Moore's Paradox

Ah, but the point is that "believe" is the weasliest of words. I know a few, and would guess there are quite a lot more, intelligent people who readily states "I believe that there is a God" but who would be very hesitant if you asked them to use "Evidence indicates that".

I would say that what you call weasel words occupy a scale and that its not just as easy to use them all in any given context, at least not for reasonably intelligent people.

Weasel words, as you call them, are a necessary part of any rational discussion. The scientific equivalent would be, "evidence indicates" or "statistics show".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from a Bayesian perspective the only difference between first-hand knowledge and N-th hand knowledge (where N>1) are the numbers. There is nothing special about first-hand.

Suppose you see a dog in the street, and formulate this knowledge to yourself. What just happened? Photons from the sun (or other light sources) hit the dog, bounced, hit your eye, initiated a chemical reaction, etc. Your knowledge is neither special nor trivial, but is a chain of physical events.

Now, what happens when your friend tells you he sees a dog? He had to form the knowledge in his head. Then he vocalized it, sound waves moved through the air, hit your ear drum, initiated chemical reactions... supposing he is a truth-sayer, the impact on you, evidence-wise, is almost exactly the same. Simply, the chain of events leading to your own knowledge is longer, but that's the only difference. Once again, there is no magic here. Your friend is just another physical link in the chain.

(A corollary is that introspection in humans is broken. Often we honestly say we want X, but do Y. The various manifestations of this phenomenon have been talked about extensively on OB. It is conceivable that in the future scientists would be able to predict our behavior better than ourselves, by studying our brains directly. So we don't really have any special authority over ourselves.)

If there was an agent known to be a perfect pipe of evidence, we should treat its words as direct observations. People are not perfect pipes of evidence, so that complicates issues. However, some things are pretty clear even though I have no first-hand knowledge of them:

Los Angeles exists. (Note that I've never been to the Americas.) It is now night-time in Los Angeles. (About 2 AM, to be precise.) In 2006, the city of Los Angeles had a population of approximately 3.8 million.

And so on, until:

Modern evolutionary theory is generally true. There is no God.

And if I am wrong, it is simply because I failed my math, not because I lack in "authority". So there, I said it. Your turn :-)

The scientist who says "according to our model M, the higgs-boson should exist" has, as his actual beliefs, a wider distribution of hypotheses than model M. He thinks model M could be right, but he is not sure -- his actual beliefs are that there's a certain probability of {M and higgs-bosons}, and another probability of {not M}.

Is something analogous true for your belief in God? I mean, are you saying "There's this framework I believe in, and, if it's true, then God is true... but that framework may or may not be true?"

Does anyone have a good model of what people in fact do, when they talk about "choosing" a particular belief? At least two possibilities come to mind:

(1) Choosing to act and speak in accordance with a particular belief.

(2) Choosing to "lie" to other parts of one's mind -- to act and speak in accordance with a particular belief internally, so that one's emotional centers, etc., get at least some of their inputs "as though" one held that belief.

Is "choosing to trust someone" any more compatible with lack of self-deception than "choosing" a particular belief?

How about "choosing to have such-and-such a preference/value", or "choosing to regard such-and-such a part of myself as 'the real me, who I should align with'"?

Also, is there a line between self-deception and playing useful tricks on the less rational parts of oneself? An example of a useful trick that doesn't bother me is visualizing ice cream as full of worms, or otherwise disgusting, if I don't want to want to eat it. "Chosen beliefs" do bother me in a way the ice cream trick doesn't -- but my best guess is that the difference is just how intelligent/reason-able a portion of oneself one is lying to.

"I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously."

I cannot conceive of how it is possible to deliberately and consciously choose to believe in something.

I grew up in a religious family. I served as a missionary for my church. I married a woman of the same religion. For most of my first 28 years I believed not only that there was a God but that he had established the church of which I and my family were all members.

But once I started examining my beliefs more closely, I realized that I was engaging in the most dishonest sort of special pleading in their favor. And then it was no longer possible to continue believing.

Is it harder for you to say "Evidence indicates that God exists" than for you to say "I believe God exists"? Just curious, it's a bit of a pet theory of mine. If you don't want to expend energy just to provide another data point for me, no hard feelings.

If you would be really kind, you could try to indicate how comfortable you are with different qualifiers jimrandomh gave.

There seems to be some confusion here concerning authority. I have the authority to say "I like the color green." It would not make sense for me to say "I believe I like the color green" because I have first-hand knowledge concerning my own likes and dislikes and I'm sufficiently confident in my own mental capacities to determine whether or not I'm deceiving myself concerning so simple a matter as my favorite color.

I do not have the authority to say, "Jane likes the color green." I may know Jane quite well, and the probability of my statement being accurate may be quite high, but my saying it is so does not make it so.

You do not cause yourself to like the color green merely by saying that you do. You are describing yourself, but the act of description does not make the description correct. You could speak falsely, but doing so would not change your preferences as to color.

There are some sentence-types that correspond to your concept of "authority." If I accept your offer to create a contract by saying, "we have a contract," I have in fact made is so by speaking. Likewise, "I now pronounce you man and wife." See J.L. Austin's "How to Do Things With Words" for more examples of this. The philosophy of language term for talking like this is that you are making a "performative utterance," because by speaking you are in fact performing an act, rather than merely describing the world.

But our speech conventions do not require us to speak performatively in order to make flat assertions. If it is raining outside, I can say, "it is raining," even though my saying so doesn't make it so. I think the mistake you are making is in assuming that we cannot assert that something is true unless we are 100% confident in our assertion.

I presume that you use the Higgs boson example because the boson hasn't been experimentally observed? In other words, the Higgs boson is an example where the evidence for existence is from reasoning to the most likely hypothesis, i.e. abduction.

If your belief in God is similar, that means you adopt the hypothesis that God exists because it better explains the available data.The physicist, of course, has access to much stronger evidence than abduction, for instance the LHC experiments, and will give much more weight to such evidence. That's an example of induction, which is key to hypothesis confirmation. Once the LHC results are in, the physicist fully expects to be saying either "the Higgs boson exists" or "the Higgs boson doesn't exist, or if it does it isn't the same thing we thought it was". However, he may well expect with 95% probability to be saying the former and not the latter.

I propose that you hesitate to say X when you have no inductive evidence that X. I also venture that in the case of the proposition "God exists", your belief is qualitatively different from that of pre-modern Christians, in that you are less likely to accept 'tests' of God's existence as valid. The medieval church, for instance, thought heliocentrism was heretical, in that it explicitly contradicted Christianity. This amounts to saying that a proof that the Earth orbits the Sun would be a disproof of Christianity, whereas I don't believe that you would see any particular material fact as evidence against God's existence.

Good point. So do the native speakers of such languages not make this mistake?

Danish is a nice example of that actually (even though I don't use my native tongue as much as would be beneficial), to say "I believe/endorse X" you usually use the religious belief/person credibility wording "tror på X" while if you are going to be nitty gritty and discuss subjective credence a good formulation is the sense related to being convinced, "overbevist om X," which transliterates roughly to "overmuch burdened by evidence of X"