no room for skepticism?

[DeathAngel]

Are we so intuned with our religions and facts, sciences, that we leave no room for skepticism?

I mean, just bcuz your a christian doesn't mean, oh hey jesus is real and you're going to hell cuz your gay...
i mean, geez, can't you ask, "well, jesus you really there?"

I'm agnostic and i'd like to keep it that way, i like to be skeptical, bucz t leaves room for the impossible,
fairytales may or may not e real, bu do we really know that,
we think we know everything but thre are so many myteries, beyond ghosts, and mytical creatures,
there just might be another plane called limbo, or some plane that exists oppositely of us,

who knows
maybe bhudda was right,

dark shadows crowd around your bedroom, and one them, might not exactly be a shadow,

people somehow appear and disapper before our very eyes, and we might think, "hallucinaon"

life is full of mysteries,
and we really don't have all the answers,
so why are we constanty fooling ourelves?

[NikolaiI]

The biggest monster I see here is language. Nietzsche said that Descartes missed the obvious in all of his philosophy, at the very beginning when he had his first principles. Descartes, who said he would doubt everything, was actually very dogmatic. Language is dogmatism, to me, too, but as Nietzsche says, to reject it would be to reject life, so we need to live with the falsities of language and math and stuff.

[TheFifthElement]

I'm agnostic and i'd like to keep it that way

I used to be agnostic until I decided it was cowardice on my part, a form of celestial 'hedging my bets' on the basis that I didn't believe in God, but would be prepared to believe in God if there was proof. Then I realised that actually I would never believe, because if proof were given I would know or understand that there was a God. Belief exists in the absence of proof, and in the end I had to be honest enough with myself to admit that actually I was an athiest. I think with belief, you believe or you don't - I don't think you can really sit on the fence.


life is full of mysteries,
and we really don't have all the answers,
so why are we constanty fooling ourelves?

Life is certainly full of mysteries, but it appears to be part of human nature to try and understand those mysteries. Inherently we are pattern seekers - we see images in random dots in the sky, and we attach meaning to them, to make sense of our lives. Consciousness makes us question. As far as fooling ourselves go, do you mean fooling ourselves that we have, or can find the answers, or fooling ourselves with our assumptions of what we know? With the former, I suppose if we didn't fool ourselves that we could find the answers then we would not make progress, our race would stagnate and not develop. To ask humans to give up seeking the answers would be to ask us to give up hope, and hope is necessary for survival. If the latter, again if we questioned everything we wouldn't move out of bed in the morning. The simplest decision becomes impossible to make, because when you question a decision eventually you come back to assumptions. Are you familiar with Agrippa's trilemma? There's a lot of truth in that.

[RichardHresko]

Augustine points out that there can be no knowledge without faith. This is not because he was devoted to a particular belief system but simply because humans are limited in their experience and must accept some things in order to have a basis for building a knowledge system.

Skepticism has its place, but radical skepticism is self-defeating.

[Demian]

You can also have no faith without doubt. If we did not doubt something to begin with, our faith would be unnecesary. I'm being a bit redundant here--TFE already covered this 2 replies above...

[RichardHresko]

You can also have no faith without doubt. If we did not doubt something to begin with, our faith would be unnecesary. I'm being a bit redundant here--TFE already covered this 2 replies above...

We need to have faith in some things in order to have any sort of knowledge, even the knowledge of doubt. So faith is necessary prior even to doubt.

(This is not a reference to faith in God, which is clearly not necessary for knowledge, as Aquinas points out.)

[blazeofglory]

The biggest monster I see here is language. Nietzsche said that Descartes missed the obvious in all of his philosophy, at the very beginning when he had his first principles. Descartes, who said he would doubt everything, was actually very dogmatic. Language is dogmatism, to me, too, but as Nietzsche says, to reject it would be to reject life, so we need to live with the falsities of language and math and stuff.

Nikolai, I do not why I mostly, amazingly find that my ideas resemble yours on many points, and what cord is there that wires me to you. Maybe if any seeming rift is there, that is insubstantial and temporal, and finally when this spatial distance is blurred, we understand what we are and become elevated.

Yes, I wholeheartedly without a tinge of doubt subscribe to your idea that language is a barrier, for there are too many languages, and we have yet to come upon a universal language. We do have one inherently, but we have yet to realize.

In fact we all I agree on things, and there are smokescreens of doubts or misunderstanding and once we lift them things will be clear to us. For instance, see, love is one and we simply color it depending upon which cultures we attach oursleves to. Cultures divide us. Identity divide us. Religions divide us. Remove all these layers, distances You and me and the rest are so together, in the same lap of the mother earth, the same mother is breast - feeding us.

This seeming division is illusive

[Mr. Dr. Ralph]

The biggest monster I see here is language.

"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."

I don't think I can think of anything else that has deluded mankind so effectively. The basis of almost everything we know is more or less a set of definitions which really aren't guaranteed to reflect anything that is conclusively correct. It's pretty sad that the the great majority of mankind can't see outside its own contrivances.


Augustine points out that there can be no knowledge without faith. This is not because he was devoted to a particular belief system but simply because humans are limited in their experience and must accept some things in order to have a basis for building a knowledge system.

Skepticism has its place, but radical skepticism is self-defeating.

I am not so sure and I want to push this a little. In what sense do you use faith? Could information which is grounded on unexamined conjecture be considered knowledge at all?

I am inclined to think that information is not knowledge unless it is demonstrably true. However, I don't know anything that is demonstrably true. I also do not know a difference between skepticism and radical skepticism.

As for faith preceding doubt, I can't agree there either. Doubt necessarily arises when an inconsistency is perceived. That is, I am immediately doubtful that x=4 is a solution to 2x=6, simply because of the mathematical impossibility. Within a given set of definitions and parameters, something either follows or it does not, and does not depend on human cognition.

I am not entirely versed with Aquinas so maybe I am missing the point.

[The Atheist]

Are we so intuned with our religions and facts, sciences, that we leave no room for skepticism?

I'm surprised you include science as lacking scepticism, because it's actually one of the central tenets of all science - test and test again, check and re-check results; be sceptical of your own findings. Further scepticism then comes into play with peer-review, where other scientists apply sceptical thinking to the theory/results.


I'm agnostic and i'd like to keep it that way, i like to be skeptical, bucz t leaves room for the impossible,
fairytales may or may not e real, bu do we really know that,
we think we know everything but thre are so many myteries, beyond ghosts, and mytical creatures,
there just might be another plane called limbo, or some plane that exists oppositely of us,

Not quite sure I follow your reasoning here, because scepticism leaves no room for the impossible. If it's impossible, it isn't real, so if it's real, it's obviously not impossible. This obviously only applies to absolutes - like maths as noted above, if 2x=6, then x can only = 3. To say that x can be anything else isn't scepticism, it's fantasy.


who knows
maybe bhudda was right,

dark shadows crowd around your bedroom, and one them, might not exactly be a shadow,

people somehow appear and disapper before our very eyes, and we might think, "hallucinaon"

life is full of mysteries,
and we really don't have all the answers,
so why are we constanty fooling ourelves?

People love to believe in things, from gods to astrology. Applying scepticism and critical analysis usually explodes the myths pretty quickly.

I disagree with you on the "life full of mysteries" bit, I'm afraid. In almost half a century, I haven't yet seen, read or heard about anything which I consider "mysterious", having found natural, physical answers to every question so far.

[blazeofglory]

The biggest monster I see here is language. Nietzsche said that Descartes missed the obvious in all of his philosophy, at the very beginning when he had his first principles. Descartes, who said he would doubt everything, was actually very dogmatic. Language is dogmatism, to me, too, but as Nietzsche says, to reject it would be to reject life, so we need to live with the falsities of language and math and stuff.

Language is never dogmatic. It is of course our use of it, and that just because some philosophers have twisted it and got it to their advantage does not mean that language is dogmatic. Language is nothing but just an amalgamation of words and which are symbols only and nothing else.

It can be prayers or something like the Buddha's discourses or like Hitler's emotionally charged speeches.

Indeed it is the user who profits from the use and misuse of it.

[Cogitus]

Not quite...

Language can be considered dogmatic from a point of view: All of advanced communication happens through the use of language. Communication is the transferring of knowledge of logical circumstances. However, every circumstance can only be expressed within the parameters that language allows. Thus, we can only communicate as far as language allows us to, independent of our intentions.

This is of course a very broad interpretation of the term 'dogmatism', but it works.

[JBI]

Math is dogmatic in the sense that the numbers don't exist. There is no such thing as 1 or 2 of something, since everything is different. Every atom perhaps can be slightly different than the next, then every neutron in the atom can be different than the next etc. The point is that we accept some things is a means of communication in order to understand the more specific things.