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Where does belief come from?

Athena

Registered User
As long as you studied and tested your beliefs as true and they are good, then you follow and carry out the belief. I would say we'd be on the right path.
Most importantly actually believe in that belief do not pretend.
 

Athena

Registered User
Edit: I am unsure if applying it plural is appropriate but I'm against division and recently picked up a book called "the laws of teamwork" one of the laws is one man never does it alone, he's had more than one person help him out to accomplish his dreams, goals, ambitions.

Well instead of editing I quoted myself. I'm so flawed.
 

dfreybur

Premium Member
I like the statement "The nice thing about science is it works whether you believe it or not". Which is itself a belief.

As men of the liberal arts and sciences, we work with the concrete. We know there is an objective reality and that our beliefs about it can be correct or incorrect.

As men of faith who look to that undiscovered country from when none return, we know there is more to life than the concrete. Faith, as long as it is carefully limited to not conflict with the concrete, gives our lives far more meaning.

Parlor magic is the science of finding and exploiting errors in human perception and cognition. Philosophy is the art of controlling reason. Because human reason is flawed, it can be hard to tease out which is which on any one topic.
 

Pointwithinacircle3

Registered User
Philosophy is the art of controlling reason.
Please forgive me if I take issue with your use of the word controlling. To me Philosophy is a conversation in which both sides try to to enlarge their understanding of a topic by careful considering, comparing, and contrasting another persons opinion with their own opinions and beliefs in order to arrive at the best workable theory about a given topic. To me this distinctly different from science which seeks to arrive at "the one true answer" that it can then label as "Truth".
 

dfreybur

Premium Member
Please forgive me if I take issue with your use of the word controlling.

A lesson from engineering, so it's my bias to use it as a source and as context -

What you don't measure you can't control. What you don't control you can't improve.

It's a form of concrete reasoning, yet philosophy has not always been concrete. It's my bias that the value in philosophy is the degree to which it can be applied. Noticing that I mentioned that the Master Mason degree is about moving beyond the concrete, which has some meaning other than concrete value.

One of the major separations of humans from our fellow animals is our amount of reason. Philosophy was developed to increase and improve our reason by applying tools and processes to it.

To me this distinctly different from science which seeks to arrive at "the one true answer" that it can then label as "Truth".

You went off the rails there. Philosophy, as it improves and increases the reason, teaches that there is no absolute truth in the concrete reasoning realm. As such any claim of absolute truth is an exit from reason. As such any claim of absolute truth is an exit from philosophy. Which is why in many ways to categorize fields of study religion is a sibling of philosophy not either a subset nor superset of philosophy.
 

dfreybur

Premium Member
The question then is: what are suitable standards to use in measuring trueness?

The word has meanings that include objective accuracy as in science, loyalty as in the meaning of faith in Semper Fidelity and the combination of moral rectitude and being at right angles. So what count as suitable standards depends on which meaning you intend.
 
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