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| Chapter 4 Clarification | ||||||||||
| You asked me "what is proof?" | ||||||||||
| My beliefs have somewhat changed sine I wrote this paper, so these responses may not totally correspond to my actual responses to chapter 4. I don't think that humans have the capacity for absolute proof. (Absolute proof being something that could cause indubitable conviction (not just belief) of something). Of course, you know about my views on perception and reality, so, even if one were presented with absolute proof, it still could not be taken as absolute proof because of the inaccuracies of human perception. The proof that I mention in my response for chapter two is not this "absolute proof" that I speak of. The proof that I mention on my paper is simply something that supports the existence of something else. For example: me seeing a chair would be considered proof of the chair's existence because it supports the existence of the chair. | ||||||||||
| It probably seems as though I've dug myself into a pit of contradictions by now, going back on everything that I mention in other papers of mine. I want to try to clarify a little here by giving my opinion on belief. I think that there are two kinds of beliefs; I'll call one true belief and the other pragmatic belief (for lack of better terms). True belief is impossible, in my opinion. True belief is the absolute indubitable conviction of something. To have a true belief, you can have no doubts about it whatsoever. I don't think that anyone can have such a belief in his/her mind. Pragmatic beliefs are what I think people use. These beliefs allow room for doubt, yet can be held by even the most skeptical people (such as myself). For a pragmatic belief, there only needs to be enough conviction for the belief to work, doubt is allowed. An example of this would be what I wrote about earlier (I believe it was in my chapter 3 responses) about reality. I wrote that one can never see true reality because his/her perceptions are always clouded by possible errors. According to this, I can be sitting in a chair and yet still be questioning its existence. According to pragmatic belief, I can still use the chair. I perceive the chair to exist and, even though I have my skepticism about it's true existence, I have a pragmatic belief about it being there because it works. I am sure that other philosophers have spoken of this subject before (using much better terms that pragmatic belief and true belief) but the concept of this just struck me as I was interpreting my beliefs and opinions. | ||||||||||
| You asked me "what the heck is physical evidence and what does it have to do with God?" | ||||||||||
| I admit that I misused the term "physical evidence" in this response. What I was trying to say in this statement was that the only way that I will ever be convinced of God's existence is if He (or She) appeared before me. Even then, this belief in God would still only be a "pragmatic belief" (see above) because I would still have my doubts about my perception and sanity. The appearance of God was the "physical evidence" that I was attempting to describe. In this sense, there would be no physical evidence if God did not exist. God can not appear if He doesn't exist, but this doesn't mean that He doesn't exist (I know what I'm trying to say, and I apologize for the absolute lack of clarity here, though I think I may have gotten the idea across). Since, what I call "physical evidence" is the only way to prove to me that God does or does not exist, and such evidence does not (or cannot) exist for proving the nonexistence of God, I can never believe in atheism. | ||||||||||
| You asked me what could there be to prove something's existence. | ||||||||||
| INow I'm really going off into my own terms here. Physical evidence (like I described in the above paragraph) is what I had in mind in this response. Something that can be perceived is enough to prove something's existence, but only in the pragmatic sense. I'm repeating myself here, but will continue to do so for the sake of clarity: If I see a chair, my perception of it is proof of its existence to me. That does not mean that I completely believe in the chair's existence; it only means that I have a pragmatic belief about the chair being there. I believe that I can use the chair, but I can still have my doubts about my perception of it or its existence. | ||||||||||