From: dliebman@terapin.com (David Liebman)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: The Voice of Experience
Date: 23 Nov 92 03:18:27 PST
Organization: BBS

In article <62205@mimsy.umd.edu>, mangoe@cs.umd.edu (Charley Wingate) writes:
>Someone named dave writes:
>
>>> The evidence is that people convert, and hence move from not experiencing
to
>>> experiencing.  Hence, simple lack of personal experience is not necessarily
>>> good evidence by itself.
>
>>never mind the matter of _what_ they are experiencing.
>
>Well, I DO say "never mind".  Taken at face value, evangelism has some of
>the qualities of giving a favorable review of a restaurant or a movie.  Here
>it is very much a matter of one's confidence in the reviewer.  Atheism is
>prone to an attitude of "all us enlightened, right-thinking, clear-minded
>people of course see through that silly backwards religion stuff".  At the
>same time, I suspec that atheists ask other people for advice and opinions,
>which pretty clearly falls in into the heading of authority.

if i'm going to comment on the movie, much less encourage others to go see it
and shape my life around it, i'd like to see the movie.  the theaters are
open, but all that's playing are the reviews of the movie critics.  the
question is, are you, as you implied, experiencing god, or are you just
experiencing a favorable summary of god?

>>as for the question of authority, which i addressed in a previous post
>>which either died or was ignored, that of Faith, unlike the others you tend
>>to mention, permit no grounds whatsoever within their domain for refutation.
>
>I'm having trouble making sense out of this, but if I understand it
>correctly, you are asserting that faith allows no grounds for refutation
>(I'm not sure what this "domain" is).  I don't know what to make of such a
>statement in the face of the abundant evidence that people lose faith.
>
>>other authorities are found incapable of denying, even in their own
>>missives, their fallibility.  consideration of the supernatural, therefore,
>>requires the mere acceptance or rejection of knowledge, rather than an
>>interaction with the process of knowing, which you seem to abdicate with a
>>throwing up of hands.
>
>I don't follow this at all.  I cannot see a separation between acceptance/
>rejection and this "process of knowing"-- and is knowing a process or a
>state?

speaking of belief in the abstract, there isn't any discourse _within_
belief, there is only discussion _of_ it.  when i ask why? you respond
'because' followed either by referring to other beliefs, which is a
discourse which involves your original belief; or by a period, which
consists of your original belief; or by denying the legitimacy of all
other beliefs, which is an elongated variation of the second sort of
response.

theological belief, as you have demonstrated by the use of the third sort
of response, tends to reject this move towards
externality; this was made manifest in the pre-modern european sacral
community, which described itself by a symbolic self-enclosure.  theological
belief is an absolute authority; it tolerates no questions.  that is to say,
it simply refers all questions to the fact of its existence.  rational
belief, on the other hand, submits itself to other beliefs.  the existence
of a rational belief is contigent on the cooperation of all other possible
rational beliefs.  to believe in deity not only requires an act of human
judgement, which, as you have pointed out, is fallible, but requires a
_singular_ act of judgement, rather than a mediation of multiple successive
judgements.  religion, in short, abhorrs change, while reason is the
substance of it.

regards,
dave