ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Knowledge
Religion

Okay, so I'm currently taking a philosophy of religions course at a community college. Anyway my teacher had asked where morals come from and I responded with a social-evolutionary type of theory and his response was: Teacher: "Your faith in reason is matched only by the most devote religious believers." Me: Let's examine that word 'faith'. Faith by definition can mean two different things, one definition of faith is confidence. For example, I have faith in my abilities to win at a sport competition or something like that. The second is belief in something without any proof at all, like for example God. It is important that we note where this difference in usage, because depending on context - they mean two different things and using them interchangeably in the same way is equivocation. If one were to say - well you have faith in science, just like I have faith in god - this is an example of equivocation. Teacher: For the record, dictionary definitions are great for learning general senses of a...

A fascinating reflection. You should write it up in the form of a Socratic dialogue. Perhaps your prof meant that your belief in science amounts to a faith in reason which is basically unsupported by reason or I suppose empirical data. Therefore, it is in the same league as faith in God. I have heard people hold that it takes faith to believe that the sun is going to come up tomorrow -- therefore religious faith is nothing that peculiar. I myself tend to agree with Kierkegaard that faith as in faith that, say, Jesus is God - that He is coming back - that He has forgiven our sins and gives us life eternal - that all this involves a radical collision with the understanding, that it is more than improbable but instead an offesne to reason, and that it is categorically different from an opinion. As for the etymolgy issue, I am a dunce, but it is true that the dictionary only provides a glimpse into the way a word tends to be used at a given time. The word in Danish that Kierkegaard uses is "tro"...
Ethics
Knowledge

Do we have a right to try to convince people to abandon demonstrably false, or socially harmful, opinions? Clearly we have no right to force them, but do we have the right to criticize their opinions and try and get them to engage with reality or with other human beings? Conversely, do people have a duty to adopt true beliefs whenever they have the opportunity to do so knowingly?

I'm not sure about the rights language here but I can't imagine that there would be anything amiss with trying to dissuade someone of the notion that the earth is flat or that 2+2=5. As for adopting true beliefs, I'm not sure that we are put together so that we can choose my beliefs. If I know something to be true it would seem to imply that I believe it. But to be sure, there are a wide range of issues and some of the most important in life, in which what is true and false are beyond definitive proof.
Knowledge
Mind

Some theories of behavior seem to rely on the idea that we are unaware of what we are doing, and that much of our behavior is programmed or conditionned into us by "our culture" without us actually being aware of this happening. To what extents are such accounts credible? A theory that tells me that the *real* reason I eat meat is because I am expressing my belief in human supremacy and dominance over animals I consider inferior doesn't seem at all credible to me, and yet if that theory also says that I just *think* I'm eating meat because it's tasty and (in some circumstances) healthy - presumably because my human supremacist culture indoctrinates me into believing this - how can I know that the theory isn't right? To what extent can a person trust their own introspection?

This may not be much help but I would say "to some extent." There can be no doubt that judgments based on introspection are sometimes wrong. I have often had the experience of thinking that I did something with one motivation only to realize later that there was another at work as well. Also, our introspective judgments are often self serving. We need to approach them with a degree of skepticism. The veracity of our inner soundings also depends on the concepts that we are looking at ourselves through. It makes all the difference in the world whether I examione myself through a Freudian, Marxist, or purely phsycalistic lens. Whether looking out or rolling our eyes balls in looking in - what we see is deeply impacted by the ideas that we are peering through.