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polymathwannabe comments on Religious and Rational? - Less Wrong Discussion
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This changes the entire color of your text. It makes it sound like its intended audience is believers, not seculars.
There are two main problems with that statement. First, the secular view has no place for the category of "faith." It's just not a concept we use. It's seriously inaccurate to call our reliance on sensory experience "faith." Second, everyone starts from sensory experience, including religious people. All your conceptions of the divine were learned via some sensation (reading, conversation, etc.).
The article is aimed at both. Yes, it is probably more aimed at believers because as a minister that the audience most receptive to me. For believers I hope to show that rationality is not always antithetical to religious practice. For secular people I hope to show that there are things in common between the religious and the secular. We dont have to always be at odds. Your right and others who have pointed it out are right that we all start with sensory experience.. It would be interesting to discuss where sensory experience begins to lead religious people to faith.
I think it's fine to call it faith in sensory experience - I choose to use it as data.
The second is the stronger argument, IMO.
Actually, if the Rev made that argument to religious people, that would be a strong argument in favor of basic empiricism. You only get to God through empiricism.
Though that's probably a better argument for a Deist than a Methodist.
What else could you ever possibly use as data?
Things you imagine. Things you reasoned "a priori".
I think the underlying assumption--that internal experiences are also 'sensory' in some sense--is a better place to start here, because discussing that clearly requires a non-unitary view of the mind. A mind could start out believing in the divine for only internal reasons, and so we would like to have a viewpoint that can see which pieces cause and propagate that belief.
Covered before. Beliefs don't pop up spontaneously in the mind without some external origin.
As a question of neuroscience, I'm not sure this is actually true. If people can be more easily conditioned to be afraid of snakes than cars, is the implied underlying belief that snakes are scary of external or internal origin?
(If one says 'external, because it's genetic,' well, the whole brain is genetic in the same sense. If one says internal, what difference between a predisposition to believe snakes are scary and a predisposition to believe the divine exists?)
I agree with you about the dynamics of correct thought; I don't agree that this is necessarily how actual minds work by default.
Humans are genetically hardwired to be afraid of snakes, but the programmed part of this trait involves automatic response behaviors; it doesn't always have to translate into a conscious belief.
Believing in the divine is an extension of the pattern-recognition and agency-detection skills. Those are innate traits, but the kind of phenomena that elicit such a conclusion are in the physical world.