*_Total List of Mistakes (For Part 1)_* 4:01 Mistake #1: Confusions about belief, knowledge, credence, certainty 16:51 Mistake #2: Faith is belief without evidence 19:58 Mistake #3: Sentences vs. beliefs vs. propositions 22:34 Mistake #4: Polysemy of ‘probability’ 26:33 Mistake #5: Evidence for H vs. making H probable 27:51 Mistake #6: Total evidence requirement 29:17 Mistake #7: Understating the evidence 29:59 Mistake #8: Confirmation is comparative 30:40 Mistake #9: Evidential symmetry 31:23 Mistake #10: Likelihood ratio rigging 32:00 Mistake #11: If E is evidence for H1 and H1 entails H2, then E is evidence for H2 41:40 Mistake #11 (extended): More on confirmation closure under entailment 45:01 Mistake #12: Data can’t be evidence for multiple, incompatible hypotheses 46:34 Mistake #13: If A is evidence for B, and B is evidence for C, then A is evidence for C. 49:30 Mistake #14: if D entails D* and D* is evidence for H, then D must be evidence for H 53:54 Mistake #15: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence 55:24 Mistake #16: Improbable by chance, therefore God 56:14 Mistake #17: Claims aren’t evidence 57:37 Mistake #18: Testimony isn’t evidence 1:01:52 Mistake #19: No evidence for a/theism 1:03:29 Mistake #20: Probabilistic arguments vs. metaphysical demonstrations 1:11:10 Mistake #21: Which God? 1:11:57 Mistake #22: “The” cosmological argument 1:14:44 Mistake #23: How can you know God’s ways? 1:15:28 Mistake #24: Only a small # of arguments for/against God 1:16:53 Mistake #25: Slapping the label ‘grounded by God’ 1:17:48 Mistake #26: Fallacy mongering 1:38:56 Mistake #27: Insults aren’t ad hominems 1:39:15 Mistake #28: Demanding necessary and sufficient conditions for terms 1:42:22 Mistake #29: Simplicity is a tiebreaker 1:46:11 Mistake #30: Only fundamental things count toward simplicity 1:54:01 Mistake #31: Only comparing a portion of your worldview 1:55:41 Mistake #32: Irrelevant features of an analogy 1:58:07 Mistake #33: God of the Gaps galore 1:59:18 Mistake #34: Blaming arguments for not proving what they weren’t trying to prove 1:59:41 Mistake #35: You can’t prove a negative 2:02:21 Mistake #36: Random philosophical problem? God must solve it! 2:03:55 Mistake #37: Which is premise is false, bro? 2:06:44 Mistake #38: A sound argument is automatically a good argument 2:08:51 Mistake #39: Justifying a non-obvious general principle by a single example 2:09:37 Mistake #40: Burden of proof confusions 2:10:41 Mistake #41: Ignoring various dimensions of simplicity 2:15:15 Mistake #42: Demanding peer-reviewed empirical evidence for God 2:16:30 Mistake #43: Theism is unfalsifiable 2:19:04 Mistake #44: Intuitions don’t matter 2:26:03 Mistake #45: Undercutting vs. rebutting defeaters 2:28:00 Mistake #46: Everything requires an argument 2:28:47 Mistake #47: Lack of epistemic humility 2:30:58 Mistake #48: Binary attitude 2:32:26 Mistake #49: Psychologizing 2:33:55 Mistake #50: Failures of objectivity 2:40:37 Mistake #51: Being a bad philosophical discussant 2:43:14 Mistake #52: Speak for your own intuitions! 2:45:34 Mistake #53: Philosophy never makes progress 2:47:30 Mistake #54: Philosophy is useless
The creator of this place is evil and feeding on our suffering what ever beauty there is here is to confuse us into staying here life after life thinking life is good and a school for us. Near death experiences and children sometimes remembering they past lives to the exact details is already big evidence of the reincarnation soul trap
#1: Gettier is complete garbage, btw. It basically just shows that someone wasn't completely justified in holding the beliefs they had. If, for example, the president of the company had sole decision making in who would get the job, and unwavering certainty that Jones would get the job, then Jones would have gotten the job. Either the president didn't have sole decision making (a board might have voted by majority, and picked Smith), or the president did have sole decision making, but wasn't unwaveringly certain, and wavered. Knowledge is a Justified True Belief. Math is based on the objectively existing amounts of things. I have an amount of fingers on one hand, and amount of fingers on the other, and an amount in total. As long as the calculations are done properly, math is undeniably knowledge. Even if our reality was some kind of illusion, or simulation, there is an amount of illusionary/simulated fingers on one hand, an amount on the other, and an amount in total. Even if you use different "languages", like Sumerian base 6 counting, yards vs metres, litres vs quarts, kg vs lbs, Celsius vs Fahrenheit, etc., the amounts are the same. Math is pure objectivity, if the calculations are done properly. #2: Oh, come on. There are multiple definitions of "faith", and in discussion about religion, the generic definition of "faith" isn't the one being used. :1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. :2. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Literally in the definition, for #2, that it's not based on proof. #17: Claims, alone, are, in fact, not evidence. Trump claims the 2020 election was rigged, against him. There has been zero evidence to support the claim that the election was rigged, against him. He also claimed the 2016 election was rigged, against him, and that he actually won the popular vote. He even set up an election integrity commission, which quietly shut down, after finding no evidence to support such a claim. The reason to believe your friend's claim, is the evidence that your friend has generally been honest with you, not simply because he made a claim. If someone else constantly lies to you, you'll do the reverse, and tend not to believe anything they say. The evidence isn't in the claim, but in who is making the claim. We do tend to give new people we meet the benefit of the doubt, if they're talking about mundane daily tasks, because it's largely irrelevant. If I just met your friend, it's completely irrelevant to my life, and my worldview, whether they bought a soccer ball, baseball, football, or whatever. But, if your friend told me they met Big Foot, on the way to the place I met them, there's zero evidence to support believing them, and centuries of not finding a Big Foot, to believe they're full of crap. I would think your friend is a loon. #19: That some number of people believe X is true, is not, at all, evidence X is true. Almost everyone used to believe the world was flat, that the earth was the centre of the universe and everything was revolving around it, and numerous other myths. That intelligent Greeks once believed there were gods living on top of Mt Olympus, is not evidence of gods living on top of Mt Olympus. That many many kids believe in Santa Claus, isn't evidence Santa Claus exists. There is also a difference between a very generic "theism", otherwise known as deism, and actual theistic religions, that are absolutely ridiculous piles of crap. Rather than there equally being evidence to support the very simple notion of created vs not created, there is actually equally no evidence to support either. On the other hand, there is tons of evidence that the Earth isn't 6000 years old ... that full fledged homo sapiens weren't created ... that there wasn't a global flood at the height of numerous civilizations ... that all the people on earth weren't in one spot speaking one language, one day, then scattered around the world, speaking different languages the next ... that Heaven isn't floating about 500' over Iraq, where a tower could reach it ... etc., etc., etc. It's a fairytale. We've seen how Mormonism was invented. We've seen how Scientology was invented. How Rastafarianism was invented. Etc. There's zero evidence that previous inventions of religions were any different. #21: "Which god?", is a perfectly valid question, because the vast majority of theists aren't simply arguing for the existence of a generic creator. Or, "What do you mean by 'god'?", is even better. Some theoretical physicists have suggested that it would be possible to create a universe, given the proper materials and energy, but that created universe would immediately detach itself from the universe it was created in, and grow into itself. If, by "god", you're arguing for an eternally existing wizard, who created the universe with magic, that's quite different from some kind of incredibly advanced being, creating universes in a lab. The latter would be a "god" similar to how we'd consider other intelligent life in the universe an "alien", they'd consider us to be "aliens", but we each wouldn't consider ourselves to be. I think it's quite dishonest, for people of various theistic religions, to pretend like they're only arguing for a generic creator, when they do have an entire fairytale, and characteristics, attached to said creator.
*_Full List of Mistakes (For Part 1)_* 4:01 Mistake #1: Confusions about belief, knowledge, credence, certainty 16:51 Mistake #2: Faith is belief without evidence 19:58 Mistake #3: Sentences vs. beliefs vs. propositions 22:34 Mistake #4: Polysemy of 'probability' 26:33 Mistake #5: Evidence for H vs. making H probable 27:51 Mistake #6: Total evidence requirement 29:17 Mistake #7: Understating the evidence 29:59 Mistake #8: Confirmation is comparative 30:40 Mistake #9: Evidential symmetry 31:23 Mistake #10: Likelihood ratio rigging 32:00 Mistake #11: Confirmation closure under entailment 41:40 Mistake #11 (extended): Variant of confirmation closure 45:01 Mistake #12: Evidence for multiple incompatible hypotheses 46:34 Mistake #13: Confirmation transitivity 49:30 Mistake #14: Thinking that if D entails D* and D* is evidence for H, then D must be evidence for H 53:54 Mistake #15: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence 55:24 Mistake #16: Improbable by chance, therefore evidence for God 56:14 Mistake #17: Claims aren't evidence 57:37 Mistake #18: Testimony isn't evidence 1:01:52 Mistake #19: There's no evidence for (a)theism 1:03:29 Mistake #20: Metaphysical demonstrations vs. probabilistic arguments 1:11:10 Mistake #21: "Which God?" 1:11:57 Mistake #22: "The" cosmological/ontological/etc. argument 1:14:44 Mistake #23: Theistic predictions 1:15:28 Mistake #24: Only a small # of arguments for (a)theism 1:16:53 Mistake #25: Slapping the label "grounded by God" 1:17:48 Mistake #26: Fallacy mongering 1:38:56 Mistake #27: Insults are not ad hominems 1:39:15 Mistake #28: Demanding necessary and sufficient conditions 1:42:22 Mistake #29: Simplicity is not a tiebreaker 1:46:11 Mistake #30: Non-fundamenta count towards simplicity 1:54:01 Mistake #31: Comparing whole worldviews 1:55:41 Mistake #32: Irrelevant features of an analogy 1:58:07 Mistake #33: God of the Gaps Galore 1:59:18 Mistake #34: Blaming arguments for not proving something irrelevant 1:59:41 Mistake #35: You can't prove a negative 2:02:21 Mistake #36: Random philosophical problem? God must solve it. 2:03:55 Mistake #37: Which premise is false, bro? 2:06:44 Mistake #38: A sound argument is not necessarily a good argument 2:08:51 Mistake #39: Justifying a non-obvious principle by a single example 2:09:37 Mistake #40: The burden of proof 2:10:41 Mistake #41: Ignoring various dimensions of simplicity 2:15:15 Mistake #42: Demanding verified, peer-reviewed evidence for God 2:16:30 Mistake #43: Theism is unfalsifiable 2:19:04 Mistake #44: Intuitions don't matter 2:26:03 Mistake #45: Undercutting vs. rebutting defeaters 2:28:00 Mistake #46: Not everything requires an argument 2:28:47 Mistake #47: Lack of epistemic humility 2:30:58 Mistake #48: Binary attitude 2:32:26 Mistake #49: Psychologizing 2:33:55 Mistake #50: Failures of objectivity 2:40:37 Mistake #51: Being a bad philosophical discussant 2:43:14 Mistake #52: Speak for your own intuitions! 2:45:34 Mistake #53: Philosophy never makes progress 2:47:30 Mistake #54: Philosophy is useless
If your aim is to have people link to this video when calling out a mistake they find out there, then you are hurting your cause by not having the Linguistic description in the chapter heading. Perhaps you intend to go back in and edit the headings later, but currently they just read "mistake#1 - mistake#2 - etc" and that is nearly useless.
Hey Joe! Can you clarify what exactly you mean by “entailment” in #11 and 12? I think there is a confusion on terms there because when you say that these mistakes are common sense yet mistakes nonetheless, that seems to be because by saying H1 entails H2, it means that if H1 is true then H2 is in fact true. Whereas the reason the example reveals mistaken reasoning is that it was actually false that the truth of H1 means that H2 is true. In other words, if H1 really does entail H2, then it would therefore be the case that evidence for H1 is evidence for H2. I was even more confused when coming to #12, because again by saying evidence against God is not evidence against Christianity, the implication then is that God’s existence is not entailed by the truth of Christianity which seems obviously false by any reasonable definition of Christianity (self-identified “atheist Christians” notwithstanding). So essentially, it seems to me that these are either not mistakes (if the entailment relation holds) or they are phrased in a misleading way (it’s stated that H1 entails H2, seemingly as a given, yet H1 does not entail H2). Can you clarify where I may be mistaken here?
@@varvela1 hopefully this clarification can help. First, some terminology: 'H1 entails H2' means that if H1 is true, H2 must also be true. So, then, here is the mistake: "If H1 entails H2, then any evidence for H1 is also evidence for H2" That is wrong. Just because H1 entails H2, it does not follow that any evidence for H1 is also evidence for H2. Sometimes, it is true that (a) H1 entails H2, (b) E is evidence for H1, and yet (c) E is NOT evidence for H2. In mistake #11, #11 (extended), and #13 (corrected #), I give multiple examples wherein conditions (a)-(c) hold: that is, I give cases wherein some hypothesis entails a second hypothesis, and yet some piece of data is evidence for the first hypothesis without being evidence for the second hypothesis. For instance, the second ball being red is evidence for the hypothesis that both balls are red; the hypothesis that both balls are red entails the hypothesis that the first ball is red; and yet the second ball being red is certainly *not* evidence for the hypothesis that the first ball is red. Or: the hypothesis that the card is a jack of spades entails the hypothesis that the card is a spade; and the datum that the card is a jack is evidence for (raises the probability of) the hypothesis that the card is a jack of spades (it makes the hypothesis go from 1/52 chance to 1/4 chance); and yet the datum that the card is a jack is certainly NOT evidence for the hypothesis that the card is a spade (before learning that datum, the hypothesis has a 1/4 chance of being true; after learning the datum, it still only has a 1/4 chance). Finally, there can be evidence against God's existence without there being evidence against Christianity even though Christianity entails God's existence. An example is the datum that Islam is false (suppose we learned this). Islam being false removes one way for God to exist, and so it lowers the probability that God exists. Yet Islam being false doesn't make Christianity less probable; in fact, it makes it more probable, since it removes one way for Christianity to be false (and hence makes the ways for Christianity to be true to take up a larger proportion of the possibility/probability space).
@@MajestyofReason The first part makes complete sense, my confusion was in mixing up the hypotheses, thinking that H1 was that the first ball is red, and H2 that the second ball is red. Its occurring to me now that the directionality matters here too in an interesting way (ie evidence for H1 is not necessarily evidence for H2 when H1 entails H2, but it is necessarily evidence for H2 when H2 *is entailed by* H1). In other words, if H1 is evident in a way completely orthogonal to H2 (when the probability for H2 is only a subset of the probability for H1) then it’s not evidence also for H2. However, when H1 is entailed by H2, then the probability space overlaps and evidence for H1 is necessarily evidence for H2. That said, it is still seeming to me that your second paragraph is mistaken through being an example of the latter case (ie incorrectly denying that evidence against H1 is evidence against H2 when H1’s probability space is a subset of H2’s). You said that evidence against God is not necessarily evidence against Christianity. I agree that it would be true that evidence against Christianity is not evidence against God, but not the other way around, since the probability space of Gods existence is a subset of the probability space of Christianity (God can exist without Christianity being true, but not vice versa). Or in the general case, evidence for H1 is always evidence for H2 when H2 is entailed by H1, yet not necessarily when H1 entails H2. Is that right? So following from this, your example says that Islam being false is evidence against God but evidence FOR Christianity. But this seems to be making the mistake you’re talking about. Islam can be false for reasons completely orthogonal to the existence of God or truth of Christianity, and so would not affect either probability. However, it seems necessarily to be the case that any evidence against the existence of God (H1) will always be evidence against Christianity or Islam (H2), since H1 in this example *is entailed by* H2 rather than the erroneous claim that it entails H1. If I’m still making a mistake here, and you’re willing to take the time to point it out, thanks in advance. I sincerely appreciate it 😊
@@brunoarruda9916 Estou fazendo ead pela UFSC, eles tem polos espalhados por algumas cidades do estado e daí vc comparece umas duas vezes por mês pras aulas presenciais, o resto é online. Infelizmente não tem Filosofia da religião no currículo deles, mas por um lado não achei tão ruim, pq religião é a área que eu sou menos ignorante graças ao yt, então o curso vai ajudar no resto que é onde mais falta conhecimento hehe
Thank you for providing such a manageable list! Great to know that simply eliminating or at least minimizing these 54 mistakes will up my philosophy game significantly 😂😂. All joking aside I’m sure this will be a great video and I’m adding it to my watch list. Thanks for taking the time to write 130 pages to prep for a thorough video on an important topic!
on the topic of the definition of faith. first off, i think it has 2 valid definitions. one is what you said, essentially trust. but, the 2nd: " believing what you know aint so" isn't such a strange definition to keep as valid. it describes cognitive dissonance. a very real thing people have. and so its a useful def. Intellectually you know something is not true or, very unlikely, but emotionally you want it to be true and believe it anyway. acting like this really unlikely thing is definitely going to happen. A less harsh version of this would be like having hope in something being true, even if it seems unlikely. but often i see faith as taking hope too far and using it to act as though you have total certainly.
Congratulations, you've singlehandedly dramatically transformed my knowledge of philosophy and made me realize that there is so much I do not know (both in breadth and quality). Its admittedly a bit daunting, knowing that I do not know so much. Still, I guess its better than falling into the ever present Dunner Kruger.
Me too even though I’m a theist I gain a lot of beneficial things from watching his videos and reading his articles. And I can definitely say he’s improve my philosophy and critical thinking.
On Mistake #2: when you hear some lay theists justify their belief with faith, you’ll understand why some atheist personalities define faith this way. Some will actually say that they believe so and so without evidence and believe it solely on faith. Now whether that’s rational will depend on the account of rationality one favors but lay theists do define faith as belief without sufficient evidence.
00:00 🧐 The video explores common mistakes in apologetics, counter-apologetics, and internet philosophy debates. 01:01 📚 The series covers various aspects of philosophy, including epistemology, argumentation, and the nature of beliefs. 04:16 🤔 The first mistake discussed is confusion regarding belief, knowledge, credence, and certainty. 09:36 🔄 The video clarifies the distinctions between belief, knowledge, credence, and certainty. 16:55 🙌 Mistake number two: Faith is not merely believing with no evidence but involves trust and commitment with cognitive and conative components. 19:05 🙌 Faith can be compatible with evidence and rational belief; it doesn't necessarily mean believing without evidence. 20:01 🧠 Sentences, beliefs, and propositions are distinct; beliefs are mental states, and propositions are what beliefs refer to. 22:23 🎲 Probability has multiple meanings, including propensity, frequency, agent's credence, rational credence, degrees of support between propositions, and degrees of justification. 27:59 🤔 Ignoring the total evidence requirement when assessing a hypothesis can lead to an incomplete evaluation. 32:13 🔄 Confirmation does not necessarily transmit over entailment; evidence for one hypothesis may not be evidence for another hypothesis entailed by it. 39:10 🤔 Confirmation is not closed under entailment, meaning evidence for one hypothesis doesn't necessarily translate into evidence for another hypothesis, even if they are related. 40:08 🤯 Pinpointing evidence for one hypothesis, even when it entails another, doesn't automatically provide evidence for the second hypothesis. 45:16 👍 Some piece of data can be evidence for multiple incompatible hypotheses, contrary to the idea that evidence can't support conflicting claims. 49:44 🤓 Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is best understood as claims with very low prior probabilities need significant evidence to become believable. 56:18 🗣 Claims can indeed serve as evidence, and the mere fact that someone claims something can be evidence for the truth of that claim, especially when the claim aligns with expected behavior. 59:44 🗣 Testimonial evidence is crucial for our beliefs, and trusting testimony by default is a reasonable starting point, as long as there are no specific grounds for doubt. 01:00:13 📚 Testimony forms the basis for much of our knowledge, including history and scientific findings, which we often can't discover ourselves. 01:02:08 🧐 The claim that there's no evidence for theism or atheism is implausible, as intelligent, honest, and truth-seeking theists and atheists exist, providing evidence for both positions. 01:04:00 🤔 Deductive metaphysical demonstrations are not immune to probabilistic or Bayesian arguments that challenge the premises, which can lead to doubting the conclusion. 01:11:56 🧐 Asking "which God" in response to arguments for God's existence is often irrelevant, as many arguments aim to establish the existence of a deity, not specific characteristics. 01:18:59 🧠 Fallacy fallacy: Don't reject good inferences labeled as fallacies; consider their context. 01:20:38 🙌 Appeals to authority can be valid if the source is credible. 01:23:00 🤔 Begging the question should be defined by a premise depending on the conclusion's justification. 01:25:22 🎯 Post hoc fallacy isn't always relevant; correlation can imply causation with sufficient evidence. 01:29:44 📊 Don't neglect base rates when evaluating probabilities and statistics. 01:30:13 🧐 Combat confirmation bias by actively seeking evidence against your beliefs. 01:31:08 💪 Be cautious about overconfidence and consider that you might be overestimating your knowledge. 01:33:00 🤯 Avoid oversimplification in philosophical discussions; explore various positions. 01:34:11 🤝 Distinguish between treatment effects and selection effects when assessing causation. 01:36:02 🤷♂ The dominance of theists in philosophy of religion may be due to a selection effect; be cautious about drawing conclusions based on this fact. 01:38:24 🤔 When someone claims a fallacy, ask them to explain why it's fallacious and if the point can be made differently without the fallacy. 01:39:06 🧠 Insults are not fallacies; fallacies involve errors in reasoning. 01:42:35 🧐 Simplicity is not just a tiebreaker in theory comparison; it carries intrinsic epistemic weight. 01:46:20 🧩 Simplicity considerations should not be limited to fundamental things; non-fundamental aspects of theories also matter. 01:55:42 🔄 Don't latch onto irrelevant features of analogies; focus on the intended point of the analogy when making arguments. 01:57:47 🧩 When objecting to an analogy, ensure you pinpoint relevant differences, not irrelevant ones. 01:58:01 🕊 The "God of the gaps" accusation doesn't apply to most serious theistic arguments, like contingency arguments. 01:59:00 🚫 Don't blame arguments for not proving something they weren't intended to prove. 01:59:55 🙅♀ The claim "you can't prove a negative" is self-defeating; it's possible to prove certain negative claims. 02:02:33 🤯 Avoid asserting that God is needed to solve philosophical problems without providing a satisfying explanation. 02:16:00 🧠 Science relies on certain presuppositions, so it's incorrect to claim only scientific evidence provides knowledge. 02:16:28 🌍 Theism is not necessarily unfalsifiable; it can make predictions, allowing for confirmation or disconfirmation. 02:19:05 🤔 Intuitions are essential in reasoning, and dismissing them entirely is a mistake. 02:28:16 🤯 Not everything requires an argument for justification; some beliefs can be justified without infinite regress of arguments. 02:31:05 🤨 Avoid binary attitudes in philosophy; there are often more nuanced positions to consider. 02:36:16 🧠 Embrace opposing views to eliminate mistaken beliefs and move closer to the truth. 02:37:11 🌐 Objectivity is crucial in philosophy, as human bias often leads to false beliefs. 02:38:22 📚 Treating opposing views fairly can lead to a more sophisticated and accurate understanding. 02:39:02 🤝 Steps to improve objectivity include identifying biases, diversifying information sources, and challenging one's own views. 02:40:57 🗣 Being a good philosophical discussant involves cooperation, charitability, and modesty in debates. 02:56:04 🎓 Universities should produce well-rounded individuals capable of critical thinking about important issues like ethics, politics, and existence of God. 02:58:10 🏛 Universities have a responsibility to enrich society by preserving cultural heritage, providing social commentary, and offering critical insights free from special interests. 03:00:12 🧪 Philosophy plays a crucial role in interdisciplinary collaboration with fields like science, psychology, and AI, contributing to the development and assessment of arguments and ethical considerations. 03:01:35 💭 Philosophy, particularly ethics, is essential for addressing value-based questions in science, from research funding to ethical experimentation. 03:03:00 🧠 Philosophy fosters critical thinking skills, analytical reasoning, and enhances moral and political perspectives, making it far from useless. ✅ Summary complete. 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Hey Joe, Regarding Mistake #11, I think we should draw a distinction between "X confirms Y and X confirms Z" and "X confirms Y and Z". It might be better to see this distinction with the use of brackets: "(X confirms Y) and (X confirms Z)" versus "X confirms (Y and Z)". With this in mind, then it is a little confusing to write that "D confirms both and ", because this can be read as "D confirms ( and
Excellent video, Majesty of Reason! I'm sure it took a looot of work and energy!! With regards to faith, there are some philosophers who defend the idea that it is belief without evidence, i.e., fideist philosophers. But even if philosophers in general reject this definition of religious faith, it is plausible that many non-philosophers accept this definition. I suppose you could say that the opinion of non-philosophers doesn't matter because we have to interact with sophisticated arguments, but that misses the point. The point is that it is not true that this definition of faith is false. Further, that would merely imply that when we're debating philosophers, we should use their non-fideistic definition of faith, while when we're debating people in general (most of the time), we should use the fideistic definition.
2:10:41 Mistake #41: Ignoring various dimensions of simplicity Aren't you presupposing foundationalism throughout this section ? What is "ideological simplicity" if your construct is circular ?
For "theism is unfalsifiable", i think its moreso that it makes too many changing or contradictory or poorly defined claims that change to protect the theist's worldview
For Mistake #2, the distinction youre making is the point of the argument, not its flaw. It is because faith requires evidence and prior experience that religious faith is not faith, its just blind belief
1:59:41 Mistake #35: You can’t prove a negative Don't they refer to the metaphysics of holes when people say that ? You can't prove that a hole exists, because a hole is precisely the absence of something existing ? Can we prove the nihil ?
1:39:30 mistake #28 is one that I wasn't really aware of until now. I found that segment very insightful, even though I've literally written a term paper on the rational use of vague language a few semesters ago.
Nice video! I love your point that merely labelling something as "grounded in God" without giving any intelligible explanation of what this means is a common mistake (at least, it's one I encounter often). But I disagree with your assumption that that-clauses (e.g., "that we will colonise Mars") 'denote' or express propositions. If that were the case, then it would make sense to speak of hoping propositions. But it doesn't. Only *sentences* (like "we will colonise Mars") can be used to express propositions or make statements. A that-clause is not a sentence, but a nominalisation of a sentence (i.e., a sentence made into an expression that functions like a nominal _in_ a sentence). It's clear that "that p" cannot be replaced by "the proposition that p" in many sentences (e.g. "I suspect that the Butler did it" makes sense, but "I suspect the proposition that the Butler did it" makes no sense). Anyway, there's obviously more that could be said, and I just intend these comments as a way of expressing my (rather hazy and tentative) thoughts at present.
When I hear certainty what I think is there is no possible way the proposition could be false given ANY evidence not just your total evidence... which is why I say there are very few things we can be certian of.
I feel you've missed the boat in #2. I disagree that your example of faith -- that your dad will show up -- is a good comparison to what religious faith in Jesus is, or captures what theists mean by faith.
2:15:49 _"And so is self undermining"_ I have been thinking about something recently. Maybe you can help me. Tarski's theorem of undefinability demonstrates that a truth predicate cannot be expressed within a given language. This means that there is no such thing as a _"self undermining"_ (or self defeating) theory of truth (or truth predicate). Precisely because in order to do an internal critique of a theory of truth, that theory of truth needs to be expressed within the framework that is critiqued... Which is precisely what leads to contradictions as showed in the apagogical demonstration of Tarski's theorem. So there are no self defeating theories of truth... Are there _"self undermining" "epistemological thesis"_ (2:15:30) ? A more general point : if one cannot make truth judge itself, what else falls into that category of things that "cannot judge itself" ? Several times in this video you try to apply a given criterion to itself, like in this case, _"scientism",_ and at 1:59:41 with Mistake #35: You can’t prove a negative. But how much can you ask something to apply to itself ? Sets that contain themselves are problematic as you know... The liar's paradox is problematic... Problems of impredicativity in general seem to indicate that we should be wary about always wanting things to predicate about themselves...
on intuitions: The argument you/emerson propose is "we can't do away with the value of intuition because that includes sense data and therefore we'd be left with nothing". I contend that there's no reason to group together sense data with thoughts-based intuition. As a matter of fact, neuroscience reveals profoundly different mechanisms behind the two and it's more than reasonable therefore NOT to group them together. So I can very well dismiss any thoughts-based intuition as worthless and keep sense-based seemings as valuable. I would also not equate the result of intuition to the result of inference for the same reason one wouldn't expect the same accuracy when intuiting the value of pi and when calculating it with an appropriate algorithm: the two processes are very different and they shouldn't be mixed together as if they weren't. We have reasons to trust inferences that don't hold for gut-based guesses. One such reason is the "too simple to break" principle used in computer science. When validating the modus ponens as an inference, we can rely on the fact that is extremely simple, only involves a few elements, the possible states involved are very limited and we can enumerate each of them. The same cannot be done with "intuiting" that the fundamental nature of reality is dual rather than monistic. I find rather puzzling that when discussing the value of intuition these kind of considerations seem to be just ignored as if we didn't have any better conceptualization to go around with. Yours truly, metaphisically informed (still by you, mostly) new atheist.
@@WolfLeib it's relevant in the moment we want to assess whether such mechanism it's reliable or not and whether its reliability is the same across the board of the different types of intuitions. The argument I'm criticizing links together two very different kinds of "intuitions" and claims I can't dismiss one and keep the other. But there's plenty of reasons (neuroscience, trial and error) to refuse that and no reason to agree on that.
Hello! I saw in another comment from 2 years ago that you said you were a christian and i just wanted to ask are you still a christian? I hope you dont mind me asking
@calebp6114 Thanks for the reply! Im a theist mor specifically a Catholic and will probably be one until the day i perish but that is not to say im not willing to change my veiw but for now my own veiw leads me to believe that God exists. Also im new to the topic of philosophy so my veiws havent sufficiently changed though i have learned a lot of new things and will probably learn more once i take a deeper dive into the philosophy of religion. Thanks again!
There are some mistakes ive made here so this is great joe, thanks. I do however feel vindicated on some points like simplicity 😊 Joe is smart Joe agrees with me So im likely right 😅
2:16:30 Mistake #43 Charitably (to steelman their argument), this could be understood as saying that the God hypothesis is *highly* unfalsifiable; not that it is 100% unfalsifiable. And they argue that unfalsifiability lowers the conditional probability of a hypothesis. See, for instance, *Deusdiapente Bayes’ Theorem and Falsifiability* and *Inflation, Evidence and Falsifiability by Rupert Allison et al., 2015.*
On the Fallacy Fallacy section I think it would be helpful to point out that a fallacy is only a fallacy when it is used in place of a valid argument. Calling someone a moron isn't necessarily a case of the ad hominem fallacy. Thinking or implying that calling someone a moron is a good reason to believe an unrelated truth claim is an instance of the ad hominem fallacy. Question begging is only a fallacy if a restatement of the conclusion is implied to be an argument for the conclusion. Restating the conclusion is not itself the fallacy of question begging. Maybe the problem isn't that people already know the above, but that they are so uncharitable that they assume any time their opponent restates his conclusion, he must be doing so because he thinks it is a valid argument for his conclusion.
When talking about god of the gaps, I would have liked if you had mentioned consciousness along with the arguments you did mention because that’s one that’s very often accused of being god of the gaps/ argument from ignorance
1:40:15 Huemer's explanation regarding words. Joe, would you say his approach is "post modern" ? Determining language categories based on their _"usage"_ or the "utility" it has for the locutor(s) ?
Hey just want to get some clarification on mistake 11. It seems to me that there is some equivocation occurring on the use of the word entails. Entail means to be a necessary consequence of. However, if my theory is that since B2 is white, B1 should be red, it seems as if that is just my theory, and it wouldnt make sense to claim that it entails that B2 is white. In other words, the phrase in the 3rd paragraph that “B1 is entailed by my theory” is a non sequiter. Wouldnt you need some sufficient evidence to be able to claim that one proposition ENTAILS another? I wouldnt be able to just claim that if the second ball is red, it entails that the first is white?
On philosophy is useless (#54) I found it intriguiing that most examples are for "societal" issues (rather than pure philosophy) where the role of philosophy is somewhat unclear (e.g. do we really prefer democracy nowadays because of philosophy progress or because of a power shift after the French revolution). Maybe there's better examples than those.
Here's my first thought. Would you agree that there are some theists (including in the online apologetics space) who think faith is something that shouldn't be dependent upon evidence? Sure we might be able to probe that more and get more evidence but prima facie this seems to be reason to believe that such a proposition is in fact the position of the theists who state it. I actually had a discussion with someone with this view just a few weeks ago.
Aren't religions pretty up front about faith being belief without ultimate proof? To be fair, it's only one fairy tale over and above the millions Normie culture is composed of.
I just ask what you mean by faith because I've never met a univocal understanding of the concept. If it turns out to be based on some reason or inference then I just want to hear that, not get lost on the term faith
Great video, big fan of the channel. To the"claims aren't evidence" point- Lets say, A experienced a miracle and reports it to skeptic B- A: "I have witnessed a miracle, as many others, and therefore a god who wants to communicate is real" B:" Consider a) multiple regularities of nature, b) all the times miracles under similar conditions don't happen, c) the possibility of hallucinations and false reports. This all count against your case". Scenario 1- B continues to talk to A:" So your report isn't the only fact to consider, because this would overstate your case. We also should consider the evidence following from a), b), c). Overall, I'm not convinced of your position". Scenario 2- B continues to talk to A:" Because we know a), b), c), contrary evidence has to overcome this as a threshold. Think of a-c as building a bar, over which your evidence has to jump. Since individual claims are weak evidence, I don't think anecdotes can jump over the "evidence bar". In Scenario 2, a claim isn't viewed holistic, but it has to "jump over a prior" first, before it is allowed to be considered further. I think this is a pretty good story about how people like Matt Dillahunty reason about miracles, NDEs, etc, and where they go wrong. I don't think they have a good understanding about "understating the evidence", but they have an intuitive skepticism about anecdotes, and therefore this weird idea of this "prior threshold to be considered evidence- worthy" comes into play.
For a non-deterministic scenario framed as boolean logic, the first mover always loses *if they make an assertion* (if we are being strict). Don't make that mistake and the skeptic doesn't have such a lovely shooting fish in a barrel position. God this planet drives me up the wall. 😂 Oh also: claims are evidence sometimes (ie: law, medicine, etc).
56:15 Thank you for this insightful list, but I’m confused by mistake #17 and hoping for more clarification. I have not studied this topic at all, so please excuse my lack of understanding! How can a claim, by itself, serve as evidence? Suppose I claim that Tinker Bell lives on a planet from a distant galaxy. Have I just provided evidence for her existence?
(BTW I'm really enjoying this video and you did a great job!) 2:01:00 If I were to steelman the "you can't prove a negative" statement I would say that what they mean is that "you can't prove the non-existence of something outside of an axiomatic system". So you can prove the non existence of square circle in the axiomatic system of euklidean geometry. But you can't prove the non-existence of a purple swan.
@@WolfLeib Ok. Can you prove that there's no non-material tiger? Then you say "I can prove there's no non-microscopic material tiger". How about a tiger being in your room for just a nanosecond as a quantum fluctuation? You surely mean "a non microscopic material continuously existing tiger". We could go on and on to no end. Since we don't know all the axioms of the physical world we could not know whether we ever covered all the ways a tiger could exist in your room.
@@stenlis Yes, we could go on and on, and that's sufficient to show that you're wrong. The fact that you need to add ad hoc properties so save an hypothesis from refutation implies that the hypothesis, without those particular properties, is refuted. You were wrong, accept it.
32:10 I think you are overstating Mistake 11. You say it's a mistake to think that evidential support transmits to entailment. I would say it's *sometimes* a mistake. Consider the following theory: 1) The victim left deep scratch marks on the John's body 2) John left pieces of his skin under the victim's fingernails If I find that the skin samples from the victim's fingernails belong to John wouldn't I raise the confidence in the claim that John has got deep scratch marks on his body? The difference between my theory and the theory you presented is that you define as the two elements of your theory as completely independent. In my theory they aren't (both refer to John). So I would say evidential support doesn't transmit to entailment if the elements of the theory are independent. Or even more precisely the amount of evidential support that transmits to entailments depends on the level of independence of the entailment from the rest of the theory. In your theory the entailment is completely independent so evidential support does not transmit at all. In my theory the entailment is highly dependent so it transmits almost completely. If the Mistake 11 as you present it was true, then we could never declare anybody guilty of a crime. John was at the crime scene? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer". John's fingerprints were on the murder weapon? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer". 10 witnessess saw John comit the murder? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer". There's a video footage? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer".
I feel like a more useful definition of knowledge is to say that you know something just in the case that what you believe is true in reality. Of course it would be much better if what you believe is justified, but I think that is (or should be) another matter. I also feel like this definition of knowledge is not undermined by the Gettier cases. But I am a total noob when it comes to philosophy, so feel free to school me on this :)
7:20 - "One cannot know a falsehood"? In what sense? If you know that 1+1=2, then you know that 1+1≠3, and 1+1≠4, etc. And there's people who know Jesus is the Messiah (Christians), and there's people who know he's not the Messiah (Jews). One of those groups is necessarily knowing a falsehood. So, what do you mean?
It's true that 1+1≠3, so it's not a falsehood you know. And Christians *profess* to know that Jesus is the Messiah; Jews profess otherwise. The side who's right has knowledge.
@@gregjanzen9354 If you know that 1+1≠3 is true, then you know that 1+1=3 is false, thus you know a falsehood. And sure, you can say that the statement "1+1=3 is false" is true, but to know it's true you need to know that 1+1=3 is false. You need to know that something is a falsehood in order to know that it's true that it's falsehood. So you can say that both christians and jews have knowledge about the messianic nature of Jesus, even though contradictory knowledges.
@@germancuervo945 Try to get a handle on it is this way. You would agree, presumably, that you don't (and can't) know that 1+1=3. Ask yourself why this is so. And re: Christian vs. Jewish beliefs about the messiah, ask yourself why not both can be right.
I'm struggling to understand mistake #11. You seem obviously correct in the cards example (i.e., a cards being a jack is evidence for its being a jack of spades, but not for its being a spade.). But then in many, many other everday examples it's not so obvious. For example, say that I'm reading a book about the civil war, and I find out that this is considered the most reliable book on civil war history ever written, with a 100% reliability rating. That fact is evidence that the claims inside the book are true. An entailment of this fact (given the 100% reliability) is that it's claim that Abraham Lincooln was assasinated was true. It seems that the fact that the book is 100% reliable, when combined with the entailment that the book claims Lincoln was asassinated, would be powerful evidence that he was assasinated. Or say, for example, we assume for argument that the problem of gratuitous evil renders theism overwhelmingly improbable in light of all relevant factors. It seems like an entailment from that would be that the existence of the traditional Christian God is overwhelmingly improbable. But mistake #11 seems to say that no, the fact that gratuitous evil is powerful evidence against theism has absolutely no evidential weight against Christian theism. In fact, it seems like you agree to some degree that evidence for X is evidence for entailments of X when you point out that the falsehood of Islam provides at least some evidence against theism. It seems like this would only be the case because Islam entails theism. If theism wasn't an entailment of Islam, then it's falsehood wouldn't necessarily provide any evidence against theism. Anyway, I'm not saying #11 can't be a real mistake, I'm just confused about when it is or isn't a mistake, because sometimes evidence for H does seem to be evidence for entailments of H.
15:55 I think in case of strong cognitive dissonance after a dramatic event you could actually have knowledge of certainty without belief. For example when I heard that one of my old high school friends had died, I for a whole week didn't believe that he was dead although I was completely certain that he's dead. I could bring a larger critique on how analytical language doesn't actually map very well to how people really think. For example I think that a lot of Gettier cases come from semantic trickery mixing trivial and analytic use of language but I'm not qualified enough to form a valid argument, and even if I could my argument would likely not be novel, I'm certain that some real philosophers have already argued against Gettier cases so 🤷
I don't get, particularly you second scenario, of point 2. Wanting or desiring your faith to be true seems to me to fit into your definition of belief but not knowledge. Faith without evidence should just be belief then. But you assert that this means that faith isn't belief without evidence. I'm missing the part where evidence is synonymous with knowledge. I'm thinking of Kierkegaard who defined faith as belief in two mutually contradictory things. I would say that constitutes belief and certainty, but not evidence and I'm not sure about knowledge or credence.
Or, one's (or, one's culture's) *experience/stories* of it, ie: "the reality". Half of the "facts" in the news are unknowable, but nobody has the ability to notice, or care. It is surreal, but also hilarious. 🤭 If this isn't pure emergence, kudos to whoever pulled off this theatrical production.
For #14 (corrected number) I don't quite understand the part that ~H does not entail D*, I mean I guess for the example it makes sense but isn't D* basically our starting point if we talk about this reality since we know our own mind exists? Even if we go for some very skeptical theory of reality I think we would still call that a mind?
Great question. It’s certainly our starting point, but that doesn’t mean it can’t serve as evidence for one hypothesis over another. In particular, when we’re assessing whether some piece of data is evidence for H over ~H, we essentially pretend we didn’t know that data, and then ask how much we’d expect the data to obtain given H, and then how much we’d expect the data to obtain given ~H. If the former is greater than the latter, then the data is evidence for H over ~H. (Consider: suppose I’m the dealer and we both observe me get 5 Royal flushes in a row. This is powerful evidence that I’m cheating, since even though we already know that I got this string of hands, it’s still true that me getting this string of hands is far more likely on the hypothesis that I’m cheating than it is on the hypothesis that I felt fairly.)
2:08:18 Is this really a sound argument, though? Can't we challenge P1 by asking why it is that there's an either/or choice between the statements "Either God exists" and "2+2=5"?
Well, the point is that it's a sound argument *by theist's lights* , since 'either A or B' is true whenever A is true, and theists think 'God exists' is true, and hence theists think 'either God exists or 2+2=5' is true. And there is also a similar argument which is sound by the atheist's lights if we substitute 'God doesn't exist' in for 'God exists'. (And if we want to make essentially the same point for someone who is neither an atheist nor a theist, just pick any claim C you accept, and substitute it for 'God exists', and you'll thereby have an argument that is sound by your lights. And yet the argument would not be a good argument.)
@@MajestyofReason Hi. Thanks for the quick response! :) When you mean "by X's light," you're saying "If we accept X's assumption about some fact(s) being true.", right? Which means that it's a premise that's not necessarily true. Which results in this statement being valid, but not necessarily sound. Or do I misunderstand something?
about mistake #19: the one about no evidence. you make it sound straightforwardly wrong, but how can there be evidence for unfalsifiable claims? if an all-powerful god can do anything, then every possible observation can neither confirm nor falsify it. it simply wouldn't be an empirical question. I think that's a reasonable position. admittedly, there are some people who say "god wouldn't do that", implying there are some standards for the evidence. it's more of a theological/epistemic question at that point I guess.
I don't really get the points on simplicity in #29. Alexander said that people justafyably stuck with the simpler option, and you said "it seems obvious" what should be settled on, but I feel like I'm missing what makes it obvious. It still just seems to me like the hypothesis with better predictive power is the better one unless there's some external reason to believe physical constants tend to be simple. I also took issue with #38. First of all, I always took the definition of sound to just be "conclusion logically follows from the premesies", which you are calling valid. The fact that he used that word in conjunction with "and has true premesies" makes me think he also agrees with that definition. Yaya I guess this is the "wrong" definition by the fancy ivory acedamia standards, but I'm just saying, you won't catch me saying 「logically "sound"」without putting sound in quotes. Also, wasn't so sure about the "God or 2+2=5" counterargument. I mean, it only meets ths premise criteria if "God exists" is taken to be true, and if it is, that seems to make makes the conclusion trivial, (which goes against another of the criteria) because inherently it's something already known. It's basically seems the same as "true things are true." I don't know what the precise technical definition of "trivial" is, but if that isn't a trivial conclusion, I don't know what is. And even if it is technically classified as "non-trivial", it's trival to ME and people generally. If there were added a scenario where this could realistically trip someone up, I think that would be helpfull.
Here's a question for "Part 2: Theism, atheism, naturalism, and agnosticism" It has never been that clear how wide a target atheists have to face. I've seen some respected philosophers say that atheists need only disprove the tri-onmi god of western monotheism. That is, the main subject of philosophical debate in the tradition. But is that actually the case? The Abrahamic God doesn't seem to fit that conception all that comfortably, polytheist gods don't fit it at all, and pantheists seem to be talking about something else entirely. So it seems that maybe we need to cast a wider net when disproving or arguing against gods. What do you think?
I think the mere notion of God renders 99%+ of human minds incapable of executing logic without making unforced errors in anything less than an academic paper that they thought out exhaustively. But get the same person in an object level argument about a culture war topic, and watch all that impressive capability vanish.
When you say professional philosophers won't make these mistakes, do you mean in a formal paper, or in real world conversation? Because I've listened to thousands of hours in meetups, youtube videos, podcasts, etc...EVERYONE makes the same TOTAL ROOKIE mistakes ALL THE TIME. Generally speaking, they can discuss philosophy academically or with simplistic examples, but they cannot practice it skilfully in complex scenarios. Worse: trying to do so triggers cultural trip wires left and right. We effectively live in a simulation imho, from a causal perspective.
Regarding #7, linking people to this: GENUINELY intelligent people 9+ times out of 10 GENUINELY AND SINCERELY are unable to recognize their error, on discussions that matter (thus, emotions are high). We have checkmated ourselves (or been checkmated) by our cultural, conceptual Overton Window....and our Mediums.
Mistake 38 - are you saying an argument that begs the question is still a sound argument? If you already believe in God and assuming that in your premises, then the conclusion that God exist seems trivial to me
To commit mistake #38 is to think that any sound argument is a good argument. (Recall: to be sound is to be valid and have all true premises.) This is false. There are many sound arguments that are terrible arguments. One example of a sound but terrible argument is a sound argument that is overtly question-begging. For instance, here's a sound but overtly question-begging (and so bad) argument: 1. I exist. 2. Therefore, I exist. That premise is true -- I do exist. And the argument is clearly valid. So the argument is sound. But the first premise is clearly question-begging, since it's literally identical to the conclusion.
your claims concerning mistake 11 seem to be just clearly wrong you seem to suggest that D does not provide evidence for either the claim that B1=red or that B1=white, which is correct... and totally irrelevant to the overall proposition that "E being evidence H1 is evidence for H2 if H2 is entailed by H1" the question you must ask is "does D provide evidence to believe that either both balls will be red or that the first ball will be red and the second ball will be white" and it should be clear that the answer is yes as the probability of either of these is better predicted in D rather than the negation of D and we can show easily that the odds of both balls being red is greater on D being true rather than on a state of not knowing if D is true. 50% on D. 25% on not knowing and 0% on the negation of D. you seem to even admit this in mistake 13 saying that B2 being red is evidence for both hypotheses but that would mean that that in this example you fail to show a contradiction in the statement that E, being evidence for H1 is also evidence for H2 if H2 is entailed by H1 edit: please note that this criticism is not reflective of my overall feeling toward this video or your content and should only be taken as a comment on this one point. I generally love your content.
What is the *absolute* quality of a culture in which one ~needs to accompany such a lovely comment with an apology? WE LIVE IN THE DARK AGES AND HAVEN'T A CLUE!!! 😂😂😂😁😁😁😟😟😟🤔🤔🤔🤔😮.
H1 - First ball is red and second ball is red H2 - First ball is red and second is white D - lets say first ball is actually red W - If second ball is white R - If second ball is red then D is evidence for H1 and H2 both i.e H1 entails D and H2 entails D D is an evidence for H1 and H1 entails R , we suppose that D is an evidence for R. D is an evidence for H2 and H2 entails W , we suppose that D is an evidence for W. But W and R are contradictory Therefore by law of contradiction D cannot be evidence for both R and W Hence IF X is an evidence for H1 and H1 entails R , then we cannot assert that X is an evidence for R.
I don't think #23 is a mistake; on the contrary, I think it's a humble attitude to have. I'll give an analogy; when my son was 1, I was going to drop him off at daycare, and he wanted to bring his stuffed animal. Now, he already had the same kind of stuffed animal at daycare, so I simply told him "your toy is already at daycare" and asked him to leave his current one. This caused him to get very upset, because he just couldn't comprehend my explanation at that time (he was 1 after all). It was at this point that I realized that this is true of us and God, but to an infinitely greater degree. Even knowing what we know about God's character (which, do we know this from philosophy or revelation? I think the latter), I just don't think we have any power to accurately predict God's actions, because we simply don't have, and cannot have, all the data. Can anyone really predict how an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal being is going to act simply by knowing (in a very surface-level sort of way) something about their attributes? My intutition is to say that it really doesn't matter how smart we are or how much we think we know, we are never going to be able to compare to that kind of being. All that we say we know, we only claim to know through God's self-revelation.
I'm not sure if you know this, but the Fallacy Fallacy isn't the end of it. You see, if you misuse the Fallacy Fallacy by claiming that the fact you're argument is fallacious is irrelevant, then that is itself a fallacy called the Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy. And if you similarly misuse the Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy, that's called the Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy. And if you misuse that, well you get the idea. :D
02:16:59 - "Suppose that the world is a tortuous world. Hundreds of billions of years, all it is is sentient creatures experiencing profound agony. There's no afterlife...a pure agony world." That sounds like a real world to me. It's called animal agriculture. Do you support this tortuous aspect of our world, MoJ? Or are you vegan?
2:46:40 On progress in philosophy: I agree that philosophy has expanded its areas of enquiry, but if by "progress" we mean actually closing the debate with an end result, then I'm afraid I have yet to see such a thing in philosophy. All the examples you tried to make of such a progress are from moral philosophy and on that front it simply doesn't matter at all that nobody among the philosophers is still defending slavery, dictatorships or attacking homosexuals. Do they actually have a definitive answer to the many people that do exactly that today? No, because there is no way to tell people "well this is just wrong". You can't even do that for one of the forms of ethic that, what a coincidence, DID historically endorse slavery and dictatorships (monarchies especially) and is STILL demonizing homosexuality: divine command theory. It's still around and still being discussed. As for knowledge not being any more agreed to be "justified true belief" that's hardly considerable progress given that there's no answer in sight to "what does constitute knowledge". Last but not least Teleology: yeah, the small number of people still pushing for it seem to be catholics. So what? Is philosophy determined by a show of hands now? For me in particular the litmus test of when philosophy can be said to have made some progress is the following: when people will be told that if they insist on investigating fruitless speculations like idealism, because of some actual philosophical rule or principle then they'll be "out of philosophy" just like whoever tries today to investigate the theory of humors would be "out of medicine". Until then philosophy can at most be said to be a speculative discipline that can serve as a bootstrap for interesting and structured endeavors, that is to say sometimes fruitful, sometimes fruitless, but always unable to come to any actual conclusion.
@MajestyofReason I'm reading currently How reason can lead to God from Joshua Rasmussen (I disovered him via your channel !). I wonder if he's not making the mistake n°13 on p. 161 : "[...] I can the deduce the following result : it is more likely - more expected - that some mysterious evils would exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Again, the existence of some mystery is expected on te Upside Hypothesis, and the Upside Hupothesis is expected on God's existence. By contrast, without God's existence, I don't think it is even possible, let alone probable - for any moral communities to exist - and without moral communities, moral mysteries are impossible. My cold calculation reveals to my mind, then, that I should actually expect to find mysterious evils if God does exist. In other words, by this analysis, the existence of mysterious evils makes the most sens only if God exists." It seems to me that it is equivalent to : Mysterious evils is evidence for the Upside Hypothesis, the Upside Hypothesis is evidence for God, therefore Mysterious evils is evidence for the Upside Hypothesis.
hi joe, I *really* appreciate your work but you made a mistake here and I need to point it out. Your characterization of faith is quite misleading. Firstly you assert it involves a "desire like" component. But when people use faith to believe that their loved one is for any reason in hell, there's nothing "desire like" in it. It's a dreaded and terrible feeling, more akin to fear than desire. Secondly, you are missing entirely the fact that faith is characterized as a justification for belief not as the belief itself. Setting aside the biblical "evidence of things unseen" passage, catholics define it as the way in which "the intellect surrenders to the divine". These are poetic/rhetorical tools that are quite hard to nail as intellectual concepts in their minutias but they do convey that faith is a means through which a belief is confirmed. And even if no contemporary philosopher is characterizing faith with such a component, well that would mean that contemporary philosophers are making up something new that doesn't reflect either use of the word by believers or by atheists. This is akin to how philosophers artificially restrict the use of the term "atheist" only to strong atheists (like myself) rather than to include the very people that started using the term in 1700 like baron d'holbach who in "good sense" declared his atheism as a lack of belief. I don't know how useful these redefinition of terms might be in philosophy, but they are damaging the clarity of discourse in here, because the thing you present here as faith is neither what the teists defend nor what the atheist attacks. Thank you as always, your metaphisically informed (by you mostly) new atheist.
Thanks for the comment! Briefly, because I have classes and hw: On your first point, there's a distinction between (a) using one's faith-based worldview to come to believe that a loved one is in hell, and (b) having faith that one's loved one is in hell. You've only pinpointed a case of (a). But that doesn't challenge my characterization of faith; one may believe that a loved one is in hell, and believe this because of one's broader faith-based worldview, and yet not have faith that a loved one is in hell, precisely because one regards that as a horrifically bad thing. There's a distinction between believing p on the basis of propositions in which one has faith, and having faith that p. The former can hold while the latter doesn't. On your second point, I didn't deny that faith is ever considered a justification for belief, and nor did I affirm that faith is the belief itself. Rather, I simply pointed out that faith involves something belief-like. The precise relationship between faith and that belief-like thing is left open; perhaps faith leads to it; perhaps it leads to faith; perhaps there are complex, interpersonally variant relationships between them. The point is that faith involves it in some manner. Hope this helps, and thanks again for the comment! :)
@@MajestyofReason Thanks for the reply! Regarding the a-b distinction you made on the practical side that'd apply also to "fear of god", ironically, but more importantly I'm kinda puzzled to how you make a methodological distinction when you outright have avoided any kind of description of faith as a method and even stated that the relationship with the "belief-like thing" is "left open". If it's open, how can you say that it doesn't include feared things and how does it not include using a "faith based worldview" to come to a conclusion? By my lights seems like you really would need to have that quite "closed" in order to argue based on that the status of a certain belief as being or not a faith-driven one.
7:13ff 1 + 1 = 2 only because it is defined as such - so is true only within its domain of discourse. 1 + 1 could well = 3 in an appropriately axiometised arithmetic.
@@JohnnyTwoFingers As the "and another" concept exists in animals it suggests it formed as the early mind evolved, prior to mankind, therefore prior to culture. It is a life preserving idea: I saw a predator go behind the rock, and another. I have now seen a predator come from behind the rock, but not another.
@@JohnnyTwoFingers Are you suggesting that common algebra appeared in several cultures? Variants of it did, but they did not emerge fully formed. The early stages were counting, such as the quipu, where the "and another" concept is used.
*_Total List of Mistakes (For Part 1)_*
4:01 Mistake #1: Confusions about belief, knowledge, credence, certainty
16:51 Mistake #2: Faith is belief without evidence
19:58 Mistake #3: Sentences vs. beliefs vs. propositions
22:34 Mistake #4: Polysemy of ‘probability’
26:33 Mistake #5: Evidence for H vs. making H probable
27:51 Mistake #6: Total evidence requirement
29:17 Mistake #7: Understating the evidence
29:59 Mistake #8: Confirmation is comparative
30:40 Mistake #9: Evidential symmetry
31:23 Mistake #10: Likelihood ratio rigging
32:00 Mistake #11: If E is evidence for H1 and H1 entails H2, then E is evidence for H2
41:40 Mistake #11 (extended): More on confirmation closure under entailment
45:01 Mistake #12: Data can’t be evidence for multiple, incompatible hypotheses
46:34 Mistake #13: If A is evidence for B, and B is evidence for C, then A is evidence for C.
49:30 Mistake #14: if D entails D* and D* is evidence for H, then D must be evidence for H
53:54 Mistake #15: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
55:24 Mistake #16: Improbable by chance, therefore God
56:14 Mistake #17: Claims aren’t evidence
57:37 Mistake #18: Testimony isn’t evidence
1:01:52 Mistake #19: No evidence for a/theism
1:03:29 Mistake #20: Probabilistic arguments vs. metaphysical demonstrations
1:11:10 Mistake #21: Which God?
1:11:57 Mistake #22: “The” cosmological argument
1:14:44 Mistake #23: How can you know God’s ways?
1:15:28 Mistake #24: Only a small # of arguments for/against God
1:16:53 Mistake #25: Slapping the label ‘grounded by God’
1:17:48 Mistake #26: Fallacy mongering
1:38:56 Mistake #27: Insults aren’t ad hominems
1:39:15 Mistake #28: Demanding necessary and sufficient conditions for terms
1:42:22 Mistake #29: Simplicity is a tiebreaker
1:46:11 Mistake #30: Only fundamental things count toward simplicity
1:54:01 Mistake #31: Only comparing a portion of your worldview
1:55:41 Mistake #32: Irrelevant features of an analogy
1:58:07 Mistake #33: God of the Gaps galore
1:59:18 Mistake #34: Blaming arguments for not proving what they weren’t trying to prove
1:59:41 Mistake #35: You can’t prove a negative
2:02:21 Mistake #36: Random philosophical problem? God must solve it!
2:03:55 Mistake #37: Which is premise is false, bro?
2:06:44 Mistake #38: A sound argument is automatically a good argument
2:08:51 Mistake #39: Justifying a non-obvious general principle by a single example
2:09:37 Mistake #40: Burden of proof confusions
2:10:41 Mistake #41: Ignoring various dimensions of simplicity
2:15:15 Mistake #42: Demanding peer-reviewed empirical evidence for God
2:16:30 Mistake #43: Theism is unfalsifiable
2:19:04 Mistake #44: Intuitions don’t matter
2:26:03 Mistake #45: Undercutting vs. rebutting defeaters
2:28:00 Mistake #46: Everything requires an argument
2:28:47 Mistake #47: Lack of epistemic humility
2:30:58 Mistake #48: Binary attitude
2:32:26 Mistake #49: Psychologizing
2:33:55 Mistake #50: Failures of objectivity
2:40:37 Mistake #51: Being a bad philosophical discussant
2:43:14 Mistake #52: Speak for your own intuitions!
2:45:34 Mistake #53: Philosophy never makes progress
2:47:30 Mistake #54: Philosophy is useless
The creator of this place is evil and feeding on our suffering what ever beauty there is here is to confuse us into staying here life after life thinking life is good and a school for us. Near death experiences and children sometimes remembering they past lives to the exact details is already big evidence of the reincarnation soul trap
@@cuntsneverdie-theysurvive, seek help, ASAP!
#1: Gettier is complete garbage, btw. It basically just shows that someone wasn't completely justified in holding the beliefs they had. If, for example, the president of the company had sole decision making in who would get the job, and unwavering certainty that Jones would get the job, then Jones would have gotten the job. Either the president didn't have sole decision making (a board might have voted by majority, and picked Smith), or the president did have sole decision making, but wasn't unwaveringly certain, and wavered. Knowledge is a Justified True Belief.
Math is based on the objectively existing amounts of things. I have an amount of fingers on one hand, and amount of fingers on the other, and an amount in total. As long as the calculations are done properly, math is undeniably knowledge. Even if our reality was some kind of illusion, or simulation, there is an amount of illusionary/simulated fingers on one hand, an amount on the other, and an amount in total. Even if you use different "languages", like Sumerian base 6 counting, yards vs metres, litres vs quarts, kg vs lbs, Celsius vs Fahrenheit, etc., the amounts are the same. Math is pure objectivity, if the calculations are done properly.
#2: Oh, come on. There are multiple definitions of "faith", and in discussion about religion, the generic definition of "faith" isn't the one being used.
:1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
:2. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
Literally in the definition, for #2, that it's not based on proof.
#17: Claims, alone, are, in fact, not evidence. Trump claims the 2020 election was rigged, against him. There has been zero evidence to support the claim that the election was rigged, against him. He also claimed the 2016 election was rigged, against him, and that he actually won the popular vote. He even set up an election integrity commission, which quietly shut down, after finding no evidence to support such a claim. The reason to believe your friend's claim, is the evidence that your friend has generally been honest with you, not simply because he made a claim. If someone else constantly lies to you, you'll do the reverse, and tend not to believe anything they say. The evidence isn't in the claim, but in who is making the claim. We do tend to give new people we meet the benefit of the doubt, if they're talking about mundane daily tasks, because it's largely irrelevant. If I just met your friend, it's completely irrelevant to my life, and my worldview, whether they bought a soccer ball, baseball, football, or whatever. But, if your friend told me they met Big Foot, on the way to the place I met them, there's zero evidence to support believing them, and centuries of not finding a Big Foot, to believe they're full of crap. I would think your friend is a loon.
#19: That some number of people believe X is true, is not, at all, evidence X is true. Almost everyone used to believe the world was flat, that the earth was the centre of the universe and everything was revolving around it, and numerous other myths. That intelligent Greeks once believed there were gods living on top of Mt Olympus, is not evidence of gods living on top of Mt Olympus. That many many kids believe in Santa Claus, isn't evidence Santa Claus exists.
There is also a difference between a very generic "theism", otherwise known as deism, and actual theistic religions, that are absolutely ridiculous piles of crap. Rather than there equally being evidence to support the very simple notion of created vs not created, there is actually equally no evidence to support either. On the other hand, there is tons of evidence that the Earth isn't 6000 years old ... that full fledged homo sapiens weren't created ... that there wasn't a global flood at the height of numerous civilizations ... that all the people on earth weren't in one spot speaking one language, one day, then scattered around the world, speaking different languages the next ... that Heaven isn't floating about 500' over Iraq, where a tower could reach it ... etc., etc., etc. It's a fairytale. We've seen how Mormonism was invented. We've seen how Scientology was invented. How Rastafarianism was invented. Etc. There's zero evidence that previous inventions of religions were any different.
#21: "Which god?", is a perfectly valid question, because the vast majority of theists aren't simply arguing for the existence of a generic creator. Or, "What do you mean by 'god'?", is even better. Some theoretical physicists have suggested that it would be possible to create a universe, given the proper materials and energy, but that created universe would immediately detach itself from the universe it was created in, and grow into itself. If, by "god", you're arguing for an eternally existing wizard, who created the universe with magic, that's quite different from some kind of incredibly advanced being, creating universes in a lab. The latter would be a "god" similar to how we'd consider other intelligent life in the universe an "alien", they'd consider us to be "aliens", but we each wouldn't consider ourselves to be.
I think it's quite dishonest, for people of various theistic religions, to pretend like they're only arguing for a generic creator, when they do have an entire fairytale, and characteristics, attached to said creator.
You stealing titles from AthleanX? 😂 I can’t wait to watch this.
Ahahha
Exactly what I was thinking 💀💀
*_Full List of Mistakes (For Part 1)_*
4:01 Mistake #1: Confusions about belief, knowledge, credence, certainty
16:51 Mistake #2: Faith is belief without evidence
19:58 Mistake #3: Sentences vs. beliefs vs. propositions
22:34 Mistake #4: Polysemy of 'probability'
26:33 Mistake #5: Evidence for H vs. making H probable
27:51 Mistake #6: Total evidence requirement
29:17 Mistake #7: Understating the evidence
29:59 Mistake #8: Confirmation is comparative
30:40 Mistake #9: Evidential symmetry
31:23 Mistake #10: Likelihood ratio rigging
32:00 Mistake #11: Confirmation closure under entailment
41:40 Mistake #11 (extended): Variant of confirmation closure
45:01 Mistake #12: Evidence for multiple incompatible hypotheses
46:34 Mistake #13: Confirmation transitivity
49:30 Mistake #14: Thinking that if D entails D* and D* is evidence for H, then D must be evidence for H
53:54 Mistake #15: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
55:24 Mistake #16: Improbable by chance, therefore evidence for God
56:14 Mistake #17: Claims aren't evidence
57:37 Mistake #18: Testimony isn't evidence
1:01:52 Mistake #19: There's no evidence for (a)theism
1:03:29 Mistake #20: Metaphysical demonstrations vs. probabilistic arguments
1:11:10 Mistake #21: "Which God?"
1:11:57 Mistake #22: "The" cosmological/ontological/etc. argument
1:14:44 Mistake #23: Theistic predictions
1:15:28 Mistake #24: Only a small # of arguments for (a)theism
1:16:53 Mistake #25: Slapping the label "grounded by God"
1:17:48 Mistake #26: Fallacy mongering
1:38:56 Mistake #27: Insults are not ad hominems
1:39:15 Mistake #28: Demanding necessary and sufficient conditions
1:42:22 Mistake #29: Simplicity is not a tiebreaker
1:46:11 Mistake #30: Non-fundamenta count towards simplicity
1:54:01 Mistake #31: Comparing whole worldviews
1:55:41 Mistake #32: Irrelevant features of an analogy
1:58:07 Mistake #33: God of the Gaps Galore
1:59:18 Mistake #34: Blaming arguments for not proving something irrelevant
1:59:41 Mistake #35: You can't prove a negative
2:02:21 Mistake #36: Random philosophical problem? God must solve it.
2:03:55 Mistake #37: Which premise is false, bro?
2:06:44 Mistake #38: A sound argument is not necessarily a good argument
2:08:51 Mistake #39: Justifying a non-obvious principle by a single example
2:09:37 Mistake #40: The burden of proof
2:10:41 Mistake #41: Ignoring various dimensions of simplicity
2:15:15 Mistake #42: Demanding verified, peer-reviewed evidence for God
2:16:30 Mistake #43: Theism is unfalsifiable
2:19:04 Mistake #44: Intuitions don't matter
2:26:03 Mistake #45: Undercutting vs. rebutting defeaters
2:28:00 Mistake #46: Not everything requires an argument
2:28:47 Mistake #47: Lack of epistemic humility
2:30:58 Mistake #48: Binary attitude
2:32:26 Mistake #49: Psychologizing
2:33:55 Mistake #50: Failures of objectivity
2:40:37 Mistake #51: Being a bad philosophical discussant
2:43:14 Mistake #52: Speak for your own intuitions!
2:45:34 Mistake #53: Philosophy never makes progress
2:47:30 Mistake #54: Philosophy is useless
If your aim is to have people link to this video when calling out a mistake they find out there, then you are hurting your cause by not having the Linguistic description in the chapter heading.
Perhaps you intend to go back in and edit the headings later, but currently they just read "mistake#1 - mistake#2 - etc" and that is nearly useless.
Hey Joe! Can you clarify what exactly you mean by “entailment” in #11 and 12? I think there is a confusion on terms there because when you say that these mistakes are common sense yet mistakes nonetheless, that seems to be because by saying H1 entails H2, it means that if H1 is true then H2 is in fact true. Whereas the reason the example reveals mistaken reasoning is that it was actually false that the truth of H1 means that H2 is true.
In other words, if H1 really does entail H2, then it would therefore be the case that evidence for H1 is evidence for H2. I was even more confused when coming to #12, because again by saying evidence against God is not evidence against Christianity, the implication then is that God’s existence is not entailed by the truth of Christianity which seems obviously false by any reasonable definition of Christianity (self-identified “atheist Christians” notwithstanding).
So essentially, it seems to me that these are either not mistakes (if the entailment relation holds) or they are phrased in a misleading way (it’s stated that H1 entails H2, seemingly as a given, yet H1 does not entail H2). Can you clarify where I may be mistaken here?
@@varvela1 hopefully this clarification can help.
First, some terminology: 'H1 entails H2' means that if H1 is true, H2 must also be true.
So, then, here is the mistake:
"If H1 entails H2, then any evidence for H1 is also evidence for H2"
That is wrong. Just because H1 entails H2, it does not follow that any evidence for H1 is also evidence for H2. Sometimes, it is true that (a) H1 entails H2, (b) E is evidence for H1, and yet (c) E is NOT evidence for H2.
In mistake #11, #11 (extended), and #13 (corrected #), I give multiple examples wherein conditions (a)-(c) hold: that is, I give cases wherein some hypothesis entails a second hypothesis, and yet some piece of data is evidence for the first hypothesis without being evidence for the second hypothesis. For instance, the second ball being red is evidence for the hypothesis that both balls are red; the hypothesis that both balls are red entails the hypothesis that the first ball is red; and yet the second ball being red is certainly *not* evidence for the hypothesis that the first ball is red. Or: the hypothesis that the card is a jack of spades entails the hypothesis that the card is a spade; and the datum that the card is a jack is evidence for (raises the probability of) the hypothesis that the card is a jack of spades (it makes the hypothesis go from 1/52 chance to 1/4 chance); and yet the datum that the card is a jack is certainly NOT evidence for the hypothesis that the card is a spade (before learning that datum, the hypothesis has a 1/4 chance of being true; after learning the datum, it still only has a 1/4 chance).
Finally, there can be evidence against God's existence without there being evidence against Christianity even though Christianity entails God's existence. An example is the datum that Islam is false (suppose we learned this). Islam being false removes one way for God to exist, and so it lowers the probability that God exists. Yet Islam being false doesn't make Christianity less probable; in fact, it makes it more probable, since it removes one way for Christianity to be false (and hence makes the ways for Christianity to be true to take up a larger proportion of the possibility/probability space).
@@MajestyofReason The first part makes complete sense, my confusion was in mixing up the hypotheses, thinking that H1 was that the first ball is red, and H2 that the second ball is red. Its occurring to me now that the directionality matters here too in an interesting way (ie evidence for H1 is not necessarily evidence for H2 when H1 entails H2, but it is necessarily evidence for H2 when H2 *is entailed by* H1). In other words, if H1 is evident in a way completely orthogonal to H2 (when the probability for H2 is only a subset of the probability for H1) then it’s not evidence also for H2. However, when H1 is entailed by H2, then the probability space overlaps and evidence for H1 is necessarily evidence for H2.
That said, it is still seeming to me that your second paragraph is mistaken through being an example of the latter case (ie incorrectly denying that evidence against H1 is evidence against H2 when H1’s probability space is a subset of H2’s).
You said that evidence against God is not necessarily evidence against Christianity. I agree that it would be true that evidence against Christianity is not evidence against God, but not the other way around, since the probability space of Gods existence is a subset of the probability space of Christianity (God can exist without Christianity being true, but not vice versa). Or in the general case, evidence for H1 is always evidence for H2 when H2 is entailed by H1, yet not necessarily when H1 entails H2. Is that right?
So following from this, your example says that Islam being false is evidence against God but evidence FOR Christianity. But this seems to be making the mistake you’re talking about. Islam can be false for reasons completely orthogonal to the existence of God or truth of Christianity, and so would not affect either probability. However, it seems necessarily to be the case that any evidence against the existence of God (H1) will always be evidence against Christianity or Islam (H2), since H1 in this example *is entailed by* H2 rather than the erroneous claim that it entails H1.
If I’m still making a mistake here, and you’re willing to take the time to point it out, thanks in advance. I sincerely appreciate it 😊
I just started my philosophy course here in Brazil in large part thanks to your channel, keep it up Joe love your work!
Let’s goooo! My classes start today, too!!
Cara, onde você tá cursando? Como é a parte de filosofia da religião? Tem ead? Tenho interesse mas não achei nada decente até onde pesquisei.
@@brunoarruda9916 Estou fazendo ead pela UFSC, eles tem polos espalhados por algumas cidades do estado e daí vc comparece umas duas vezes por mês pras aulas presenciais, o resto é online. Infelizmente não tem Filosofia da religião no currículo deles, mas por um lado não achei tão ruim, pq religião é a área que eu sou menos ignorante graças ao yt, então o curso vai ajudar no resto que é onde mais falta conhecimento hehe
@@belialord Entendi. Obrigado pelas informações
Tem Br aqui?
Awesome video, loving the epistemology section so far!
31:04 got me like 😈😈😈
Great stuff. Thanks for uping the intellectual level for these discussions.
Thank you for providing such a manageable list! Great to know that simply eliminating or at least minimizing these 54 mistakes will up my philosophy game significantly 😂😂.
All joking aside I’m sure this will be a great video and I’m adding it to my watch list. Thanks for taking the time to write 130 pages to prep for a thorough video on an important topic!
Now this is the movie I’ve been waiting to watch. Cool. Much needed video because I trip up and do some of these at times.
on the topic of the definition of faith. first off, i think it has 2 valid definitions. one is what you said, essentially trust.
but, the 2nd:
" believing what you know aint so" isn't such a strange definition to keep as valid.
it describes cognitive dissonance. a very real thing people have. and so its a useful def.
Intellectually you know something is not true or, very unlikely, but emotionally you want it to be true and believe it anyway. acting like this really unlikely thing is definitely going to happen.
A less harsh version of this would be like having hope in something being true, even if it seems unlikely. but often i see faith as taking hope too far and using it to act as though you have total certainly.
probably your most valuable video yet
♥♥♥
Another in depth video! Great job Joe and thanks!
1:29:00 this disease question is very good. Many doctors simply don't know this.
Congratulations, you've singlehandedly dramatically transformed my knowledge of philosophy and made me realize that there is so much I do not know (both in breadth and quality). Its admittedly a bit daunting, knowing that I do not know so much. Still, I guess its better than falling into the ever present Dunner Kruger.
Me too even though I’m a theist I gain a lot of beneficial things from watching his videos and reading his articles. And I can definitely say he’s improve my philosophy and critical thinking.
On Mistake #2: when you hear some lay theists justify their belief with faith, you’ll understand why some atheist personalities define faith this way. Some will actually say that they believe so and so without evidence and believe it solely on faith. Now whether that’s rational will depend on the account of rationality one favors but lay theists do define faith as belief without sufficient evidence.
I'm not sure lay theists do that. Show me evidence.
@@PhilosophyUnraveled I already did. Unless you don’t believe my account.
Joe Schmid is the most thorough person. Period.
00:00 🧐 The video explores common mistakes in apologetics, counter-apologetics, and internet philosophy debates.
01:01 📚 The series covers various aspects of philosophy, including epistemology, argumentation, and the nature of beliefs.
04:16 🤔 The first mistake discussed is confusion regarding belief, knowledge, credence, and certainty.
09:36 🔄 The video clarifies the distinctions between belief, knowledge, credence, and certainty.
16:55 🙌 Mistake number two: Faith is not merely believing with no evidence but involves trust and commitment with cognitive and conative components.
19:05 🙌 Faith can be compatible with evidence and rational belief; it doesn't necessarily mean believing without evidence.
20:01 🧠 Sentences, beliefs, and propositions are distinct; beliefs are mental states, and propositions are what beliefs refer to.
22:23 🎲 Probability has multiple meanings, including propensity, frequency, agent's credence, rational credence, degrees of support between propositions, and degrees of justification.
27:59 🤔 Ignoring the total evidence requirement when assessing a hypothesis can lead to an incomplete evaluation.
32:13 🔄 Confirmation does not necessarily transmit over entailment; evidence for one hypothesis may not be evidence for another hypothesis entailed by it.
39:10 🤔 Confirmation is not closed under entailment, meaning evidence for one hypothesis doesn't necessarily translate into evidence for another hypothesis, even if they are related.
40:08 🤯 Pinpointing evidence for one hypothesis, even when it entails another, doesn't automatically provide evidence for the second hypothesis.
45:16 👍 Some piece of data can be evidence for multiple incompatible hypotheses, contrary to the idea that evidence can't support conflicting claims.
49:44 🤓 Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is best understood as claims with very low prior probabilities need significant evidence to become believable.
56:18 🗣 Claims can indeed serve as evidence, and the mere fact that someone claims something can be evidence for the truth of that claim, especially when the claim aligns with expected behavior.
59:44 🗣 Testimonial evidence is crucial for our beliefs, and trusting testimony by default is a reasonable starting point, as long as there are no specific grounds for doubt.
01:00:13 📚 Testimony forms the basis for much of our knowledge, including history and scientific findings, which we often can't discover ourselves.
01:02:08 🧐 The claim that there's no evidence for theism or atheism is implausible, as intelligent, honest, and truth-seeking theists and atheists exist, providing evidence for both positions.
01:04:00 🤔 Deductive metaphysical demonstrations are not immune to probabilistic or Bayesian arguments that challenge the premises, which can lead to doubting the conclusion.
01:11:56 🧐 Asking "which God" in response to arguments for God's existence is often irrelevant, as many arguments aim to establish the existence of a deity, not specific characteristics.
01:18:59 🧠 Fallacy fallacy: Don't reject good inferences labeled as fallacies; consider their context.
01:20:38 🙌 Appeals to authority can be valid if the source is credible.
01:23:00 🤔 Begging the question should be defined by a premise depending on the conclusion's justification.
01:25:22 🎯 Post hoc fallacy isn't always relevant; correlation can imply causation with sufficient evidence.
01:29:44 📊 Don't neglect base rates when evaluating probabilities and statistics.
01:30:13 🧐 Combat confirmation bias by actively seeking evidence against your beliefs.
01:31:08 💪 Be cautious about overconfidence and consider that you might be overestimating your knowledge.
01:33:00 🤯 Avoid oversimplification in philosophical discussions; explore various positions.
01:34:11 🤝 Distinguish between treatment effects and selection effects when assessing causation.
01:36:02 🤷♂ The dominance of theists in philosophy of religion may be due to a selection effect; be cautious about drawing conclusions based on this fact.
01:38:24 🤔 When someone claims a fallacy, ask them to explain why it's fallacious and if the point can be made differently without the fallacy.
01:39:06 🧠 Insults are not fallacies; fallacies involve errors in reasoning.
01:42:35 🧐 Simplicity is not just a tiebreaker in theory comparison; it carries intrinsic epistemic weight.
01:46:20 🧩 Simplicity considerations should not be limited to fundamental things; non-fundamental aspects of theories also matter.
01:55:42 🔄 Don't latch onto irrelevant features of analogies; focus on the intended point of the analogy when making arguments.
01:57:47 🧩 When objecting to an analogy, ensure you pinpoint relevant differences, not irrelevant ones.
01:58:01 🕊 The "God of the gaps" accusation doesn't apply to most serious theistic arguments, like contingency arguments.
01:59:00 🚫 Don't blame arguments for not proving something they weren't intended to prove.
01:59:55 🙅♀ The claim "you can't prove a negative" is self-defeating; it's possible to prove certain negative claims.
02:02:33 🤯 Avoid asserting that God is needed to solve philosophical problems without providing a satisfying explanation.
02:16:00 🧠 Science relies on certain presuppositions, so it's incorrect to claim only scientific evidence provides knowledge.
02:16:28 🌍 Theism is not necessarily unfalsifiable; it can make predictions, allowing for confirmation or disconfirmation.
02:19:05 🤔 Intuitions are essential in reasoning, and dismissing them entirely is a mistake.
02:28:16 🤯 Not everything requires an argument for justification; some beliefs can be justified without infinite regress of arguments.
02:31:05 🤨 Avoid binary attitudes in philosophy; there are often more nuanced positions to consider.
02:36:16 🧠 Embrace opposing views to eliminate mistaken beliefs and move closer to the truth.
02:37:11 🌐 Objectivity is crucial in philosophy, as human bias often leads to false beliefs.
02:38:22 📚 Treating opposing views fairly can lead to a more sophisticated and accurate understanding.
02:39:02 🤝 Steps to improve objectivity include identifying biases, diversifying information sources, and challenging one's own views.
02:40:57 🗣 Being a good philosophical discussant involves cooperation, charitability, and modesty in debates.
02:56:04 🎓 Universities should produce well-rounded individuals capable of critical thinking about important issues like ethics, politics, and existence of God.
02:58:10 🏛 Universities have a responsibility to enrich society by preserving cultural heritage, providing social commentary, and offering critical insights free from special interests.
03:00:12 🧪 Philosophy plays a crucial role in interdisciplinary collaboration with fields like science, psychology, and AI, contributing to the development and assessment of arguments and ethical considerations.
03:01:35 💭 Philosophy, particularly ethics, is essential for addressing value-based questions in science, from research funding to ethical experimentation.
03:03:00 🧠 Philosophy fosters critical thinking skills, analytical reasoning, and enhances moral and political perspectives, making it far from useless.
✅ Summary complete.
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Hey Joe,
Regarding Mistake #11, I think we should draw a distinction between "X confirms Y and X confirms Z" and "X confirms Y and Z". It might be better to see this distinction with the use of brackets: "(X confirms Y) and (X confirms Z)" versus "X confirms (Y and Z)".
With this in mind, then it is a little confusing to write that "D confirms both and ", because this can be read as "D confirms ( and
2:43:40
I can see Lance Bush violently nod approval right now 😂
I find it profoundly strange that I have to keep pointing this out, and yet professional philosophers continue to say these sorts of things.
Excellent video, Majesty of Reason! I'm sure it took a looot of work and energy!!
With regards to faith, there are some philosophers who defend the idea that it is belief without evidence, i.e., fideist philosophers. But even if philosophers in general reject this definition of religious faith, it is plausible that many non-philosophers accept this definition.
I suppose you could say that the opinion of non-philosophers doesn't matter because we have to interact with sophisticated arguments, but that misses the point. The point is that it is not true that this definition of faith is false. Further, that would merely imply that when we're debating philosophers, we should use their non-fideistic definition of faith, while when we're debating people in general (most of the time), we should use the fideistic definition.
I am learning so much from you, i made many of these mistakes, thank you for the video.
Gonna be honest, I don't really understand Mistake #29. I get the conclusion, but the reasoning behind it is going over my head.
2:10:41 Mistake #41: Ignoring various dimensions of simplicity
Aren't you presupposing foundationalism throughout this section ? What is "ideological simplicity" if your construct is circular ?
For "theism is unfalsifiable", i think its moreso that it makes too many changing or contradictory or poorly defined claims that change to protect the theist's worldview
For Mistake #2, the distinction youre making is the point of the argument, not its flaw. It is because faith requires evidence and prior experience that religious faith is not faith, its just blind belief
Definitely watch Aaron ra
1:59:41 Mistake #35: You can’t prove a negative
Don't they refer to the metaphysics of holes when people say that ?
You can't prove that a hole exists, because a hole is precisely the absence of something existing ?
Can we prove the nihil ?
1:39:30 mistake #28 is one that I wasn't really aware of until now. I found that segment very insightful, even though I've literally written a term paper on the rational use of vague language a few semesters ago.
Nice video! I love your point that merely labelling something as "grounded in God" without giving any intelligible explanation of what this means is a common mistake (at least, it's one I encounter often).
But I disagree with your assumption that that-clauses (e.g., "that we will colonise Mars") 'denote' or express propositions. If that were the case, then it would make sense to speak of hoping propositions. But it doesn't.
Only *sentences* (like "we will colonise Mars") can be used to express propositions or make statements. A that-clause is not a sentence, but a nominalisation of a sentence (i.e., a sentence made into an expression that functions like a nominal _in_ a sentence). It's clear that "that p" cannot be replaced by "the proposition that p" in many sentences (e.g. "I suspect that the Butler did it" makes sense, but "I suspect the proposition that the Butler did it" makes no sense).
Anyway, there's obviously more that could be said, and I just intend these comments as a way of expressing my (rather hazy and tentative) thoughts at present.
I wish i could put the contents of your brain into mine!! 🙏
You're a fkn monster bro. Thanks.
When I hear certainty what I think is there is no possible way the proposition could be false given ANY evidence not just your total evidence... which is why I say there are very few things we can be certian of.
Thanks so much for the corrections on common probabilistic mistakes! I'm still new to probabilistic reasoning so it was incredibly helpful :D
❤️❤️❤️
I thought I was unprepared when I saw 3 hours hehe
Playlisted for now, but much appreciated nonetheless 😅
I feel you've missed the boat in #2. I disagree that your example of faith -- that your dad will show up -- is a good comparison to what religious faith in Jesus is, or captures what theists mean by faith.
The biggest mistake is not being subscribed to Joe's channel. The second biggest mistake is not thinking the Kalam is sound. 😜
2:15:49 _"And so is self undermining"_
I have been thinking about something recently. Maybe you can help me.
Tarski's theorem of undefinability demonstrates that a truth predicate cannot be expressed within a given language. This means that there is no such thing as a _"self undermining"_ (or self defeating) theory of truth (or truth predicate). Precisely because in order to do an internal critique of a theory of truth, that theory of truth needs to be expressed within the framework that is critiqued... Which is precisely what leads to contradictions as showed in the apagogical demonstration of Tarski's theorem.
So there are no self defeating theories of truth...
Are there _"self undermining" "epistemological thesis"_ (2:15:30) ?
A more general point : if one cannot make truth judge itself, what else falls into that category of things that "cannot judge itself" ?
Several times in this video you try to apply a given criterion to itself, like in this case, _"scientism",_ and at 1:59:41 with Mistake #35: You can’t prove a negative.
But how much can you ask something to apply to itself ? Sets that contain themselves are problematic as you know... The liar's paradox is problematic... Problems of impredicativity in general seem to indicate that we should be wary about always wanting things to predicate about themselves...
on intuitions:
The argument you/emerson propose is "we can't do away with the value of intuition because that includes sense data and therefore we'd be left with nothing". I contend that there's no reason to group together sense data with thoughts-based intuition. As a matter of fact, neuroscience reveals profoundly different mechanisms behind the two and it's more than reasonable therefore NOT to group them together. So I can very well dismiss any thoughts-based intuition as worthless and keep sense-based seemings as valuable. I would also not equate the result of intuition to the result of inference for the same reason one wouldn't expect the same accuracy when intuiting the value of pi and when calculating it with an appropriate algorithm: the two processes are very different and they shouldn't be mixed together as if they weren't. We have reasons to trust inferences that don't hold for gut-based guesses.
One such reason is the "too simple to break" principle used in computer science. When validating the modus ponens as an inference, we can rely on the fact that is extremely simple, only involves a few elements, the possible states involved are very limited and we can enumerate each of them. The same cannot be done with "intuiting" that the fundamental nature of reality is dual rather than monistic.
I find rather puzzling that when discussing the value of intuition these kind of considerations seem to be just ignored as if we didn't have any better conceptualization to go around with.
Yours truly,
metaphisically informed (still by you, mostly) new atheist.
How is "the" mechanism behind intuitions relevant?
@@WolfLeib it's relevant in the moment we want to assess whether such mechanism it's reliable or not and whether its reliability is the same across the board of the different types of intuitions.
The argument I'm criticizing links together two very different kinds of "intuitions" and claims I can't dismiss one and keep the other. But there's plenty of reasons (neuroscience, trial and error) to refuse that and no reason to agree on that.
@@paskal007r Then I would disagree that we have evidence that show that the mechanism behind intuition is unreliable.
@@WolfLeib yes we do: people have all sorts of different and mutually exclusive intuitions all the time. That doesn't happen with sensory seemings.
@@paskal007r Nothing to with mechanism behind intuition.
3hr Majesty of Reason video? We take those!
Hello! I saw in another comment from 2 years ago that you said you were a christian and i just wanted to ask are you still a christian? I hope you dont mind me asking
@@gg2008yayo Hi! Yes, I'm still a Christian - thanks for asking. What do you think about God, yourself?
@calebp6114 Thanks for the reply! Im a theist mor specifically a Catholic and will probably be one until the day i perish but that is not to say im not willing to change my veiw but for now my own veiw leads me to believe that God exists. Also im new to the topic of philosophy so my veiws havent sufficiently changed though i have learned a lot of new things and will probably learn more once i take a deeper dive into the philosophy of religion.
Thanks again!
Also more question have you had religious experience? If not what is it that convinces you of God?
There are some mistakes ive made here so this is great joe, thanks. I do however feel vindicated on some points like simplicity 😊
Joe is smart
Joe agrees with me
So im likely right 😅
You won't BELIEVE tip number 43!!!
Tip number 16 is LIFE CHANGING, MUST WATCH!
2:16:30 Mistake #43
Charitably (to steelman their argument), this could be understood as saying that the God hypothesis is *highly* unfalsifiable; not that it is 100% unfalsifiable. And they argue that unfalsifiability lowers the conditional probability of a hypothesis. See, for instance, *Deusdiapente Bayes’ Theorem and Falsifiability* and *Inflation, Evidence and Falsifiability by Rupert Allison et al., 2015.*
Awesome stuff ❤❤❤
On the Fallacy Fallacy section I think it would be helpful to point out that a fallacy is only a fallacy when it is used in place of a valid argument. Calling someone a moron isn't necessarily a case of the ad hominem fallacy. Thinking or implying that calling someone a moron is a good reason to believe an unrelated truth claim is an instance of the ad hominem fallacy. Question begging is only a fallacy if a restatement of the conclusion is implied to be an argument for the conclusion. Restating the conclusion is not itself the fallacy of question begging.
Maybe the problem isn't that people already know the above, but that they are so uncharitable that they assume any time their opponent restates his conclusion, he must be doing so because he thinks it is a valid argument for his conclusion.
When talking about god of the gaps, I would have liked if you had mentioned consciousness along with the arguments you did mention because that’s one that’s very often accused of being god of the gaps/ argument from ignorance
What about "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"?
Frank Turek is killing your gains
1:40:15 Huemer's explanation regarding words. Joe, would you say his approach is "post modern" ? Determining language categories based on their _"usage"_ or the "utility" it has for the locutor(s) ?
Hey just want to get some clarification on mistake 11. It seems to me that there is some equivocation occurring on the use of the word entails. Entail means to be a necessary consequence of. However, if my theory is that since B2 is white, B1 should be red, it seems as if that is just my theory, and it wouldnt make sense to claim that it entails that B2 is white. In other words, the phrase in the 3rd paragraph that “B1 is entailed by my theory” is a non sequiter. Wouldnt you need some sufficient evidence to be able to claim that one proposition ENTAILS another? I wouldnt be able to just claim that if the second ball is red, it entails that the first is white?
Next video: Top 50 mistakes that are KILLING your ACL rehab 😂
💀
On philosophy is useless (#54) I found it intriguiing that most examples are for "societal" issues (rather than pure philosophy) where the role of philosophy is somewhat unclear (e.g. do we really prefer democracy nowadays because of philosophy progress or because of a power shift after the French revolution). Maybe there's better examples than those.
Liked before watching
Here's my first thought. Would you agree that there are some theists (including in the online apologetics space) who think faith is something that shouldn't be dependent upon evidence? Sure we might be able to probe that more and get more evidence but prima facie this seems to be reason to believe that such a proposition is in fact the position of the theists who state it. I actually had a discussion with someone with this view just a few weeks ago.
Aren't religions pretty up front about faith being belief without ultimate proof? To be fair, it's only one fairy tale over and above the millions Normie culture is composed of.
I just ask what you mean by faith because I've never met a univocal understanding of the concept. If it turns out to be based on some reason or inference then I just want to hear that, not get lost on the term faith
Great video, big fan of the channel. To the"claims aren't evidence" point-
Lets say, A experienced a miracle and reports it to skeptic B-
A: "I have witnessed a miracle, as many others, and therefore a god who wants to communicate is real" B:" Consider a) multiple regularities of nature, b) all the times miracles under similar conditions don't happen, c) the possibility of hallucinations and false reports. This all count against your case".
Scenario 1- B continues to talk to A:" So your report isn't the only fact to consider, because this would overstate your case. We also should consider the evidence following from a), b), c). Overall, I'm not convinced of your position".
Scenario 2- B continues to talk to A:" Because we know a), b), c), contrary evidence has to overcome this as a threshold. Think of a-c as building a bar, over which your evidence has to jump. Since individual claims are weak evidence, I don't think anecdotes can jump over the "evidence bar".
In Scenario 2, a claim isn't viewed holistic, but it has to "jump over a prior" first, before it is allowed to be considered further. I think this is a pretty good story about how people like Matt Dillahunty reason about miracles, NDEs, etc, and where they go wrong. I don't think they have a good understanding about "understating the evidence", but they have an intuitive skepticism about anecdotes, and therefore this weird idea of this "prior threshold to be considered evidence- worthy" comes into play.
For a non-deterministic scenario framed as boolean logic, the first mover always loses *if they make an assertion* (if we are being strict). Don't make that mistake and the skeptic doesn't have such a lovely shooting fish in a barrel position.
God this planet drives me up the wall. 😂
Oh also: claims are evidence sometimes (ie: law, medicine, etc).
Immediate like for the title.
56:15 Thank you for this insightful list, but I’m confused by mistake #17 and hoping for more clarification. I have not studied this topic at all, so please excuse my lack of understanding! How can a claim, by itself, serve as evidence?
Suppose I claim that Tinker Bell lives on a planet from a distant galaxy. Have I just provided evidence for her existence?
33:43
If this isn't on purpose, I am flabbergasted
Have you talked to Richard Carrier or looked into his work? If so, do you see him making many of these mistakes?
54 ! Let's go !
(BTW I'm really enjoying this video and you did a great job!)
2:01:00 If I were to steelman the "you can't prove a negative" statement I would say that what they mean is that "you can't prove the non-existence of something outside of an axiomatic system". So you can prove the non existence of square circle in the axiomatic system of euklidean geometry. But you can't prove the non-existence of a purple swan.
That's still false. You can prove that you have no tiger in a bedroom, for example.
@@WolfLeib could you prove there are no microscopic tigers in your room?
@@stenlis I can prove that there no non-microcoscopic tiger in my room.
@@WolfLeib Ok. Can you prove that there's no non-material tiger?
Then you say "I can prove there's no non-microscopic material tiger".
How about a tiger being in your room for just a nanosecond as a quantum fluctuation?
You surely mean "a non microscopic material continuously existing tiger".
We could go on and on to no end. Since we don't know all the axioms of the physical world we could not know whether we ever covered all the ways a tiger could exist in your room.
@@stenlis Yes, we could go on and on, and that's sufficient to show that you're wrong. The fact that you need to add ad hoc properties so save an hypothesis from refutation implies that the hypothesis, without those particular properties, is refuted. You were wrong, accept it.
32:10 I think you are overstating Mistake 11. You say it's a mistake to think that evidential support transmits to entailment. I would say it's *sometimes* a mistake. Consider the following theory:
1) The victim left deep scratch marks on the John's body
2) John left pieces of his skin under the victim's fingernails
If I find that the skin samples from the victim's fingernails belong to John wouldn't I raise the confidence in the claim that John has got deep scratch marks on his body?
The difference between my theory and the theory you presented is that you define as the two elements of your theory as completely independent. In my theory they aren't (both refer to John). So I would say evidential support doesn't transmit to entailment if the elements of the theory are independent. Or even more precisely the amount of evidential support that transmits to entailments depends on the level of independence of the entailment from the rest of the theory. In your theory the entailment is completely independent so evidential support does not transmit at all. In my theory the entailment is highly dependent so it transmits almost completely.
If the Mistake 11 as you present it was true, then we could never declare anybody guilty of a crime. John was at the crime scene? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer". John's fingerprints were on the murder weapon? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer". 10 witnessess saw John comit the murder? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer". There's a video footage? Doesn't transmit to "John was the murderer".
I feel like a more useful definition of knowledge is to say that you know something just in the case that what you believe is true in reality. Of course it would be much better if what you believe is justified, but I think that is (or should be) another matter. I also feel like this definition of knowledge is not undermined by the Gettier cases. But I am a total noob when it comes to philosophy, so feel free to school me on this :)
7:20 - "One cannot know a falsehood"? In what sense? If you know that 1+1=2, then you know that 1+1≠3, and 1+1≠4, etc. And there's people who know Jesus is the Messiah (Christians), and there's people who know he's not the Messiah (Jews). One of those groups is necessarily knowing a falsehood. So, what do you mean?
It's true that 1+1≠3, so it's not a falsehood you know. And Christians *profess* to know that Jesus is the Messiah; Jews profess otherwise. The side who's right has knowledge.
@gregjanzen9354 If you know that 1+1≠3 is true, then you know the proposition "1+1=3 is false." So you know a falsehood.
@@gregjanzen9354 If you know that 1+1≠3 is true, then you know that 1+1=3 is false, thus you know a falsehood. And sure, you can say that the statement "1+1=3 is false" is true, but to know it's true you need to know that 1+1=3 is false. You need to know that something is a falsehood in order to know that it's true that it's falsehood. So you can say that both christians and jews have knowledge about the messianic nature of Jesus, even though contradictory knowledges.
@@germancuervo945 Try to get a handle on it is this way. You would agree, presumably, that you don't (and can't) know that 1+1=3. Ask yourself why this is so. And re: Christian vs. Jewish beliefs about the messiah, ask yourself why not both can be right.
I'm struggling to understand mistake #11. You seem obviously correct in the cards example (i.e., a cards being a jack is evidence for its being a jack of spades, but not for its being a spade.). But then in many, many other everday examples it's not so obvious. For example, say that I'm reading a book about the civil war, and I find out that this is considered the most reliable book on civil war history ever written, with a 100% reliability rating. That fact is evidence that the claims inside the book are true. An entailment of this fact (given the 100% reliability) is that it's claim that Abraham Lincooln was assasinated was true. It seems that the fact that the book is 100% reliable, when combined with the entailment that the book claims Lincoln was asassinated, would be powerful evidence that he was assasinated.
Or say, for example, we assume for argument that the problem of gratuitous evil renders theism overwhelmingly improbable in light of all relevant factors. It seems like an entailment from that would be that the existence of the traditional Christian God is overwhelmingly improbable. But mistake #11 seems to say that no, the fact that gratuitous evil is powerful evidence against theism has absolutely no evidential weight against Christian theism.
In fact, it seems like you agree to some degree that evidence for X is evidence for entailments of X when you point out that the falsehood of Islam provides at least some evidence against theism. It seems like this would only be the case because Islam entails theism. If theism wasn't an entailment of Islam, then it's falsehood wouldn't necessarily provide any evidence against theism.
Anyway, I'm not saying #11 can't be a real mistake, I'm just confused about when it is or isn't a mistake, because sometimes evidence for H does seem to be evidence for entailments of H.
15:55 I think in case of strong cognitive dissonance after a dramatic event you could actually have knowledge of certainty without belief.
For example when I heard that one of my old high school friends had died, I for a whole week didn't believe that he was dead although I was completely certain that he's dead.
I could bring a larger critique on how analytical language doesn't actually map very well to how people really think.
For example I think that a lot of Gettier cases come from semantic trickery mixing trivial and analytic use of language but I'm not qualified enough to form a valid argument, and even if I could my argument would likely not be novel, I'm certain that some real philosophers have already argued against Gettier cases so 🤷
Are these videos your way of studying? Were you prepared for the final?
Great video !
Could you make a video about Ibn Sina (Avicenna)'s Proof of God ?
I loved that you put ‘God exists’ right before ‘Bigfoot exists’ 😂
I don't get, particularly you second scenario, of point 2. Wanting or desiring your faith to be true seems to me to fit into your definition of belief but not knowledge. Faith without evidence should just be belief then. But you assert that this means that faith isn't belief without evidence. I'm missing the part where evidence is synonymous with knowledge. I'm thinking of Kierkegaard who defined faith as belief in two mutually contradictory things. I would say that constitutes belief and certainty, but not evidence and I'm not sure about knowledge or credence.
The biggest mistake thinking propositions represent reality rather than a model of reality. Inferentialists are right unfortunately.
Or, one's (or, one's culture's) *experience/stories* of it, ie: "the reality".
Half of the "facts" in the news are unknowable, but nobody has the ability to notice, or care. It is surreal, but also hilarious. 🤭
If this isn't pure emergence, kudos to whoever pulled off this theatrical production.
@@JohnnyTwoFingers no idea what you are talking about. Can you speak plainly?
I’ve shown several of my new atheist Friends your videos and they just accuse you of being a secret theist 😂
For #14 (corrected number) I don't quite understand the part that ~H does not entail D*, I mean I guess for the example it makes sense but isn't D* basically our starting point if we talk about this reality since we know our own mind exists? Even if we go for some very skeptical theory of reality I think we would still call that a mind?
Great question. It’s certainly our starting point, but that doesn’t mean it can’t serve as evidence for one hypothesis over another. In particular, when we’re assessing whether some piece of data is evidence for H over ~H, we essentially pretend we didn’t know that data, and then ask how much we’d expect the data to obtain given H, and then how much we’d expect the data to obtain given ~H. If the former is greater than the latter, then the data is evidence for H over ~H. (Consider: suppose I’m the dealer and we both observe me get 5 Royal flushes in a row. This is powerful evidence that I’m cheating, since even though we already know that I got this string of hands, it’s still true that me getting this string of hands is far more likely on the hypothesis that I’m cheating than it is on the hypothesis that I felt fairly.)
Wich do you love more, philosophy or soccer?
Why is all this knowledge free? There must be a catch
2:08:18 Is this really a sound argument, though? Can't we challenge P1 by asking why it is that there's an either/or choice between the statements "Either God exists" and "2+2=5"?
Well, the point is that it's a sound argument *by theist's lights* , since 'either A or B' is true whenever A is true, and theists think 'God exists' is true, and hence theists think 'either God exists or 2+2=5' is true. And there is also a similar argument which is sound by the atheist's lights if we substitute 'God doesn't exist' in for 'God exists'. (And if we want to make essentially the same point for someone who is neither an atheist nor a theist, just pick any claim C you accept, and substitute it for 'God exists', and you'll thereby have an argument that is sound by your lights. And yet the argument would not be a good argument.)
@@MajestyofReason
Hi. Thanks for the quick response! :) When you mean "by X's light," you're saying "If we accept X's assumption about some fact(s) being true.", right? Which means that it's a premise that's not necessarily true. Which results in this statement being valid, but not necessarily sound. Or do I misunderstand something?
33:44 I see what you did there
The D and the red, white, and blueballs 😊
Hardcore philosophy 🎉
Hi, what do you think about transcendental argument? I don't know if you are familiar with Jay Dyer.
about mistake #19: the one about no evidence. you make it sound straightforwardly wrong, but how can there be evidence for unfalsifiable claims? if an all-powerful god can do anything, then every possible observation can neither confirm nor falsify it. it simply wouldn't be an empirical question. I think that's a reasonable position. admittedly, there are some people who say "god wouldn't do that", implying there are some standards for the evidence. it's more of a theological/epistemic question at that point I guess.
I don't really get the points on simplicity in #29. Alexander said that people justafyably stuck with the simpler option, and you said "it seems obvious" what should be settled on, but I feel like I'm missing what makes it obvious. It still just seems to me like the hypothesis with better predictive power is the better one unless there's some external reason to believe physical constants tend to be simple.
I also took issue with #38. First of all, I always took the definition of sound to just be "conclusion logically follows from the premesies", which you are calling valid. The fact that he used that word in conjunction with "and has true premesies" makes me think he also agrees with that definition.
Yaya I guess this is the "wrong" definition by the fancy ivory acedamia standards, but I'm just saying, you won't catch me saying 「logically "sound"」without putting sound in quotes.
Also, wasn't so sure about the "God or 2+2=5" counterargument. I mean, it only meets ths premise criteria if "God exists" is taken to be true, and if it is, that seems to make makes the conclusion trivial, (which goes against another of the criteria) because inherently it's something already known. It's basically seems the same as "true things are true." I don't know what the precise technical definition of "trivial" is, but if that isn't a trivial conclusion, I don't know what is.
And even if it is technically classified as "non-trivial", it's trival to ME and people generally. If there were added a scenario where this could realistically trip someone up, I think that would be helpfull.
Conclusion logically follows from the premise is the definition of valid
Only if the premises are true is the argument also sound
Here's a question for "Part 2: Theism, atheism, naturalism, and agnosticism"
It has never been that clear how wide a target atheists have to face. I've seen some respected philosophers say that atheists need only disprove the tri-onmi god of western monotheism. That is, the main subject of philosophical debate in the tradition. But is that actually the case? The Abrahamic God doesn't seem to fit that conception all that comfortably, polytheist gods don't fit it at all, and pantheists seem to be talking about something else entirely. So it seems that maybe we need to cast a wider net when disproving or arguing against gods. What do you think?
I think the mere notion of God renders 99%+ of human minds incapable of executing logic without making unforced errors in anything less than an academic paper that they thought out exhaustively. But get the same person in an object level argument about a culture war topic, and watch all that impressive capability vanish.
3:02:31 ''Gender-affirming healthcare'' ugh the framing never stops in America.
When you say professional philosophers won't make these mistakes, do you mean in a formal paper, or in real world conversation? Because I've listened to thousands of hours in meetups, youtube videos, podcasts, etc...EVERYONE makes the same TOTAL ROOKIE mistakes ALL THE TIME. Generally speaking, they can discuss philosophy academically or with simplistic examples, but they cannot practice it skilfully in complex scenarios. Worse: trying to do so triggers cultural trip wires left and right.
We effectively live in a simulation imho, from a causal perspective.
Regarding #7, linking people to this: GENUINELY intelligent people 9+ times out of 10 GENUINELY AND SINCERELY are unable to recognize their error, on discussions that matter (thus, emotions are high). We have checkmated ourselves (or been checkmated) by our cultural, conceptual Overton Window....and our Mediums.
10:32 " *and* of story"
33:43. I won't say anything else.
Mistake 38 - are you saying an argument that begs the question is still a sound argument?
If you already believe in God and assuming that in your premises, then the conclusion that God exist seems trivial to me
To commit mistake #38 is to think that any sound argument is a good argument. (Recall: to be sound is to be valid and have all true premises.) This is false. There are many sound arguments that are terrible arguments. One example of a sound but terrible argument is a sound argument that is overtly question-begging. For instance, here's a sound but overtly question-begging (and so bad) argument:
1. I exist.
2. Therefore, I exist.
That premise is true -- I do exist. And the argument is clearly valid. So the argument is sound. But the first premise is clearly question-begging, since it's literally identical to the conclusion.
@@MajestyofReason Thanks for the response 👍
your claims concerning mistake 11 seem to be just clearly wrong you seem to suggest that D does not provide evidence for either the claim that B1=red or that B1=white, which is correct... and totally irrelevant to the overall proposition that "E being evidence H1 is evidence for H2 if H2 is entailed by H1" the question you must ask is "does D provide evidence to believe that either both balls will be red or that the first ball will be red and the second ball will be white" and it should be clear that the answer is yes as the probability of either of these is better predicted in D rather than the negation of D and we can show easily that the odds of both balls being red is greater on D being true rather than on a state of not knowing if D is true. 50% on D. 25% on not knowing and 0% on the negation of D.
you seem to even admit this in mistake 13 saying that B2 being red is evidence for both hypotheses but that would mean that that in this example you fail to show a contradiction in the statement that
E, being evidence for H1 is also evidence for H2 if H2 is entailed by H1
edit: please note that this criticism is not reflective of my overall feeling toward this video or your content and should only be taken as a comment on this one point. I generally love your content.
What is the *absolute* quality of a culture in which one ~needs to accompany such a lovely comment with an apology?
WE LIVE IN THE DARK AGES AND HAVEN'T A CLUE!!! 😂😂😂😁😁😁😟😟😟🤔🤔🤔🤔😮.
H1 - First ball is red and second ball is red
H2 - First ball is red and second is white
D - lets say first ball is actually red
W - If second ball is white
R - If second ball is red
then D is evidence for H1 and H2 both
i.e H1 entails D and H2 entails D
D is an evidence for H1 and H1 entails R , we suppose that D is an evidence for R.
D is an evidence for H2 and H2 entails W , we suppose that D is an evidence for W.
But W and R are contradictory
Therefore by law of contradiction D cannot be evidence for both R and W
Hence IF X is an evidence for H1 and H1 entails R , then we cannot assert that X is an evidence for R.
I don't think #23 is a mistake; on the contrary, I think it's a humble attitude to have.
I'll give an analogy; when my son was 1, I was going to drop him off at daycare, and he wanted to bring his stuffed animal. Now, he already had the same kind of stuffed animal at daycare, so I simply told him "your toy is already at daycare" and asked him to leave his current one.
This caused him to get very upset, because he just couldn't comprehend my explanation at that time (he was 1 after all).
It was at this point that I realized that this is true of us and God, but to an infinitely greater degree. Even knowing what we know about God's character (which, do we know this from philosophy or revelation? I think the latter), I just don't think we have any power to accurately predict God's actions, because we simply don't have, and cannot have, all the data. Can anyone really predict how an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal being is going to act simply by knowing (in a very surface-level sort of way) something about their attributes?
My intutition is to say that it really doesn't matter how smart we are or how much we think we know, we are never going to be able to compare to that kind of being. All that we say we know, we only claim to know through God's self-revelation.
I'm not sure if you know this, but the Fallacy Fallacy isn't the end of it. You see, if you misuse the Fallacy Fallacy by claiming that the fact you're argument is fallacious is irrelevant, then that is itself a fallacy called the Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy. And if you similarly misuse the Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy, that's called the Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy. And if you misuse that, well you get the idea. :D
02:16:59 - "Suppose that the world is a tortuous world. Hundreds of billions of years, all it is is sentient creatures experiencing profound agony. There's no afterlife...a pure agony world."
That sounds like a real world to me. It's called animal agriculture. Do you support this tortuous aspect of our world, MoJ? Or are you vegan?
Mistake 26 41 43
2:46:40 On progress in philosophy:
I agree that philosophy has expanded its areas of enquiry, but if by "progress" we mean actually closing the debate with an end result, then I'm afraid I have yet to see such a thing in philosophy.
All the examples you tried to make of such a progress are from moral philosophy and on that front it simply doesn't matter at all that nobody among the philosophers is still defending slavery, dictatorships or attacking homosexuals. Do they actually have a definitive answer to the many people that do exactly that today? No, because there is no way to tell people "well this is just wrong". You can't even do that for one of the forms of ethic that, what a coincidence, DID historically endorse slavery and dictatorships (monarchies especially) and is STILL demonizing homosexuality: divine command theory. It's still around and still being discussed.
As for knowledge not being any more agreed to be "justified true belief" that's hardly considerable progress given that there's no answer in sight to "what does constitute knowledge".
Last but not least Teleology: yeah, the small number of people still pushing for it seem to be catholics. So what? Is philosophy determined by a show of hands now?
For me in particular the litmus test of when philosophy can be said to have made some progress is the following: when people will be told that if they insist on investigating fruitless speculations like idealism, because of some actual philosophical rule or principle then they'll be "out of philosophy" just like whoever tries today to investigate the theory of humors would be "out of medicine".
Until then philosophy can at most be said to be a speculative discipline that can serve as a bootstrap for interesting and structured endeavors, that is to say sometimes fruitful, sometimes fruitless, but always unable to come to any actual conclusion.
57:02 *football*
You look like a discounted Scott the Woz
Based + redpilled
+ majesty pilled
+ pillpilled
@MajestyofReason I'm reading currently How reason can lead to God from Joshua Rasmussen (I disovered him via your channel !). I wonder if he's not making the mistake n°13 on p. 161 : "[...] I can the deduce the following result : it is more likely - more expected - that some mysterious evils would exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Again, the existence of some mystery is expected on te Upside Hypothesis, and the Upside Hupothesis is expected on God's existence. By contrast, without God's existence, I don't think it is even possible, let alone probable - for any moral communities to exist - and without moral communities, moral mysteries are impossible. My cold calculation reveals to my mind, then, that I should actually expect to find mysterious evils if God does exist. In other words, by this analysis, the existence of mysterious evils makes the most sens only if God exists." It seems to me that it is equivalent to : Mysterious evils is evidence for the Upside Hypothesis, the Upside Hypothesis is evidence for God, therefore Mysterious evils is evidence for the Upside Hypothesis.
Are you a theist if not a christian if not neither? I hope you dont mind me asking
@@gg2008yayo I'm a catholic.
@@JacquesdeLEspinay Thanks for the reply! Im also a catholic so thanks for answering my question
bro what 3 hours?!
PART 1 OF AN EPIC SERIES OMGGGGG
hi joe, I *really* appreciate your work but you made a mistake here and I need to point it out. Your characterization of faith is quite misleading.
Firstly you assert it involves a "desire like" component. But when people use faith to believe that their loved one is for any reason in hell, there's nothing "desire like" in it. It's a dreaded and terrible feeling, more akin to fear than desire.
Secondly, you are missing entirely the fact that faith is characterized as a justification for belief not as the belief itself. Setting aside the biblical "evidence of things unseen" passage, catholics define it as the way in which "the intellect surrenders to the divine". These are poetic/rhetorical tools that are quite hard to nail as intellectual concepts in their minutias but they do convey that faith is a means through which a belief is confirmed.
And even if no contemporary philosopher is characterizing faith with such a component, well that would mean that contemporary philosophers are making up something new that doesn't reflect either use of the word by believers or by atheists.
This is akin to how philosophers artificially restrict the use of the term "atheist" only to strong atheists (like myself) rather than to include the very people that started using the term in 1700 like baron d'holbach who in "good sense" declared his atheism as a lack of belief.
I don't know how useful these redefinition of terms might be in philosophy, but they are damaging the clarity of discourse in here, because the thing you present here as faith is neither what the teists defend nor what the atheist attacks.
Thank you as always,
your metaphisically informed (by you mostly) new atheist.
Thanks for the comment! Briefly, because I have classes and hw:
On your first point, there's a distinction between (a) using one's faith-based worldview to come to believe that a loved one is in hell, and (b) having faith that one's loved one is in hell. You've only pinpointed a case of (a). But that doesn't challenge my characterization of faith; one may believe that a loved one is in hell, and believe this because of one's broader faith-based worldview, and yet not have faith that a loved one is in hell, precisely because one regards that as a horrifically bad thing. There's a distinction between believing p on the basis of propositions in which one has faith, and having faith that p. The former can hold while the latter doesn't.
On your second point, I didn't deny that faith is ever considered a justification for belief, and nor did I affirm that faith is the belief itself. Rather, I simply pointed out that faith involves something belief-like. The precise relationship between faith and that belief-like thing is left open; perhaps faith leads to it; perhaps it leads to faith; perhaps there are complex, interpersonally variant relationships between them. The point is that faith involves it in some manner.
Hope this helps, and thanks again for the comment! :)
@@MajestyofReason Thanks for the reply!
Regarding the a-b distinction you made on the practical side that'd apply also to "fear of god", ironically, but more importantly I'm kinda puzzled to how you make a methodological distinction when you outright have avoided any kind of description of faith as a method and even stated that the relationship with the "belief-like thing" is "left open".
If it's open, how can you say that it doesn't include feared things and how does it not include using a "faith based worldview" to come to a conclusion?
By my lights seems like you really would need to have that quite "closed" in order to argue based on that the status of a certain belief as being or not a faith-driven one.
7:13ff 1 + 1 = 2 only because it is defined as such - so is true only within its domain of discourse.
1 + 1 could well = 3 in an appropriately axiometised arithmetic.
It has also emerged independently in multiple cultures has it not? What say anthropologists?
@@JohnnyTwoFingers As the "and another" concept exists in animals it suggests it formed as the early mind evolved, prior to mankind, therefore prior to culture.
It is a life preserving idea: I saw a predator go behind the rock, and another. I have now seen a predator come from behind the rock, but not another.
@@JohnnyTwoFingers Are you suggesting that common algebra appeared in several cultures? Variants of it did, but they did not emerge fully formed. The early stages were counting, such as the quipu, where the "and another" concept is used.
crazy
Are you going to address your logically fallacious beliefs of moral realism, compatibilism, and why you are not a vegan?
yoooooooo
Philosophy? More like... philo sophistry. Heh, got em.