"All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strewn
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own."
-- Sir Richard Francis Burton
A judge in a village court had gone on vacation. Sufi Mullah Nasrudin was asked to be temporary judge for a day.
Nasrudin sat on the Judge's chair with a serious face, gazing around the public and ordered the first case be brought-up for hearing.
"You are right," said Nasrudin after hearing one side.
"You are right," he said after hearing the other side.
"But both cannot be right," said a member of public sitting in the audience.
"You are right, too" said Nasrudin.
If you can only see two sides of an argument you are missing something.
Originally posted by Scriabinthere is no spoon
"All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strewn
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own."
-- Sir Richard Francis Burton
A judge in a village court had gone on vacation. Sufi Mullah Nasrudin was asked to be temporary judge for a day.
Nasrudin sat on the Judge's chair with a serious face, gaz ...[text shortened]... Nasrudin.
If you can only see two sides of an argument you are missing something.
Originally posted by Scriabin"All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strewn"
"All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strewn
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own."
-- Sir Richard Francis Burton
A judge in a village court had gone on vacation. Sufi Mullah Nasrudin was asked to be temporary judge for a day.
Nasrudin sat on the Judge's chair with a serious face, gaz ...[text shortened]... Nasrudin.
If you can only see two sides of an argument you are missing something.
--------------->>>>>Should I have faith that this statement is true?
If I don't have faith in it being true then it fails , if I do have faith in it being true then I am contradicting myself.
Either way philosophies like this are bunk because all they prove is that we all have to have faith or belief in some idea being true - there is no escaping it.
Originally posted by jaywillExactly! 🙂
[b]"There is no real truth, or even reality."
Then we can ignore this statement which itself cannot be a truth or indicate reality.[/b]
-sometimes some people seem to make this kind of interpretation of quantum mechanics (i.e. ‘there is no external reality’ ) and it drives me round the bend when they do this.
now that the ball is in play, so to speak, let's clarify:
Our understanding of reality needs to be more clear.
Let's deconstruct a bit. There is what philosophy calls Phenomenological Reality. Our individual and uniquely personal interpretations of an event cannot be shared save through language. Yet, those interpretations shape reality as seen by each of us as individuals.
This form of reality might be something others experience, but we restrict the term because this experience can be unique to oneself and never experienced or agreed on by any one else.
Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality.
What other meanings can we agree on for the term "reality?"
As for truth, show me a single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.
Are truths independent of our beliefs? Except for propositions that are actually about our beliefs or sensations, is that which is true or false independent of what we think is true or false?
Is truth subjective?
When we agree on the interpretation and experience of a particular event, we form a consensus about that event. Does this consensus then become the 'truth?' Doesn't this lead to different communities and societies having different notions of reality and truth of the external world?
Aren't religions examples of `socially constructed 'reality'?
Does the lack of any objective truth mean that there is no truth beyond the socially-accepted consensus? (Although this means there are truths, not truth).
What of the view that the world is a set of definite facts, which exist independently of human perceptions ("The world is all that is the case" — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), and these facts are the final arbiter of truth?
Lady Macbeth had three children or she did not; a tree falls or it does not. A statement will be true if it corresponds to these facts — even if the correspondence cannot be established.
How do we reconcile all these?
Consider Philip K. Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Most of my objection to religion comes from my experience that the major source of cultural conflict in the world occurs when certain individuals or groups try to impose their phenomenological realities or truths on other people or communities.
This why I rather find Buddhism an attractive philosophy. Buddhists hold that we can only discuss objects which are not reality itself and that nothing can be said of reality which is true in any absolute sense.
Originally posted by knightmeisterWhy do we need faith or belief in some idea being true?
"All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strewn"
--------------->>>>>Should I have faith that this statement is true?
If I don't have faith in it being true then it fails , if I do have faith in it being true then I am contradicting myself.
Either way philosophies like this are bunk because all they prove is that we all have to have faith or belief in some idea being true - there is no escaping it.
Originally posted by ScriabinTruth is a set of definite facts which exist independently of human perception and conception.
As for truth, show me a single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.
Are truths independent of our beliefs? Except for propositions that are actually about our beliefs or sensations, is that which is true or false independent of what we think is true or false?
Is truth subjective?
When we agree on the i ...[text shortened]... s — even if the correspondence cannot be established.
How do we reconcile all these?
Originally posted by ThinkOfOneI don't disagree. However, that is not the consensus of a majority of philosophers and other professionals. It is just one view.
Truth is a set of definite facts which exist independently of human perception and conception.
This is what G.E. Moore or Bertrand Russell might say. The correspondence theory of truth expresses the very natural idea that truth is a content-to-world or word-to-world relation: what we say or think is true or false in virtue of the way the world turns out to be.
What we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are—to the facts. This idea can be seen in various forms throughout the history of philosophy. Its modern history starts with the beginnings of analytic philosophy at the turn of the 20th century.
This theory of truth, at its core, is an ontological thesis: a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity—a fact—to which it corresponds.
A correspondence theory of truth, of any kind, is often taken to embody a form of realism. The key features of realism are that:
1. The world exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it.
2. Our thoughts and claims are about that world.
In the later work of Russell, around1956, the existence of facts is the “first truism.” Here the influence of Wittgenstein's ideas to appear in the Tractatus (1922) on Russell was strong.
Russell attacks a different theory of truth by Joachim, the coherence theory: a belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs.
The correspondence theory seeks to capture the intuition that truth is a content-to-world relation. It captures this in the most straightforward way, by asking for an object in the world to pair up with a true proposition. The coherence theory, in contrast, insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation.
Others have taken a pragmatic view and said such things as:
Truth is the end of inquiry.
or
Truth is satisfactory to believe.
Originally posted by ScriabinSo you think there is an all powerful being that is stupid? Throw in a bit of wisdom and common sense and what you get is a being that would not waste his time on such pursuits.
Deductive reasoning shows that the concept of an omnipotent entity is logically contradictory, from considering a question like: "Can God create a rock so big that he cannot lift it?" or "If God is all powerful, could God create a being more powerful than itself?"
Deductive reasoning is a man made construct and, as such, should in no way be able to fully capture an all knowing and all powerful being.
Originally posted by whodeyDid I indicate I believed this proposition? I don't think I did.
So you think there is an all powerful being that is stupid? Throw in a bit of wisdom and common sense and what you get is a being that would not waste his time on such pursuits.
Deductive reasoning is a man made construct and, as such, should in no way be able to fully capture an all knowing and all powerful being.
Your response is classical inductive reasoning, however. The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent and omniscient being would not have any reason to act in any way, specifically by creating the universe, because it would have no needs, wants, or desires since these very concepts are subjectively human. As the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is espoused by Scott Adams in the book God's Debris.
This one is easy to get around -- how do we know what such an omnipotent and omniscient being would feel like doing or not doing? This argument assumes too much. So does its opposite, to prove God's existence with an ontological argument or so many others. All of these arguments, save one or two, rest on unwarranted assumptions to support a conclusion that God does or does not exist.
We cannot assume facts not in evidence -- and so we don't know by reason alone one thing or another. I hold with the theory of Theological noncognitivism. But I am open to new information.
Yet another argument suggests that there is a contradiction between God being omniscient and omnipotent, basically asking "how can an all-knowing being change its mind?"
I merely have to ask my wife the answer to that one.
Originally posted by whodeyIf deductive reasoning is a man made construct and thus is invalid -- how is the man made theological doctrine in which you believe so strongly anything different?
So you think there is an all powerful being that is stupid? Throw in a bit of wisdom and common sense and what you get is a being that would not waste his time on such pursuits.
Deductive reasoning is a man made construct and, as such, should in no way be able to fully capture an all knowing and all powerful being.
Where is the non-man made construct to support it?
Are you saying you have direct experience to support your beliefs -- something that is not "man made?"