Do you think the Bible takes precedence over evidence?

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This could head rather swiftly into epistomology, and I don't think any of us want that. But (as with so many of these things) the problem comes down to language. Belief generally relates to knowledge without evidence; we believe this to be true. Of course, it is technically impossible to state we "know" anything.

Imagine your mind is a jigsaw puzzle. You don't know what the picture is and there don't appear to be any edge pieces, so you're finding random bits and putting them together wherever they seem to fit. We start off with some very basic jigsaw pieces about ourselves and reality. We add on more about how the world works, how we relate to it, and so on. This process continues throughout our lives.

Sometimes a section of the jigsaw is wrong. We're working fairly blind, and parts that seemed to fit to start with don't fit so well when we find more pieces. There's a certain level of inertia at work - if this is a minor part on the edge of the jigsaw, it's not too difficult to take those pieces out again and put them back in a different way around. If it's a major part, or near the middle of the jigsaw, then we resist the change. We worked hard on that part, we've based a lot of the rest of the jigsaw on it, and we really don't want to have to undo all that work.

An example of this is breaking free of religion. A child raised in religion will be religious - this is obvious. They will be moulded around the shape of that religion. But sometimes they come to the conclusion that they don't actually believe in it - often something happens that makes them reconsider, and they look back at a whole massive slice of their jigsaw puzzle and realise it doesn't fit. This is major reworking - your religion filters into all sorts of other aspects of your life, such as your personal identity, your social networks, your purpose in life and your moral code. Changing all that is very hard.

To get back to the point - beliefs are not so much adopted as assimilated. We accept new beliefs based on a number of factors, many of which are not rational, and we're generally very unwilling to change those beliefs whatever they are. We only believe things we think are true, but our means of determining this are seldom evidential. We start out believing what we're told. We then start believing what benefits us, what supports what we already believe, what authority figures tell us is true. Alarmingly, we believe things if we hear them often enough, which is why it is essential we don't associate with people that complain all the time. Sooner or later you'll pick up on their pessimism.



The heart and mind are really just two aspects of the same thing. If they don't agree, there is unhappiness.

So what does that matter? Happiness or unhappiness, these are just emotions which change more often than the weather.

Unhappiness is a state of wanting things to be different. Happiness is, bizarrely, not the arrival at a perfect state. Such a thing doesn't exist. It is the journey. When we come in from the cold, we are cheered by the warmth of the room - but we get less happy, not more, as we settle into an optimum temperature. Contentment is the ultimate aim, not happiness.

Actually, I prefer the cold of the outdoors. After the nerves in the skin reach thermal equilibrium it doesn't feel cold anymore.

Also, there are more than just two emotions. Although you could put them as a subset of "unhappy", there's also sadness, anger, and fear, at least. Each of these have their own design role in the course of human events. People should be sad when a loss occurs. People should be angry when they are mistreated. People should be afraid when there is a danger. And people should be happy when things are going well. Times changes and new events take place. Someone is born, someone dies. Someone gets a job, someone loses a job. Et cetera. Emotions are necessary for the different events of ones life. It's important to maintain self control of them, but all of them matter and not just happiness alone.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LSTc-5Fn_Y[/youtube]

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 KJV
(1) To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
(2) A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
(3) A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
(4) A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
(5) A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
(6) A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
(7) A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
(8) A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

I don't understand how that is relevant to my question. Are you saying adopting a belief because of wishful thinking is impossible? A creationist in an interview published on youtube said he refused to believe in evolution because if we are just animals there is nothing to stop us from behaving like animals. Other creationists have said the same. I have also seen a climate change skeptic writing that he would believe in climate change if it didn't cost him anything. In both cases people reject a belief because they don't like the consequence of accepting the belief, not because they have reason to believe it is false.


That is no part of my interpretation of belief. You can ignore that one.


I was being pedantic. All empirical knowledge is probabilistic. Probabilities may approach 0 or 1, you may approximate a probability as 0 or 1 for simplicity, but certainty is unattainable. You can get certainty only in deduction, and you can only be certain that a conclusion is consistent with your premises. All empirical knowledge has to deal with measurement error and induction. You can't ever be completely certain that a conclusion corresponds with what really happens in the universe you observe. I wrote "probably true" to reduce the odds of another pedant diverting the discussion into an irrelevant debate over empirical knowledge.


Are you describing Bayesian reasoning? I see that as rational. My question concerns the presuppositions. Do you think you can have absolute certainty about your presuppositions? That you would never change them? That is another way of asking my question. Can you agree that if your presuppositions entail deductions that conflict with empirical evidence, that reduces the probability of your presuppositions being true? Can you agree that your estimate of the probabilities should depend only on the strength of evidence, not on how much you like the conclusion?

I thought I replied to that. Fun.