Series 108: belief without reason?
previous analysis suggests every real belief requires acted inference of believer; delirium after being snakebit doesn’t necessarily mean ‘I believe’ what I am saying in delirium about being snakebit; unconscious person is purely reacting; parrot may react to environment with words that have ‘meaning’; doesn’t believe what it is saying; may consciously infer (like some religious leaders and politicians!) it will be fed if it says words; still not same as believing what it says; parrot conscious of meaning can believe what it says, unconscious of meaning (in various ways), no; every belief, including religious belief, still seems to require reasoning in order to exist as belief; fideistic theist claims instead that sheer action of asserting a proposition entails a belief; rejects all reasonable support as spurious, debateable, maybe unbecoming the dignity of God; all support means scriptural support, too! (faith/reason dichotomy leads yet again to rejection of whatever makes Christianity specifically “Christian”–fortress mentality no real safeguard against ‘heresy’); several reasons to choose fideism; all reasons to choose fideism involve reasoning!; fideist cannot successfully argue that beliefs and attitudes about God should and/or cannot be grounded on reasons–tacitly ignoring her own chain of reasoning to her own attiude and belief about God; what about pure, total assertion of fideism, rejecting even reasons for fideism?; result is indistinguishable from no belief about God at all; assertions obviously not necessarily beliefs in other cases; fideist’s ‘belief’ must have content or else no belief; if asserting one piece of content (God exists), why not others?; can be no reason not to even merely assert other details; hyperfideist ends in mere zero, or else with ultiamtely arbitrary characteristic set; inaccessible to other people; technically inaccessible to hyperfideist, too!; certainly can have no reason to bar anyone else from at least trying to do better than merely asserting characteristics; if ultimately transcendent God exists, is it arrogant fatuity to claim particular characteristics can be discovered and known?; no more arrogant than sheer assertion on any point!; already discovered that characteristics of Ultimate Reality not intrinsically undiscoverable; neither assertion nor reasoning makes God exist or have various intrinsic characteristics; discovery may be humble in procedure and results; may place priority on actual truth instead of wishful assertion or forcing desired conclusion; not necessarily exercise in prideful self-acclimation
(wave at Jeff!); even simple math statements would be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; reasons deploying or appealing to an infinite regression (such as against Christianity or atheism being true) would also be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; also, inf-reg proposals end up necessarily implying a final explanatory fact after all; turtles all the way down (for example) must be turtles all the way down and not even possibly explainable in terms of something else more fundamentally basic; an infinite regress must be self-existently what it is and there is an end to it; but that’s an Independent Fact, not an infinite regress; infinite regressors must make tacit exception against infinite regression being true, even to try to seriously propose or appeal to it as true; the IF (including any supposed ‘infinite regression’) cannot be explainable by further appeal to something else; a deployment of this concept by philosophical naturalists against a too-simple supernaturalistic argument; the too simple supernat argument tacitly assumes that anything we can ask the question of origin about, must have an origin instead of being self-existent; naturalists rightly complain that this leads to an infinite regression unless the too-simple supernaturalist cheats in his own favor; no escape for infinite regression by this route either: how did infinite regression “come to exist”?; we end up, whichever way we go, explicitly or implicitly requiring the existence of an ultimate Fact that is not dependent on anything else, and so is not caused by anything else; infinite regressor complains that uncaused cause is contradiction, thus no worse than his own position; uncaused causation may in fact be self-contradictory proposal; self-causing causation, however, is not; the principle difference between privative and positive aseity; at least one non-contradictory option, therefore; (but leaving aside final decision between privative and positive aseity until later); various ways different philosophies agree with existence of an Independent Fact; but how far can they be in agreement with each other?
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