Put it this way, if you think that there is a 1% probability (e.g. you are convinced it is bogus) that I am right in stating that if taken seriously God will answer prayers as from the scriptures I provided and this is enough to get you to try out what they say then that was sufficient faith in that instance. Clearly at 1% probability you shouldn’t be doing anything else that comes with believing in the Book of Mormon or being LDS (at least that doesn’t already coincide with what you think of as being right).
If you follow through and get evidence to boost the Book of Mormon to say 70 or 80% level then that should likewise boost the level confidence of what the book says to do to high enough to test them out. Following what the book says and finding it to be right should then boost the level, eventually at least, to whatever you have preset as your critical value to say you know it to be true.
If however one waits until they have evidence to suggest something is true with ones preset critical value then one is not acting in faith. If one has evidence at that level and then doesn’t follow the commands of God then one is worse off then someone that thinks it is bogus but has had someone tell them it isn’t or someone that due to everything else thinks it has 51% chance to be right.
That doesn’t seem consistent with part of the earlier verse you posted.
‘[I]f a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.’
Under the account you’re offering faith and knowledge are just different degrees of belief – indeed under that account knowledge is the type of belief with the most cause behind it. Whereas under the account in the verse knowledge and belief seem to be completely different kinds of thing.
If you want to call different degrees of confidence faith and knowledge, I don’t really mind – the probabilities are what they are regardless of the labels you hang off them—but it doesn’t seem to be doing any work that gets you closer to the conclusion you’ve decided on. You haven’t illustrated any difference beyond the claim that at some point of arbitrarily selected confidence it’s going to become worse for us if we don’t follow the relevant commandments.
Which is fine as far as it goes I suppose – why doesn’t god provide whatever portion of the evidence doesn’t quite tip me over that vital point yet preserves enough meaning to actually be evidence?
It strikes me the answer is going to have to be along the lines of ‘The more sure you are the more liable you are.’ But then the degree of confidence is a measure of degrees of knowledge and you’ve lost that sharp divide that seems to be required for you to make meaning and faith coexist (i.e. being more sure of the religion’s groundings than of a fair coin flip). The objection that I couldn’t know because then I wouldn’t believe would become rather meaningless – all meaningful faith would be based primarily on some form of knowledge.
why doesn’t god provide whatever portion of the evidence doesn’t quite tip me over that vital point yet preserves enough meaning to actually be evidence?
It is my understanding that He does.
’The more sure you are the more liable you are
yep.
all meaningful faith would be based primarily on some form of knowledge.
Which it is. An experience once provided does give knowledge of the thing, however it is possible to doubt your experiences. Also, the experiences only provide knowledge of one thing and there will remain many things that are not known with the same surety, some of which may be difficult to understand, and these things must be taken on faith until they too become known.
arbitrarily selected confidence it’s going to become worse for us if we don’t follow the relevant commandments.
I would think that it is a continuum such that someone totally unaware of anything about the subject is not liable for anything while those that have received knowledge of everything are liable for all of it.
Confidence in something not tested is faith. Anything not known with whatever level of confidence constitutes near enough to certainty to not matter for you is taken on faith. Knowledge is anything that is known with that level of confidence to constitute certainty. I am pretty sure that is a consistent translation of the terms into something understandable in this setting, I could be wrong.
If you’re right in respect to the prophesies of Thomas S. Monson, I don’t see how this could hold. They would be strong evidence.
In any case I think, we’ve got the chunks to start doing some building.
All meaningful faith would be based primarily on some form of knowledge.
Which it is.
But.
Knowledge is anything that is known with that level of confidence to constitute certainty.
Also known things are knowledge. You seem to be invoking, admittedly with some degree of displacement, the term in its own description.
Confidence in something not tested is faith.
To a degree – if you’re going to build knowledge into the meaningfulness of faith then faith would be something like believing with a greater certainty than the evidence justifies. Since all faith would be tested to some extent, even if very weakly, in order to contain meaning.
The problem with that approach is that it never seems necessary for me to believe beyond the evidence. If I put, say, one percent confidence on the idea of god based upon things I see then that’s not faith – and if I get more evidence from investigating based on that one percent and believe it to be slightly more likely – do some more investigation and get more… it never becomes faith; it’s testing / knowledge all the way up.
You seem to be invoking, admittedly with some degree of displacement, the term in its own description.
I know, probably should be changed to “anything that is held to be true with such a level of confidence so as to not make any difference from 100%”. That removes the term but doesn’t seem to change the meaning.
faith would be something like believing with a greater certainty than the evidence justifies
hmm. That would certainly be faith but it doesn’t fit exactly with how it is used in, say “Lectures on Faith”. The confidence is the faith, it really is that broad of a concept.
If faith is just another word for confidence then knowledge would just be a high degree of faith and that doesn’t fit in with how it’s used in the Book; where it’s held that if you know you don’t have faith/believe.
If you keep using knowledge to mean a very high degree of confidence and maintain that all meaningful faith is based on knowledge—and not just in the sense of exceeding the level of confidence that evidence justifies—then I’m not sure how it’s possible for meaningful faith to exist.
Since:
If it meets the level of confidence that the knowledge justifies, then it’s not faith. And if it exceeds the level of confidence that evidence justifies then it doesn’t fit how it’s used in “Lectures on Faith”. And I take it just as a given that faith is not to believe /less/ than the evidence justifies—especially with 1 John 4:1 commanding people to test their prophets.
Knowledge would be certainty. However, this site works with the assumption that certainty is impossible so I am trying to get everything to work under that assumption.
I am looking at my computer right now so I am certain it exists were I to look away I would be slightly less certain of its existence. That difference in certainty of the current existence of the computer seems to constitute faith as used in scripture and lectures on faith. However, I am still certain that the computer did exist while I was looking at it even if I am not looking at it currently, I know it existed then (I would say that my degree of certainty of it currently existing would still constitute knowledge, but as used it would seem to be in some sense faith).
According to this site I can not say that I know with certainty that I am male. I wonder what the confidence level is that I exist or that you exist. I have seen examples of saying that one can not be certain of the prime numbers or of 1+1=2. To me all these things are certainties, I know them even if in reproducing that knowledge to an outside observer I might err in doing so. This is what I mean by knowledge, if you can come up with a better way of explaining it in terms of this site where there is no certainty other then what I have explained then please do so.
This is what I mean by knowledge, if you can come up with a better way of explaining it in terms of this site where there is no certainty other then what I have explained then please do so.
You seem to be meaning two things by knowledge, depending on the context in which you use it. I would suggest that you might find it easier if you use the words ‘information’ or ‘evidence’ when talking about justifications for a level of confidence/faith. And only use ‘knowledge’ to signify whatever high degree of confidence you’ve decided to use as your cut-off point for hands-in-fire-get-burned, I’m-looking-at-the-computer-and-it’s-still-there levels of certainty.
It still seems to me that you’re going to end up with problems if you hold faith as being another word for confidence. Since even certainty (100% confidence) is still a degree of confidence – and also knowledge under such a definition. But scripture holds that knowledge isn’t faith – which is the same as saying if you hold that faith and confidence are synonymous – that knowledge isn’t a degree of confidence (even 100% confidence).
It seems to me to be a deeper problem than one of definitions.
You’re going to have problems if you say that faith just refers to the preceding 99.9 recurring % levels of confidence, too. You’ve said that it’s a general enough idea, in “Lectures on Faith”, to just be taken as a synonymous term with confidence. But even putting that problem aside, when you wanted to start talking about scripture again I suspect you’d end up saying either, ‘People don’t believe that which they know.’ Or, ‘People don’t believe that which they have faith in.’
But belief isn’t one of those fuzzy terms, like knowledge or faith. The meaning can’t be altered to fit a particular argument without doing significant damage to the network of references into which it fits. If I say I believe my computer is in front of me while I’m typing on it, (which going by your standards would also be knowledge,) then there’s no significant question what I mean. Just as it’s coherent for me to say that I believe my front door is locked, when strictly speaking I’ve heard one of the other occupants of the building come in and do not know if they locked the door. You might ask how strongly I believe it, but it’s coherent for me to answer that in degrees of doubt/confidence; even to the point of saying that I have no doubt.
If you start saying that belief means something else to patch the problem in the epistemology, then you’re going to have to explain how that new definition is coherent with all the other instances of its use. And that will alter more, even more well defined, meanings to do that which you’re going to have to redefine along with everything that hooks onto those instances… and so on until eventually you’ve defined everything in terms of whether it makes your theology right. It doesn’t seem to be a workable approach.
what do you mean by meaningful faith?
Better odds than the chance a similarly but non-testimony privileged observer has. Or to put it another way whether the faith adds any information. (With non-adding faith being meaningless.)
Take the coin-flip example:
If we were to say that somehow divine testimony could predict the outcome of a coin flip. (Not that I’m saying it can but if it could—or someone claimed it could.) You might get three groups – in separate rooms – and one group would commune with god and score down their predictions, and the other two groups would flip coins. And you’d see what the difference between the god group and one of the coin flipping groups was as compared to the difference between the two coin flipping groups. Do it a few hundred times to get the errors down to whatever you’d decided the noise level was and see whether the faith group was more reliable.
If at the end of all that you didn’t have a higher degree of confidence in the predictions of divinity than those of a coin flip, then – assuming that was all the evidence you had for god – you may as well use the coin flip to dictate your actions. The faith wouldn’t add any information, it wouldn’t hook onto the world you were experiencing.
You could do the same sort of thing with the more day to day predictions of prophets from the Church but you’d need to compare them against experts in whatever field the prediction was being made in since the real world provides more information than they’d have in the coin flip case. The advantage of the coin flip is that there are fewer confounding variables more than anything else.
meaning two things by knowledge, depending on the context in which you use it.
I think you are right in this assessment.
when you wanted to start talking about scripture again I suspect you’d end up saying either, ‘People don’t believe that which they know.’ Or, ‘People don’t believe that which they have faith in.’
??? - you lost me here. Why would I end up saying that people don’t believe that which they know? Why would I have to redefine belief?
You could do the same sort of thing with the more day to day predictions of prophets from the Church but you’d need to compare them against experts in whatever field the prediction was being made in since the real world provides more information than they’d have in the coin flip case
Take the Word of Wisdom for instance the experts in the health fields are still not able to agree as to whether coffee, tea, and alcohol are good or bad for you in the long run. The LDS Church however has consistently said they were. If the revelations from God are correct then one would expect that those that follow the revelations would be healthier than similar populations, which is indeed the case. Is this the type of thing that you mean?
Why would I end up saying that people don’t believe that which they know?
Alma 32:18
[I]f a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.
But if knowledge was just a belief with 100% confidence, then that you knew it would mean you had quite a few causes to believe it.
I suppose you could also end up saying that knowledge was uncaused belief but that seems even more problematic
Take the Word of Wisdom for instance the experts in the health fields are still not able to agree as to whether coffee, tea, and alcohol are good or bad for you in the long run.
I’m not surprised, risk profiles don’t tend to reduce to a substance being absolutely good or bad for you. It depends on your genetics and the interaction of various chemicals in the drink, not all of which have linear relationships with consumption.
So far as coffee goes, broadly speaking, the consensus among the experts—i.e. those publishing studies into the effects of coffee—seems to indicate that consumption beneath four cups a day has more health benefits than risks, unless you happen to have gastro intestinal problems or need iron supplements. Paper filters seem to reduce risks even further.
Tea seems to be okay as long as you don’t put milk with it or drink it while it’s incredibly hot. Or drink stupid amounts, of course.
Alcohol? Well one or two drinks seems to be linked to reduced mortality—at least in the UK. The French seem to do well with it, though it may just be because of their diets. Heavy consumption does seem to be very bad for you.
The LDS Church however has consistently said they were. If the revelations from God are correct then one would expect that those that follow the revelations would be healthier than similar populations, which is indeed the case. Is this the type of thing that you mean?
In principle, yeah. I don’t think the WoW is very strong evidence by itself because there are loads of other possible explanations for health variances, and depending on the rationale the range of likely guesses may not have been all that wide, and because, IIRC, it was originally hot drinks in general which was changed later on when it became untenable; but it’s the right sort of thing, yeah.
If LDS’s prophets consistently make better predictions than experts, then they’ve probably got access to some sort of privileged information to narrow their range of answers down. Either that or they’re just vastly more rational than the experts, but the odds of that are slim.
Alma 32:18 [I]f a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it. But if knowledge was just a belief with 100% confidence, then that you knew it would mean you had quite a few causes to believe it.
I always took it to mean that if one knows something one has no cause to doubt it.
Belief as defined at dictionary.com does work with saying that one does not believe something one knows, being if a statement has proof then one does not believe it (see # 2).
It seems to be using belief-in as opposed to belief-that. If not then you are right that my definition of knowledge doesn’t work.
it was originally hot drinks in general which was changed later on when it became untenable
It appears to have been clarified in July of 1833 when the revelation was given in February of 1833.
Put it this way, if you think that there is a 1% probability (e.g. you are convinced it is bogus) that I am right in stating that if taken seriously God will answer prayers as from the scriptures I provided and this is enough to get you to try out what they say then that was sufficient faith in that instance. Clearly at 1% probability you shouldn’t be doing anything else that comes with believing in the Book of Mormon or being LDS (at least that doesn’t already coincide with what you think of as being right).
If you follow through and get evidence to boost the Book of Mormon to say 70 or 80% level then that should likewise boost the level confidence of what the book says to do to high enough to test them out. Following what the book says and finding it to be right should then boost the level, eventually at least, to whatever you have preset as your critical value to say you know it to be true.
If however one waits until they have evidence to suggest something is true with ones preset critical value then one is not acting in faith. If one has evidence at that level and then doesn’t follow the commands of God then one is worse off then someone that thinks it is bogus but has had someone tell them it isn’t or someone that due to everything else thinks it has 51% chance to be right.
Does this make more sense to you?
That doesn’t seem consistent with part of the earlier verse you posted.
Under the account you’re offering faith and knowledge are just different degrees of belief – indeed under that account knowledge is the type of belief with the most cause behind it. Whereas under the account in the verse knowledge and belief seem to be completely different kinds of thing.
If you want to call different degrees of confidence faith and knowledge, I don’t really mind – the probabilities are what they are regardless of the labels you hang off them—but it doesn’t seem to be doing any work that gets you closer to the conclusion you’ve decided on. You haven’t illustrated any difference beyond the claim that at some point of arbitrarily selected confidence it’s going to become worse for us if we don’t follow the relevant commandments.
Which is fine as far as it goes I suppose – why doesn’t god provide whatever portion of the evidence doesn’t quite tip me over that vital point yet preserves enough meaning to actually be evidence?
It strikes me the answer is going to have to be along the lines of ‘The more sure you are the more liable you are.’ But then the degree of confidence is a measure of degrees of knowledge and you’ve lost that sharp divide that seems to be required for you to make meaning and faith coexist (i.e. being more sure of the religion’s groundings than of a fair coin flip). The objection that I couldn’t know because then I wouldn’t believe would become rather meaningless – all meaningful faith would be based primarily on some form of knowledge.
It is my understanding that He does.
yep.
Which it is. An experience once provided does give knowledge of the thing, however it is possible to doubt your experiences. Also, the experiences only provide knowledge of one thing and there will remain many things that are not known with the same surety, some of which may be difficult to understand, and these things must be taken on faith until they too become known.
I would think that it is a continuum such that someone totally unaware of anything about the subject is not liable for anything while those that have received knowledge of everything are liable for all of it.
Confidence in something not tested is faith. Anything not known with whatever level of confidence constitutes near enough to certainty to not matter for you is taken on faith. Knowledge is anything that is known with that level of confidence to constitute certainty. I am pretty sure that is a consistent translation of the terms into something understandable in this setting, I could be wrong.
If you’re right in respect to the prophesies of Thomas S. Monson, I don’t see how this could hold. They would be strong evidence.
In any case I think, we’ve got the chunks to start doing some building.
But.
Also known things are knowledge. You seem to be invoking, admittedly with some degree of displacement, the term in its own description.
To a degree – if you’re going to build knowledge into the meaningfulness of faith then faith would be something like believing with a greater certainty than the evidence justifies. Since all faith would be tested to some extent, even if very weakly, in order to contain meaning.
The problem with that approach is that it never seems necessary for me to believe beyond the evidence. If I put, say, one percent confidence on the idea of god based upon things I see then that’s not faith – and if I get more evidence from investigating based on that one percent and believe it to be slightly more likely – do some more investigation and get more… it never becomes faith; it’s testing / knowledge all the way up.
I know, probably should be changed to “anything that is held to be true with such a level of confidence so as to not make any difference from 100%”. That removes the term but doesn’t seem to change the meaning.
hmm. That would certainly be faith but it doesn’t fit exactly with how it is used in, say “Lectures on Faith”. The confidence is the faith, it really is that broad of a concept.
If faith is just another word for confidence then knowledge would just be a high degree of faith and that doesn’t fit in with how it’s used in the Book; where it’s held that if you know you don’t have faith/believe.
If you keep using knowledge to mean a very high degree of confidence and maintain that all meaningful faith is based on knowledge—and not just in the sense of exceeding the level of confidence that evidence justifies—then I’m not sure how it’s possible for meaningful faith to exist.
Since:
If it meets the level of confidence that the knowledge justifies, then it’s not faith. And if it exceeds the level of confidence that evidence justifies then it doesn’t fit how it’s used in “Lectures on Faith”. And I take it just as a given that faith is not to believe /less/ than the evidence justifies—especially with 1 John 4:1 commanding people to test their prophets.
what do you mean by meaningful faith?
Knowledge would be certainty. However, this site works with the assumption that certainty is impossible so I am trying to get everything to work under that assumption.
I am looking at my computer right now so I am certain it exists were I to look away I would be slightly less certain of its existence. That difference in certainty of the current existence of the computer seems to constitute faith as used in scripture and lectures on faith. However, I am still certain that the computer did exist while I was looking at it even if I am not looking at it currently, I know it existed then (I would say that my degree of certainty of it currently existing would still constitute knowledge, but as used it would seem to be in some sense faith).
According to this site I can not say that I know with certainty that I am male. I wonder what the confidence level is that I exist or that you exist. I have seen examples of saying that one can not be certain of the prime numbers or of 1+1=2. To me all these things are certainties, I know them even if in reproducing that knowledge to an outside observer I might err in doing so. This is what I mean by knowledge, if you can come up with a better way of explaining it in terms of this site where there is no certainty other then what I have explained then please do so.
You seem to be meaning two things by knowledge, depending on the context in which you use it. I would suggest that you might find it easier if you use the words ‘information’ or ‘evidence’ when talking about justifications for a level of confidence/faith. And only use ‘knowledge’ to signify whatever high degree of confidence you’ve decided to use as your cut-off point for hands-in-fire-get-burned, I’m-looking-at-the-computer-and-it’s-still-there levels of certainty.
It still seems to me that you’re going to end up with problems if you hold faith as being another word for confidence. Since even certainty (100% confidence) is still a degree of confidence – and also knowledge under such a definition. But scripture holds that knowledge isn’t faith – which is the same as saying if you hold that faith and confidence are synonymous – that knowledge isn’t a degree of confidence (even 100% confidence).
It seems to me to be a deeper problem than one of definitions.
You’re going to have problems if you say that faith just refers to the preceding 99.9 recurring % levels of confidence, too. You’ve said that it’s a general enough idea, in “Lectures on Faith”, to just be taken as a synonymous term with confidence. But even putting that problem aside, when you wanted to start talking about scripture again I suspect you’d end up saying either, ‘People don’t believe that which they know.’ Or, ‘People don’t believe that which they have faith in.’
But belief isn’t one of those fuzzy terms, like knowledge or faith. The meaning can’t be altered to fit a particular argument without doing significant damage to the network of references into which it fits. If I say I believe my computer is in front of me while I’m typing on it, (which going by your standards would also be knowledge,) then there’s no significant question what I mean. Just as it’s coherent for me to say that I believe my front door is locked, when strictly speaking I’ve heard one of the other occupants of the building come in and do not know if they locked the door. You might ask how strongly I believe it, but it’s coherent for me to answer that in degrees of doubt/confidence; even to the point of saying that I have no doubt.
If you start saying that belief means something else to patch the problem in the epistemology, then you’re going to have to explain how that new definition is coherent with all the other instances of its use. And that will alter more, even more well defined, meanings to do that which you’re going to have to redefine along with everything that hooks onto those instances… and so on until eventually you’ve defined everything in terms of whether it makes your theology right. It doesn’t seem to be a workable approach.
Better odds than the chance a similarly but non-testimony privileged observer has. Or to put it another way whether the faith adds any information. (With non-adding faith being meaningless.)
Take the coin-flip example:
If we were to say that somehow divine testimony could predict the outcome of a coin flip. (Not that I’m saying it can but if it could—or someone claimed it could.) You might get three groups – in separate rooms – and one group would commune with god and score down their predictions, and the other two groups would flip coins. And you’d see what the difference between the god group and one of the coin flipping groups was as compared to the difference between the two coin flipping groups. Do it a few hundred times to get the errors down to whatever you’d decided the noise level was and see whether the faith group was more reliable.
If at the end of all that you didn’t have a higher degree of confidence in the predictions of divinity than those of a coin flip, then – assuming that was all the evidence you had for god – you may as well use the coin flip to dictate your actions. The faith wouldn’t add any information, it wouldn’t hook onto the world you were experiencing.
You could do the same sort of thing with the more day to day predictions of prophets from the Church but you’d need to compare them against experts in whatever field the prediction was being made in since the real world provides more information than they’d have in the coin flip case. The advantage of the coin flip is that there are fewer confounding variables more than anything else.
I think you are right in this assessment.
??? - you lost me here. Why would I end up saying that people don’t believe that which they know? Why would I have to redefine belief?
Take the Word of Wisdom for instance the experts in the health fields are still not able to agree as to whether coffee, tea, and alcohol are good or bad for you in the long run. The LDS Church however has consistently said they were. If the revelations from God are correct then one would expect that those that follow the revelations would be healthier than similar populations, which is indeed the case. Is this the type of thing that you mean?
Alma 32:18 [I]f a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.
But if knowledge was just a belief with 100% confidence, then that you knew it would mean you had quite a few causes to believe it.
I suppose you could also end up saying that knowledge was uncaused belief but that seems even more problematic
I’m not surprised, risk profiles don’t tend to reduce to a substance being absolutely good or bad for you. It depends on your genetics and the interaction of various chemicals in the drink, not all of which have linear relationships with consumption.
So far as coffee goes, broadly speaking, the consensus among the experts—i.e. those publishing studies into the effects of coffee—seems to indicate that consumption beneath four cups a day has more health benefits than risks, unless you happen to have gastro intestinal problems or need iron supplements. Paper filters seem to reduce risks even further.
Tea seems to be okay as long as you don’t put milk with it or drink it while it’s incredibly hot. Or drink stupid amounts, of course.
Alcohol? Well one or two drinks seems to be linked to reduced mortality—at least in the UK. The French seem to do well with it, though it may just be because of their diets. Heavy consumption does seem to be very bad for you.
In principle, yeah. I don’t think the WoW is very strong evidence by itself because there are loads of other possible explanations for health variances, and depending on the rationale the range of likely guesses may not have been all that wide, and because, IIRC, it was originally hot drinks in general which was changed later on when it became untenable; but it’s the right sort of thing, yeah.
If LDS’s prophets consistently make better predictions than experts, then they’ve probably got access to some sort of privileged information to narrow their range of answers down. Either that or they’re just vastly more rational than the experts, but the odds of that are slim.
I always took it to mean that if one knows something one has no cause to doubt it.
Belief as defined at dictionary.com does work with saying that one does not believe something one knows, being if a statement has proof then one does not believe it (see # 2).
It seems to be using belief-in as opposed to belief-that. If not then you are right that my definition of knowledge doesn’t work.
It appears to have been clarified in July of 1833 when the revelation was given in February of 1833.