Are you so confident in your perfect, unerring rationality that you’ll consider that particular proposition completely settled and beyond questioning? I’m about as certain that there is no God as one can get, but that certainty is still less than 100%, as it is for virtually all things I believe or know. Part of maintaining a rational outlook toward life, I’d think, would be keeping an attitude of lingering doubt about even your most cherished and long-held beliefs.
Yes, that will always be technically true—no belief can be assigned a probability of 100%. Nevertheless, my utility calculations recognize that the expected benefit of questioning my stance on that issue is so small (because of its infinitesimal probability) that almost anything else has a higher expected value.
Why then should I question that, when there is so much else to ask?
Are you so confident in your perfect, unerring rationality that you’ll consider that particular proposition completely settled and beyond questioning? I’m about as certain that there is no God as one can get, but that certainty is still less than 100%, as it is for virtually all things I believe or know. Part of maintaining a rational outlook toward life, I’d think, would be keeping an attitude of lingering doubt about even your most cherished and long-held beliefs.
Yes, that will always be technically true—no belief can be assigned a probability of 100%. Nevertheless, my utility calculations recognize that the expected benefit of questioning my stance on that issue is so small (because of its infinitesimal probability) that almost anything else has a higher expected value.
Why then should I question that, when there is so much else to ask?
Where are you getting the idea that Annoyance said this?