No comments are allowed in the main debate thread, so direct your comments and questions here.

Well, my first comment is that whoever apparently tried to convert ganstaman's post to Swedish Chefese accidentally converted it to Redneck. Unless that's some bizarre problem on my end.

Edit: Thanks OrP.

You beg the question of the status of Wikipedia's growth as a good and hence of faith's role in that growth as evidence of its being a virtue.



Sounds awesome, right?

The failure rate of AA tracks closely with recidivism rates among alcoholics who don't use AA. If, as seems to be the case, your claim is that faith is central to AA, and AA is awesome because of how much it help people, I think this point is at best seriously questionable.

Direction-taking can be read game-theoretically, in which case the 'faith' aspect is purely behavioural - acceptance as distinct from belief. Those occasions when some mischievous individual offers bad directions are more than compensated for by the general accuracy of directions given. This contractarian account requires no 'faith' as such.

I think this misconstrues the argument represented. Virtuousness is orthogonal to the point it seeks to make. It can be entirely virtuous for the atheist to have faith in science and yet still hypocritical for that same atheist to criticise theists for the faith they demonstrate in their god - which criticism is the target of that argument, rather than the faith it mentions.

It's not your fault, but ganstaman seems to have pre-empted this line. Bad luck?

I can think of several dozen ways in which the motive 'I must be kind' leads to disastrous consequences. There are situations where charity fosters dependence and so hampers development. Patience can be excessive, thus also hampering development, or misapplied, thus indulging vicious behaviour.

Thoughts so far: ganstaman is ahead, but whether that's due to first-post advantage remains to be seen.

i dislike ganstaman's wall of text style, but i think zumby has really trapped himself with bad definitions and absolute claims with easy counterexamples.

Before we started, i figured whoever used the approach of "its a net good" or "net bad" would have a much easier time than whoever tried to to take a stronger position. it looks like ganstaman is going this route, and its much easier to negotiate the degrees of good in a gray area as compared to trying to maintain zumby's more black/white positions.

Appreciate the time and effort zumby and gangsta put into this
Also, how is the winner to be determined? I didn't see a final answer in the original idea thread, is it going to be made by mod (OrP), or after discussion ITT?

Also appreciate the effort put in by all parties, loving this idea. Thanks guys.

Glad this subject was chosen too, the way that religions have created the appearance that a confidence in something without any evidence is virtuous, is one of the issues that really gets me steaming. Interested to see how this goes.

Faith, which is belief in the absence of evidence, should never be considered a virtue. It should be considered a shameful and irrational position.

Well, so far not good, as zumby shoots himself in the foot with overly strict definitions. Gangsta wins the definition battle by defining "faith" over the notion of "Having faith in someone or something is more than simply trusting or believing; it is doing so without first requiring evidence of veracity," rather than linking it to God. Faith is something that also happens in religious contexts (and happens a lot), but it's not something that is unique to it or should be conceived in other contexts as a kind of "extension" of religious faith to non-religious settings.

Thus, he is able to incorporate obvious cases of faith such as stating in a contest setting something like "I have faith in my brother ('s ability to overcome obstacles or w/e)", or "I have faith in my weather predictions (sez the farmer looking up at the clouds)", neither of which can be reformulated as simply stating a belief or a trust, as in both cases the element of admitting to not having sufficient proof or evidence available, is missing.

By starting out with the limited notion of religious faith, then providing an encyclopedic entry whose diverse notions -- lo and behold -- all seem to incorporate the notion of God somehow is severely limiting the force of your objections. It almost seems that zumby believes he's debating against a theist believing that FIAV, rather than a formal debate opponent who argues that FIAV. "To claim that faith is a virtue, on these definitions, presupposes the existence of God." ... is a reasonable statement when levelled against the theist who believes that FIAV, yet is not a reasonable statement about a more broad conception of faith.

Am I reading this correctly, i.e. that AA basically doesn't work? (In the sense that it shows no better results than those not participating?)

Also, this is a strawman, as you very well know.

Oh, and I also think that Wikipedia is a really strange example (while admitting that it's not as easy as it looks to come up with good examples).

sort of. what he states about recitivism is true, AA doesn't actually have better results than random. however your conclusion is not necessarily true. if 90% of people fall off the wagon overall, and AA helps 10% of people (90% it doesn't help), it could be that AA doesnt work, or it could also just be a coincidence. It could certainly be possible that different techniques work better/worse on different people and it just happens that AA works very well on a select few who are predisposed towards it. It may be impossible to actually isolate the benefits though since there are always multiple factors in play, friends family work willpower etc.

That may or may not be a correct interpretation of what Zumby has done but it's not what I'm doing. I object to the concept of faith, and reject it's use in any context, it's just particularly vexing in the religious context. I wouldn't accept 'I just believe it to be true' in any context.

I don't think that your examples of the brother and the weather are not sound. In both examples, there may not be 'sufficient' proof or evidence by some standard that you have set that I'm not aware of but which must fall short of being incontrovertible, but there is prior knowledge of both how weather behaves and how what qualities are possessed by the brother on which a reasonable judgement might be based and which IS completely missing in the religious context. IMO, religious faith has no justification at all, it's simply believing what you want to believe regardless of what may be perceived as evidence for or against.


Interesting sentence. I'm not sure what 'as you very well know' implies, perhaps that if I don't know that then I should? That's verging on an ad hominen wouldn't you say?

In any case, I don't think it's a strawman. But, how would you describe the situation?

"As you well know" generally means "we both know you know well". It's not an ad-hominem if it's true. Just two weeks ago you not only stated the same position in the same carelessness, but also indicated by your phrasing:

that you in return are well aware of the fact that the word "evidence" can be and is used in different notions of strictness: there's circumstantial evidence, scientific evidence, introspective evidence etc.

By attributing the view to religion that it makes a virtue out of believing in something without any evidence, you're willingly and knowingly producing a wrong statement. Knowingly, because by your phrasing you indicate to be aware that doggg is using one meaning of evidence while Hector is using a different one, willingly, because you choose to continuously disregard that distinction.

Thus, by continuing to state "religions" position as being one of making a virtue out of belief without any evidence, rather than making the more modest yet still inaccurate claim that religions make a virtue out of beliving withouth scientific evidence (or the like), you're misrepresenting "religions" position.

Ya, wouldn't be the first time you're wrong, now, would it?

Be that as it may - this is not the place for this; if you feel like replying, we should move it to a different thread.

ok, I've answered in the thread that you linked since it was dead anyway.

We've had this discussion around here before.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=190

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=198

If you randomly shove people into programs, you get random results. It's not clear whether this approach is going to give meaningful results when success in the program requires volitional submission to the program.

"faith is understood to exist when the evidence is insufficient or solely subjective, and while this is not an entirely objective definition, it should be sufficient for this discussion."

It's not a definition at all, it's not sufficiently rigorous and it's wrong.

Aaron,

thanks, I wasn't even aware that AA had a spiritual/religious side. Basically, my understanding of it comes from some TV shows. It doesn't extend much beyond:

"Hi, my name is Bob, ..."
"Hi Bob!"x15

It definitely started out as having a clear spiritual/religious element to it, but it also has very secularized versions of it as well. You can find lots of atheist alcoholic anonymous groups, for example.

It seems to me that a crucial issue is not being adequately addressed by either zumby and ganstaman. They are both assuming that we should understand virtue as a moral term,* and so asking whether faith is morally justified. But isn't faith as they are treating it an epistemic category? But epistemology is also a normative discipline, and as such, has its own characteristic set of virtues. Thus, shouldn't we be asking whether faith is virtuous according to the norms of epistemology rather than (just that) of morality?

So it seems to me entirely possible that it might end up being morally virtuous to have faith, but epistemically vicious.

I third the notion that Wikipedia is a bad example, but I want to expand on precisely why. Namely on the "reliability" front (ignoring other advantages like ease of reading compared to random google results, etc) Wikipedia uses a combination of moderate standards (like requiring external links and dismissing certain types of poor argumentation like "weasel words") and crowdsources the process of identifying factual errors, biases, logical fallacies, and the like. It is far from perfect, but the basic process provides a strong basis for the belief that Wikipedia is generally a more accurate portrayal of information than what was commonly used before, namely googling terms and reading the first few pages. It is thus not faith but resting on its known merits. This is much the same way that it is reasonable to believe much of the results of the peer review academic process, not because it is infallible but because the peer review academic is generally truth tending and one is citing this general tend to modulate ones believes in the claims of a journal publication that one doesn't understand.

Now people will tend to believe too much in wikipedia (or in claims in journal papers). Obviously wikipedia has many errors and biases and whatever else. But this is a problem for faith. It is an example where people use the general truth tending nature of wikipedia to believe too strongly in a specific claim made that may well not be accurate. In other words, while a general sense of trust in the material on wikipedia is justified, certainty in any specific claim is certainly not and any who does this (try marking first year papers if you want to see this in action) is relying far too much on insufficient evidence. Believe in wikipedia claims should be modulated based on the evidence, not on faith.

I really think the cartoon covered all that.

I'd argue, no. At least not entirely. "Making a leap of faith", "I have faith in my brother" etc. - at least according to my language intuition - entail some statement of "community support" or solidarity or something. Hard to put into concrete words, exactly, but certainly not a spiritual/religious category (nor derivative thereof) - contra zumby - and not a notion concerned with the epidemiological status of whatever claim is being made.

lol

These are the original steps and have been adopted by other anonymous groups, that said there are other groups who've adopted the twelve steps but substituted something else for God often a generic higher power but sometimes secular terms.

Teen challenge who are a more clearly defined faith based recovery group would probably have been a better example

1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

/derail

i'll wait for the next round before I comment other than I think it's pretty finely balanced

Wiki is as good as the references some of which are not very good. Some controversial or political topics cannot be trusted at all as many of the contributors are agenda-driven. I don't see that wiki has any place in a discussion about faith.

So, when do we get to see round 2?