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Tem42 comments on Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Elo 24 August 2015 08:14AM

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Comment author: Tem42 27 August 2015 11:27:47PM 2 points [-]

BattleGround God is bad arguing. It seems to have been created and tested by one person who had strong ideas about the type of person that was going to take it. The 'contradictory statements' that it identifies are 1. not actually contradictory, but 2. not presented in conjunction to each other, meaning that you have to take their re-wording of previous statements as consistent. They are not constant -- they replace wording indicating a broad idea with wording requiring a narrow (and specifically Judaic/Christian/Islamic) definition in order to 'catch you out'. Whacking through all the random things they think that you might believe (mostly wisely chosen if you are taking an exit poll at a church, but not so good on a philosophy site) makes it very boring to find their errors... But errors there are. Whoever wrote it was much more interested in catching out theists with murky ideas of rhetoric and not particularly interested in defining beliefs and testing for contradictions.

This person would not last 5 minutes in a discussion with a real human. This is not a good model of how to talk to theists, nor will any non-rational theist bother to play this game with any intent of taking its conclusions as valid. Nor should they.

It was so painful!

Comment author: Jiro 28 August 2015 03:12:53PM *  1 point [-]

I just took that.

Earlier you said that even in the absence of independent evidence, it is justified to base one's beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner-conviction. But now you do not accept that the serial murderer Peter Sutcliffe was justified in doing just that. The example of the killer has exposed that you do not in fact think that a belief is justified just because one is convinced of its truth. So you need to revise your opinion here. The intellectual sniper has scored a bull's-eye!

and

Earlier you said that it is justified to base one's belief about the external world on a firm inner conviction, even in the absence of any independent evidence for the truth of this conviction, but now you say it is not justified to believe in God on just those grounds. That's a flagrant contradiction!

I answered the first question that way because I believe there are some inner convictions it is justified to base one's beliefs on (for instance, the belief that there is an external world and that I am not a brain in a vat), but I do not believe this is true for all inner convictions. So that is not actually a contradiction.

I didn't get any other "contradictions" and I suspect that it's because I took everything very literally there.

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