JohnH comments on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted - Less Wrong

56 Post author: Alicorn 27 April 2009 04:49PM

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Comment author: JohnH 18 May 2011 05:38:16AM -1 points [-]

why doesn't god provide whatever portion of the evidence doesn't quite tip me over that vital point yet preserves enough meaning to actually be evidence?

It is my understanding that He does.

'The more sure you are the more liable you are

yep.

all meaningful faith would be based primarily on some form of knowledge.

Which it is. An experience once provided does give knowledge of the thing, however it is possible to doubt your experiences. Also, the experiences only provide knowledge of one thing and there will remain many things that are not known with the same surety, some of which may be difficult to understand, and these things must be taken on faith until they too become known.

arbitrarily selected confidence it's going to become worse for us if we don't follow the relevant commandments.

I would think that it is a continuum such that someone totally unaware of anything about the subject is not liable for anything while those that have received knowledge of everything are liable for all of it.

Confidence in something not tested is faith. Anything not known with whatever level of confidence constitutes near enough to certainty to not matter for you is taken on faith. Knowledge is anything that is known with that level of confidence to constitute certainty. I am pretty sure that is a consistent translation of the terms into something understandable in this setting, I could be wrong.

Comment author: Estarlio 18 May 2011 04:36:29PM *  -1 points [-]

It is my understanding that He does.

If you're right in respect to the prophesies of Thomas S. Monson, I don't see how this could hold. They would be strong evidence.

In any case I think, we've got the chunks to start doing some building.

All meaningful faith would be based primarily on some form of knowledge.

Which it is.

But.

Knowledge is anything that is known with that level of confidence to constitute certainty.

Also known things are knowledge. You seem to be invoking, admittedly with some degree of displacement, the term in its own description.

Confidence in something not tested is faith.

To a degree – if you're going to build knowledge into the meaningfulness of faith then faith would be something like believing with a greater certainty than the evidence justifies. Since all faith would be tested to some extent, even if very weakly, in order to contain meaning.

The problem with that approach is that it never seems necessary for me to believe beyond the evidence. If I put, say, one percent confidence on the idea of god based upon things I see then that's not faith – and if I get more evidence from investigating based on that one percent and believe it to be slightly more likely – do some more investigation and get more... it never becomes faith; it's testing / knowledge all the way up.