Talk:Argument from faith

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There are sorts of beliefs that you must hold in order to be a functioning human. You do not have to hold them unexamined, however. The most basic beliefs I know of that you can hold are Occam's razor and induction. You can determine, with Occam's razor and induction, whether Occam's razor and induction work in our universe. You see the problem. You might be justified in calling my continuing use of Occam's razor and induction an act of faith.

Premise 2 is useless in this argument. An appropriate premise would be "The existence of God can be determined by faith". The phrasing used seeks to justify a lack of physical evidence.


I take issue with the section entitled "False premise p1a". In particular, the first sentence, "The premise that nothing can be proven for certain or from scratch can be demonstrated as false when you consider 'I think therefore I am', mathematics and the 3 logical absolutes." I am not an expert in formal logic or in philosophy, but I am an expert in mathematics, so it is from this perspective that I comment. The 3 logical absolutes seem to me to be conventions that we follow without question because they seem to be reasonable. That is, they are axioms of logic. An axiom is something which is accepted without proof, which to me seems to be not contrary to the concept of faith, but rather similar to it.

But, as far as the math goes, one cannot prove that 2+2=4 "from scratch". In fact, developing the amount of machinery necessary to even define what is meant by all of the symbols in that statement requires quite a bit of axiomatic definition. That is to say, at some point we must admit that we have to stop proving claims and simply agree that we believe a certain thing.

I think perhaps it would be best to avoid this half of the argument and simply stick to the second half of the argument, where it is asserted that absolute knowledge is never necessary in interacting with the real world, since empirical science is never absolute but "it works" and therefore is useful. Keith Penrod 13:06, 21 March 2013 (CDT)

The logical absolutes are simply formal statements of how we link definitions to the things they define. They just explain that when we use (for example) the term "your next-door neighbor", we generally mean "a person who lives in a house next to your own" and not "the manhole cover in the intersection of 15th and Main", nor "Ghengis Khan", nor any of the near-infinite number of other things that do not match that definition. When we say "A", we mean "A" and not "not A"; when we talk about "B" in terms of "A" or "not A", "B" cannot be both "A" and "not A". Jdog 10:08, 22 March 2013 (CDT)