If God becomes a deists id bet the numbers move from the extremes.

A belief is a feeling of certainty towards or about something. Therefore, it can't be less than 90% or more than 10%. The only thing stronger than a belief is a conviction which would be either 0% or 100%.

An opinion is somewhere between 11% and 89%.

There is an aspect of human nature, which I call ego, that pushes us away from uncertainty, toward the extremes. It's a self preservation tactic. That's the truthful answer but it cannot be accepted until it is discovered personally and until then will remain vague and esoteric.

Is it still uncertainty if I take no position on a question? And what's the role of the ego in this instance?

How certain are you about your uncertainty.

You can't be uncertain about something in the present unless it is brought to your attention. When you say you take no position, I assume this means that you are usually ignoring it, which is what ego wants. The ego's role in this is that it makes holding onto uncertainty uncomfortable.

Ego isn't as resistant to being uncertain about the metaphysical unless you are actively holding that uncertain mindset. I would consider that pretty advanced stuff though when it comes to one's development.

So withholding assent is ego-driven?

I don't see that personally, unless you're defining 'ego' with some tricky properties.

I choose not to have a position on many questions: questions whose answer (whatever it may be) does not have a discernible impact on my day-to-day life. Not because I'm not curious, but because the answer (whatever it may be) is unimportant.

If I asked you, is there is a tennis ball in my closet right now? You probably wouldn't care enough to take a position on the question. This is the same of the 'God' question for me.

Yeah, I am.

The God question is tied in with the pursuit of satisfying that unfulfillment that I posted about in that SMP thread. It gets answered along the way. We are incentivized to seek fulfillment in a way that we are not incentivized to investigate tennis balls in closets.

Religion teaches it wrong: Believe in God -> receive salvation
When it should be: Seek salvation -> find God

Fine. Doesn't change my question. Why do so few people, have a mere opinion rather than a belief?

This is incorrect.

Beliefs are merely the output of particular cognitive process so opinions are a class of belief.

Opinions are beliefs, opinions that attempt to describe the world attempt to be objective, opinions that attempt to describe our evaluations of the world are subjective but they are still beliefs.

Lot's of people consider themselves agnostic whether agnostic theist or atheist and these would seem to fall between your 10%-90% range, however it is pretty uncommon for people to attempt to assign a probability to some belief being true, they will accept or reject claims without assigning a probability they may express uncertainty but they aren't assigning a % to it.

Not nearly as many as do regarding other subjects. The only exception might be politics, which is why I give a hard time to the zealots.

You'd be better concerning yourself with the quality of the hard time you give them than the intransigence of their beliefs.

Well I won't be going to that forum for awhile. But as long as I have you here I may as well mention a second reason why you might not want universal suffrage. I mentioned it as a joke earlier when someone said Trump might bring out nukes. My reply, needling the liberals was "nuclear war is a small price to pay if it guarantees everyone has the vote." But more seriously if it ever got to the point where voters were so incompetent that their choice was likely to cause a catastrophe of epic proportions, and that could be averted by some sort of test, that could theoretically be another reason.

I agree that a small test would improve things, but sadly I dont see it ever happening.

Maybe if there was a test in place, George W doesnt get elected for a second term, and there would most likely been no second Iraq war and no IsIs.

Fulfilment is subjective from my observations. While it may require God for you, or objective morality for Aaron, for others neither of these are required.
I often say: whatever floats your boat: so long as it doesn't infringe on the happiness of others.

Yes it is relatively straightforward to contrive situations that challenge our commitments to principles like universal suffrage, but the problem with these challenges in Politics is that you often treat political questions philosophically focusing on the principle rather than the practice. This doesn't go down well and causes people to think you are addressing issues from a degree of abstraction that divorces you from the practical implications of whatever it is you're advocating for.

The thing is from a philosophical perspective your posts don't always do much better, issues with democracy have been documented since Plato's Republic and that people elect bad leaders is hardly new or unusual but there's an established body of work that addresses these questions and it's not really the nature of Politics or Politics Unchained to go over them.

Personally I think you rely too much on your smarts and get frustrated when people don't see your point, but you being smarter than me doesn't mean I'm not better informed than you on these questions and at the level of discussion your additional smarts are not more valuable than the extra information. It's not that I don't understand you it's that I don't agree.

A large majority of people sleepwalk through life and the easier to acquire and the more comfortable and/or ingrained a belief system is the more likely it will be adapted, and too little questioned.

The reasons behind this are many, everything from evolutionary biology to psychology of human interaction(s) to societal factors. What the interplay of all these factors, known or unknown, are is important to understand how and why belief systems emerge and develop. That is my take. I could be missing something or be somewhat off the mark; I've neither the expertise or knowledge base of the specialties to sort it all out.

See now I would think it's the opposite...

In my opinion you are an eloquent poster and good contributor to the forum. Others might not agree. If so, I can argue why I think they're wrong, but in the end, we're just giving our opinions.

In other words it is my opinion (subjective) that you are a good poster. It is not that I believe you are.

It's possible I'm just nitpicking on semantics. But a belief is more powerful (in my opinion -lol). When I believe something I like to make sure it's true. Things that are true for me, should be true for others as well. Things that can be true for me (like the quality of someone's posts), but not true for others, makes it an opinion. So I'm back to my original question: What is a belief exactly? Or what should it be?

See I believe both that you are correct and that others are wrong to disagree

I understand the distinction and I appreciate your reluctance to claim as a belief something you aren't sure is true. I also think it's good that you want your beliefs to be true but I don't think there is anything wrong with the following sentence.

I believe it is likely that X

Where X is some proposition for which there is insufficient evidence to settle the matter. On your account I should be writing

It is my opinion that X

This doesn't capture that I only think it is likely.

Consider the traditional account of knowledge as Justified True Belief, now while this is largely discredited post Gettier what it does capture is that beliefs can be both untrue and unjustified, if this were not the case and belief entailed either then they would be redundant.

You can argue that I am presenting an epistemic definition of belief rather than a psychological definition and this may be true but I have claimed that a belief is merely the output of some cognitive process, this includes reflecting on the proposition under question reasoning from the evidence and this seems to be the same process irrespective whether or not we can come to a conclusion we are sure of.

I think once we accept that beliefs can be untrue, they can be unjustified and the process we engage in is indistinguishable from those that result in opinions we are justified in considering opinions a class of belief.

What if you can't make sure it's true? Are such statements relegated to being only opinions? For example, I hide a candy bar in a box that's impossible to open. I tell you that it's a candy bar. You can't make sure it's a candy by checking because the candy bar is in the impossible-to-open box. So is it just an opinion that there's a candy bar in the box, or is it a belief that there's a candy bar in the box, or what?

Look deeper at what you mean when you say something is "true."

If you are entitled to believe whatever you want about "belief" that you choose, then the answer is that it is whatever you want it to be, and no amount of discussion can make you wrong.

But if you want to use a framework that has been explored with intellectual depth and rigor, a broadly accepted definition is that beliefs are propositional attitudes. They depend nothing on the statement being true or false, verifiable, or whatever.

I think a belief is something that "overpowers" sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad


For example: James could believe that all people have some good in their heart or at least the capacity for good, even if they have chosen otherwise

eat this fruit, its good for you.

I would think they are.

Again, I like to assign probabilities. But your question also points out that maybe I also delineate by importance, or should be doing so...

You say you put a candy bar in a box. I don't know you, but sure... I'll go with that there's probably a candy bar in the box, since I see no reason for you to lie about it. How sure am I? Well, probably means over 50/50, but not that much over. Now what if some people with a magic key to open the box were on their way. They want to know what's in the box and if I give them the wrong answer, they'll shoot me. And you knew this when you told me about the bar...

I'm still going with yes, there's candy bar is in the box. I'm also a little more sure (+90%?) about it, because I'm hoping you're not some jerk who wants to see me die for no reason. But it's still not a belief yet...

What if instead of you, it was my mother? Now the probabilities approach 100% and I can start forming a belief that there's indeed a candy bar in the box. I'm still not 100% sure, since there's a chance my mother was hallucinating or something, but if she has her faculties, I know she doesn't want to see me die and would not lie to me about it.

This is a very long way of demonstrating that I do not like to hold beliefs about things unless I'm very sure they are true. Of course, I can never be 100%, but I want to do my due diligence before believing something. So...

-It's my opinion that my gf doesn't cheat on me
-It's my opinion that you would save my life if you could
-It's my opinion that you told the truth about the candy bar.

-I believe the earth is around 4.5 billion years old
-I believe that my mother loves me
-I believe the Theory of Evolution is the best explanation for the diversity of life on earth

I don't understand what you mean by this and I'd like to, because I think it's the exact opposite: Beliefs should depend on how likely they are to be true and should be verifiable. Are you saying this isn't the case?

Most would disagree. A lot of people hold "true" to be some sort of correspondence to reality, not a correspondence to mental states. Whereas most people hold that "belief" corresponds to mental states.

I make no claim about what you *should* be doing. But your belief/opinion dichotomy appears problematic. You would be using the word "opinion" for statements like "Chocolate is better than vanilla" as well as statements like "The candy bar is in the box."

Again, you're really going to want to look into what you mean by "true."

I'm saying that many people do not accept this is the case.

Belief as a "propositional attitude" basically means that "belief" corresponds to a your level of mental assent to the statement. Beliefs can be either "true" or "false" (let's say, taking those words to be reality-correspondence). For example, it makes perfect sense for me to say "I believe the car was red" and have it turn out that the car was blue. It would be odd for my "opinion" to be the car is red.