No, you can't literally see and feel God. You experience stimulus that you attribute to God, but it is not literally equivalent to the experience of seeing a physical object with your own eyes. You are presuming that the cause of your religious experience is God, but you lack the ability to verify through repeated consistent observation that this is the case the way you do for your wife.

Assuming without cause the world is real is axiomatic because something being "real" to you is a necessary quality in something having a "real" result that affects your life. If you believe that a banana is not "real", then you also believe that its ability to satiate your hunger is not "real". If you believe that is not "real", then logically there is no reason to eat the banana because it has no actual tangible impact on your life, so you won't do it. Exploding this to its extreme means that, if you refuse to live assuming the world is real, you won't ever take any actions.

You have to grant the reality of the world, even if you know you're doing it arbitrarily, because unreal things do not have any tangibility, real qualities, or real impact. You can understand you don't REALLY know the world is real, but you can't COMMIT to this authentically and purely. It would result in you basically taking a seat and starving to death.

> You're obviously lying though. You can see and feel your wife, chairs and tables, etc. You can't literally see and feel God.

That's where you're wrong, because I do. Religious experience is common among our species!

> an intentional decision to suspend our lack of real justification for believing in the world because to do otherwise would render our ability to act impossible

Given that simulation could exist, and therefore multiple simulations could exist, the odds on this being the original reality is slim. You believe with zero evidence that this is real.

>an intentional decision to suspend our lack of real justification for believing in the world because to do otherwise would render our ability to act impossible.

That says more about you than about the nature of reality. Why is it axiomatic that function breaks down if the possibility that this is all not real is accepted, and/or believed? Plenty of people have concluded that it's not real and still manage to function. Are you so weak that you need this belief as a crutch?

In fact, could it not be that believing it's not real could free you up to try things you may have been scared to try? To lighten up in stressful situations?

You have faith in a materialistic universe because that's what you're experiencing, even though you know it could all be a dream you're having.

So it is with believers of God.

>The idea that we can only justifiably believe a proposition if it is the conclusion of a deductively sound argument is essentially epistemological infallibilism

I deal with the issue of inductive knowledge.

And under epistemic justification, philosophers argue for different standards for what would constitute a justified belief. Skeptics may argue that no beliefs are justified, since beliefs require an infinite regress of knowledge. Some philosophers accept the regress, while others deal with it in some way. I argue that its not worth dealing with if we have reasonable certainty.

>Whatever we must logically accept in order to coherently exist in the world and make decisions as intentional agents. These are things like "I exist", "the world exists", "the world is predictable (physically)", and other extremely basic presumptions about the status of reality. If we were to completely shed our belief in any of these things, we would logically destroy our ability to act and expect results we had reason to believe were meaningful. We have to at least accept them on an informal basis, or we can do nothing else. This is entirely different from faith, which is the acceptance of a belief that is not necessary, for no reasons.

You postulate "logic" before using "logic". You postulate "reality" before using "reality" in your logic. How can you know 100% that reality is as it appears to you? All your above statements are meta-physical statements because you are implying things about reality. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't get your certainty.

I'm not using faith in the sense that you defined as "acceptance of a belief that is not necessary, for no reasons". For me "faith" is about "appropriation/devotion/commitment" (I don't have a better word for now). e.g. we dovote our life to a way of seeing the world in which we see ourselves as intentional agents, we postulate the reality-mind correspondence, etc.

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>I mean, that's your problem, but I exercise reason to make life decisions and haven't been steered wrong yet as far as I know.

Again, neither Kierkegaard not I is saying that you can't use reason for your life decisions. Of course you use reason. However, after you have reason for sufficient time, you need to take a decision. I'm sure you had take bad life decisions in your life. You developed your "reason", you learned, you acquired more experience. If as a child every decision you take was based on "reason", you would probably be dead by now.

Of course, use reason at its highest, but your reason will always be limited by your pressupositions (your commitment to a way of seeing the world). Of course, we can examine and change our pressupositions, but that also tells us something about the infirmities of reason. We reason within our understanding of the world ("faith", as I use it).

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>A bad decision is something that causes an outcome that people (yourself or others) think is bad. We have seen plenty of instances where faith in God causes bad decisions, in that it causes people to deny medical care that could have saved their lives, it causes people to ostracize their family members, encourages some people to commit acts of violence against others, etc.

What if the Nazis conqured the world and brainwash everyone to think The Holocaust was good? Does that changed that it was actually bad? (But nevermind, it is not very relevant for the discussion). I'm not saying the feedback we receive from others it is not valueable. It is. I also agree that for some people there is a correspondence between beliving in God and bad things. However, Christians believe that God has revealed Himself by living a life of a normal man and dying for the salvation of the world. If you have faith in that i.e. appropriate the message that as God loved the world (dying sacrificially) you should also love others, you shouldn't commit acts of violance. If through careful reason we find that the Christian story is untrue (i.e. resurrection did not happened) then we should definetely not believe in it (i.e. live in the world as if God revelealed Himself in Christ's sacrifice).

​

>I'm not sure how you figure this. Let's say you engage in the following logical process:I am hungry and want food > As far as I know, there is food in the fridge > If I get up and go to the fridge I will get the food > I want to get the food > Ergo I should get up and go to the fridge > I get up and go to the fridge > I get the food > I eat the food > I satisfy my desire for foodThat is entirely a logical series of steps. It's not one we consciously work through, but it's logical and requires no faith. If you happen to get to the fridge and there is no food, your knowledge of the world was wrong, but at that point you can pivot away from that to something else. There's a difference between having a belief based on exposure to something, and having "faith" in the way people do in God.

I have no problem using reason as in this example because I accept every premise and I think almost everyone will do.

However, I cannot ignore your appropriation for a world where hunger exists and is not an illusion, food is in fridges, food satisfies hunger, food does not fall from the sky, someone will not bring you food in bed, etc. It is way way more complicated when you consider complex decisions that are further away from our more "animalic" life. Things like meaning, significance, values, etc.

On the other hand, I don't see how you make the transition from logic to action. There are many valid logical statements, but none is producing the action. It only makes the action reasonable, but I can act against reason. So, action is not always produced by reason. It is produced by the commitment I have to the world. When I see someone is in danger I can produce in my mind reasons to ignore, to call for help or to actually intervene personally. What is producing these reasons? I might even believe I should ignore feared reasons based on my devotion to the good and intervene. It might get bad and die, but I might also save a life. I don't know.

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>You weigh the good reasons and bad reasons against each other and determine through thinking that the good outweigh the bad because they're more important to you. 2+2=4 is the same for everyone, but it's every person's individual preferences and desires that determine the numbers you slot into the equation. For me, getting married might be 2+2+4+12-8-1=11, whereas for somebody else the same question might be 2+2+4-12+2-5=(-7).

Absolutely. However, what makes someone think it will be happier doing A while someone else thinks it will be happier doing the opposite of A? Do you have an absolute splitter in this situation? I think the answer to the Q is faith i.e. the devotion to a way of seeing the world e.g. where being married is a value or being single is a desiderate. You call that "individual preferences and desires". I think faith might include these, but it is not limited to that.

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>They really are not.

Yes, if you use a different definition of "faith" that the one I'm using. I'm not sure if it is a strawman or not because it could be the case that many people of "faith" (although I think everyone is manifesting faith in a way or another) are using it as equivalence to blind faith (blind commitment to a way of seeing the world). I would advocate for an informed faith (an informated commitment to a way of seeing the world).

Philosophical skeptics may argue that there are no inductive beliefs (knowledge outside deductions or our direct sensations) that can be justified. For example, we don't know that we aren't brains in vats, so we can't say we are justified in believing that we are not.

I argue that this level of skepticism is unwarranted if we have reasonable certainty.

In philosophy, sound conclusions require 100% certainty (pretty much impossible for inductive knowledge). I argue that having something like 95% certainty and if its impossible to get any higher, is justification enough for a belief.

You're obviously lying though. You can see and feel your wife, chairs and tables, etc. You can't literally see and feel God. Any attempt at trying to say otherwise is necessarily metaphorical.

> That's suspension of disbelief. You know that if you make Mario jump on a Goomba, he'll destroy him. That's doing things and expecting results. That's not destroyed by Mario, the Goombas, and the entire world he exists in being nothing more than transistors firing.

Yeah? That's the point, just like we're able to pretend that Mario's world is real, we can "pretend" that we have "justifiable reason" to believe that our world is real, such that we can act in it. That's not faith, that's an intentional decision to suspend our lack of real justification for believing in the world because to do otherwise would render our ability to act impossible.

No, God is as real to me as my wife, and you'd have a difficult time convincing me my wife doesn't exist.

God is a part of my reality, just as tables and chairs are a part of yours. You believe in those tables and chairs, and I believe in God.

>If the world isn't treated as real, even on an informal basis, then our entire ability to do things and expect results that we interpret as significant is destroyed.

That's suspension of disbelief. You know that if you make Mario jump on a Goomba, he'll destroy him. That's doing things and expecting results. That's not destroyed by Mario, the Goombas, and the entire world he exists in being nothing more than transistors firing.

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Engaging in arbitrary nonsense has no place in a philosophy subreddit.

> Almost certainly not, but as I pointed out already, it doesn't matter whether there is or not.

In terms of belief, perhaps, but in terms of knowledge there is.

If you were to simply acknowledge that you are expressing your opinion, I think we'd have less disagreement.

> It isn't. The proposition in question is the conditional statement, "IF there is sufficient evidence for a belief, THEN that belief is justified", which doesn't require us to take any position on what constitutes sufficiency.

Vague tautologies are true by definition. They are also an excellent source of delusion (as if consciousness and our piss poor education system wasn't enough!!!).

> Since justification just is having sufficient evidence, then whatever sufficiency might be, IF you have it, THEN belief is justified, regardless of what constitutes sufficiency.

At the object level, how do you determine that you have it though? Belief is powerful, but it has limited ability to transform reality itself, it only changes perception of reality.

> Assume sufficiency to be whatever you like

I cannot, it is against my religion.

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>For all propositions that exist, is there unanimous agreement on the necessary level of evidence required to meet epistemic justification?

Almost certainly not, but as I pointed out already, it doesn't matter whether there is or not.

>It is a crucially important component of your claim, so yes you do if you want your claim to be epistemically sound.

It isn't. The proposition in question is the conditional statement, "IF there is sufficient evidence for a belief, THEN that belief is justified", which doesn't require us to take any position on what constitutes sufficiency.

Since justification just is having sufficient evidence, then whatever sufficiency might be, IF you have it, THEN belief is justified, regardless of what constitutes sufficiency. Assume sufficiency to be whatever you like; no matter what you pick, it will always remain the case that if you have sufficient evidence (whatever "sufficient" might be) then belief is justified. Its just straightforwardly tautological, no subjectivity involved whatsoever.

Because "faith" is an English word and when you use it in an English-speaking context people will engage with you using that definition. You doing what you did is 1) adding confusion to the discussion, and 2) will cause you to operate according to both your personal definition of faith and the common English usage of faith in random ways, because you're human and all humans' brains are flawed.

It's even worse for you because you literally created an amalgamation of a concept between possibly two different ideas, so you will wind up conflating three different ideas, and your own personal definition of faith is functionally useless in all other contexts that aren't you thinking to yourself and feeling all erudite.

Like...it's complete nonsense and has no place here.

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Would fit well as "don't at me, you negate me"

>Moreover, the standard isn't whether there is "sufficient evidence" for a belief the standard isn't whether there is "sufficient evidence" for a belief but whether we can validly conclude a belief, which in philosophy, for inductive knowledge, we cannot.

Sure it is, at least on the dominant philosophical account of epistemic justification (which I've just been assuming for the sake of discussion).

The idea that we can only justifiably believe a proposition if it is the conclusion of a deductively sound argument is essentially epistemological infallibilism, which is highly problematic (and not widely held or respected by professional philosophers, from what I can tell) since it entails that we can never be justified in believing any matter of fact, since matters of fact can never be established as logically necessary, and would mean we are only justified in believing the tautologies of mathematics and logic and that we cannot reasonably believe any substantive propositions about the physical universe.

Which is... not a great result, especially since this constitutes precisely the sort of radical skepticism you keep mentioning that you are arguing against.

>There's nothing subjective about it; epistemic justification for a given belief just is having sufficient evidence for it

For all propositions that exist, is there unanimous agreement on the necessary level of evidence required to meet epistemic justification?

If so, please link to your data source so I can check to see if my name is in the list.

>So if you say that "there is sufficient existing evidence for a certain belief" this is to say that this belief is epistemically justified, since having sufficient evidence =/= the belief being justified/warranted.

Seeing something is true does not cause it to be true though, it only causes it to appear to be true.

>What may be "subjective" (or, at least, open to disagreement) is what one considers to constitute "sufficient" evidence for a given belief... but we don't need to adjudicate the proper criteria for sufficiency for our purposes here

It is a crucially important component of your claim, so yes you do if you want your claim to be epistemically sound.

>if we say that "there is sufficient existing evidence for a belief" then we are by the same token saying that the belief is epistemically justified, regardless of what particular criteria of sufficiency we happen to be using.

Do "we" say that though, or might you have only imagined that?

Also, this runs up against the issue I noted above.

You can't just make words mean whatever you want. Not only is it disingenuous argumentation, it's bad thinking because you will mentally conflate your own definition you made up with the "normal" definition everyone else has, and that will confuse you internally. It's bad.

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>Yet this goes at the problem of induction and skepticism in general, which argues that we should be mindful of our lack of certainty outside of a priori knowledge.

I don't really see how; the proposition in question ("if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a certain belief, then that belief is justified") is tautological, or at most definitional- it merely sets out what we mean by "justification"- and so doesn't contradict any particular view or proposition.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you have in mind, if you'd like to clarify.

>tautology: a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form
>
>The proposition is subjective - subjective matters can be framed in a tautological manner, but this does not seem to be an example of that.

There's nothing subjective about it; epistemic justification for a given belief just is having sufficient evidence for it (at least, on the prevailing theory of epistemic justification, evidentialism, which I'm assuming for the purposes of this discussion). So if you say that "there is sufficient existing evidence for a certain belief" this is to say that this belief is epistemically justified, since having sufficient evidence =/= the belief being justified/warranted.

What may be "subjective" (or, at least, open to disagreement) is what one considers to constitute "sufficient" evidence for a given belief... but we don't need to adjudicate the proper criteria for sufficiency for our purposes here; if we say that "there is sufficient existing evidence for a belief" then we are by the same token saying that the belief is epistemically justified, regardless of what particular criteria of sufficiency we happen to be using.

It's not a virtue to live life weaseling out of criticism by warping the meaning of words away from their actual meaning and into something you just made up to suit yourself.

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> What is the source of presuppositions from which we start your reason processes?

Whatever we must logically accept in order to coherently exist in the world and make decisions as intentional agents. These are things like "I exist", "the world exists", "the world is predictable (physically)", and other extremely basic presumptions about the status of reality. If we were to completely shed our belief in any of these things, we would logically destroy our ability to act and expect results we had reason to believe were meaningful. We have to at least accept them on an informal basis, or we can do nothing else. This is entirely different from faith, which is the acceptance of a belief that is not necessary, for no reasons.

> I agree that reason provides significant confidence, but I find it to be rather retrospective than prospective, especially when it comes to life decision.

I mean, that's your problem, but I exercise reason to make life decisions and haven't been steered wrong yet as far as I know.

> What is a "bad" decision? How do you determine? What makes you think switching to something else will be better over the course of time?

A bad decision is something that causes an outcome that people (yourself or others) think is bad. We have seen plenty of instances where faith in God causes bad decisions, in that it causes people to deny medical care that could have saved their lives, it causes people to ostracize their family members, encourages some people to commit acts of violence against others, etc.

> Reason can verify our decisions, but cannot trigger them.

I'm not sure how you figure this. Let's say you engage in the following logical process:

I am hungry and want food > As far as I know, there is food in the fridge > If I get up and go to the fridge I will get the food > I want to get the food > Ergo I should get up and go to the fridge > I get up and go to the fridge > I get the food > I eat the food > I satisfy my desire for food

That is entirely a logical series of steps. It's not one we consciously work through, but it's logical and requires no faith. If you happen to get to the fridge and there is no food, your knowledge of the world was wrong, but at that point you can pivot away from that to something else. There's a difference between having a belief based on exposure to something, and having "faith" in the way people do in God.

> For example, you find good reasons and bad reasons to get married or not to get married. What makes you actually take a decision and not be stuck forever in the process of thinking?

You weigh the good reasons and bad reasons against each other and determine through thinking that the good outweigh the bad because they're more important to you.

> If "existentialistic" decisions are like mathematical formulas our life will lack individuality. 2+2=4 is the same for everyone.

2+2=4 is the same for everyone, but it's every person's individual preferences and desires that determine the numbers you slot into the equation. For me, getting married might be 2+2+4+12-8-1=11, whereas for somebody else the same question might be 2+2+4-12+2-5=(-7).

> In my opinion reason needs faith and faith needs reason. They are complementary.

They really are not.

If you can articulate how these basic foundations of logic refute our observation, that might lead to a discussion.

Right now, all you've done is make an assertion without illustrating your point, the rough equivalent of "Nuh-uh!"

So... care to be a bit more specific?