the walls once the foundations are laid, his ability to build the walls does not depend in who or what laid the foundations.
Must I really go on? are you really struggling with this?
So you made a claim that palpably isn’t true then.
Not only that, but when I asserted that beliefs are formed when our brains start to store memories, and offered a citation you dismissed it with handwaving and juvenile insult.
So, you ignored the post to which you felt compelled to reply?.. … Uh, okay, I give up. What’s the punchline to the fucking joke? (Oh, damn. My bad. Now I suppose you will ignore this post, too.)
No. Some rational beliefs are demonstrable and yet without reason. The justification is in their utility. They work and justify themselves through their utility.
The assumption* of the laws of logic is a fundamental aspect of human reasoning. These laws, such as the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle, provide a framework for understanding and interpreting the world around us. You would in fact need to use the laws of logic to refute them in any way.
Just speculating: Might this be where a certain participant in this thread trips and falls? There is a distinction between the statements “I do not believe X exists” and “I believe X does not exist”. The former express the lack of belief in the existence of X, as a shorthand form of “I have not been presented with any evidence compelling enough to convince me to believe that X exists, so until I get that evidence, I withhold my belief”, while the latter is close to an assertion that X is not real.
I think I see a pattern in the mindsets of the religous people that I have been discussing/arguing with over the years. There is a clear tendency for them to make a false dichotomy out of the belief issue - either you believe their god exists and worship it, or else you poitively believe their god does not exist, with no nuances possible. They tend to not see “I withhold my belief until compelling evidence surfaces” as the qualified statement it is, but instead shoehorn it into the “I believe X does not exist” category. I do not have enough data to say if this is a general trait among religious people, or if it’s just those among them that choose to argue their points against non-believers.
Absolutely, that seems to be exactly what he keeps doing. Imagine a line and true or false is either side of that line, forgive me for the clumsy analogy, now if we are dealing with an unknown then asserting the claim is true or untrue is epistemologically unsound. However disbelieving the claim is not, as this need not involve a claim either side of that line. Of course weighing evidence is another matter, as this can be much more complex. Though of course the more extraordinary the claim, the higher the standard for evidence of that claim, hence sufficient objective evidence. No one I think can fail to see that sufficient is relative to the extraordinary nature of the claim, and that the more objective evidence is the more reliable it is, else the methods created to remove subjective bias, like logic and science, would do no better than holding purely subjective beliefs.
Precisely so.
Yes, i have noticed, as have we all I imagine on here, that this is true, indeed this type of false dichotomy used to create an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy to shift the burden of proof onto atheism, seems to have gained a lot of popularity among apologists. I have seen lane craig use this in a debate with Hitchens, and even after Hitchens who himself went further and claimed he believed no deities exist, explained atheism was not a contrary claim to theism, Lane Craig tried to persist, I can still remember hims saying then you’d be talking about (he mispronounced it exaggerating the A) Ahhhh-theism, and the Hitch smiled and said like ahhh-moral and ahhhh-sexual then? The crowd laughed, and I mean loudly, LC just looked baffled at the laughter.
Obviously they known this puts the burden of proof firmly onto their claim a deity exists. It also means they have thousands of comparable claims for deities they must be claiming don’t exist by the way, since the claim only one exists is also a claim none of the others do, a burden of proof atheism per se does not incur.
I also think the importance they attach to their belief, gives them a blind spot in understanding that i attach no more significance to my lack of belief in deities than I do unicorns, it’s just that no one is trying peddle unicorns along with archaic patriarchal Bedouin morality from the bronze age.
That’s a lot of research right there, but if the apologists that come here, and the professional apologists are any bench mark, it is definitely a popular misconception upon most apologists.
This should give you pause, and make you re-examine your claim that beliefs can only come from beliefs. Also your dismissal of the idea that beliefs are formed when our brains start to store memories, and the evidence I linked to support this idea, which you just waved away.
If I make a claim, as with most of the atheists here, and that claim was demonstrated as either erroneous or dubious, I would certainly consider retracting or amending that claim, if one is open minded of course.
Then when I asked you where this initial belief came from you asserted:
If you have no idea, how then can you assert it must come itself from an initial belief?
It is you who needs to let that contradiction sink in.
I can’t make this any simpler for you, maybe a venn diagram? You made a claim about where ALL beliefs come from, now you admit you don’t know where our first or initial belief comes from, do you see the problem yet?