Circularity of belief systems

[vhawk01]

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There are alternatives though - it seems to me that this is the source of disagreement between most theists and most atheists. I think atheists who say christians are silly for believing in god because it says so in the bible on the grounds that that is circular are hurting their own cause. The theist can say "your beliefs are circular too" and that's that. I think a better strategy for the atheist is to say "My axiom is more self-evidently true than yours, so we should adopt mine". I think this is a better argument (not that it will make much difference in the theist v atheist debate) when presented to a skeptic.

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'Circular' doesn't quite capture it, although it can be framed that way.
It's more a matter of premises. What is the minimum amount of premises a person can work from?
1) there is a 'me'.
2) there is an external reality.
3) there is cause and effect.
4) I have free will.

Those probably capture the bulk of what most would require as a minimum to work from. I doubt any of those can be proven but it doesn't matter that much if they are true or not because it seems to work out even accepting them on an 'as if' basis.

It's bad enough we have to have that many premises and the disagreement between theists and atheists is over the addition of extra premises for no reason ( reason is essentially built in #3). In various ways atheists are saying "you just can't pull premises out of your azz just because it makes you feel good and claim they are 'true'" or that leaves us with #2 being meaningless and reality is what we want it to be.

Personally, I'm not tied to any of the 4 and make no thrVth claims about them, and I know people that discard a couple of them. I don't take them as self-evident just functionally minimal assumptions. I kept with short descriptions so don't be too literal with them.

luckyme

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Exactly. Those are the bare minimum that are required in order to function or interact with the world in any way. I don't LIKE them, and I am more than willing to consider alternatives to some, but those are my basic axioms. And they are entirely sufficient. That isn't to say you can't add in whatever extra axioms you want, but if you are going to add in things which are unprovable, why add in any more than necessary? I wish there were 0, but I see no way to eliminate more than 1 or 2 of these. If we add 1 more, why not add a thousand more?

[vhawk01]

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This interpretation works too. My point is that atheists often try to make an argument that theists assume things and atheists dont (and it's often labelled circular). The circularity isnt the issue it's the obviousness of the axiom (or, in your terminology, the superfluous axioms a theist tacks on to the minimum required).

In passing, it seems you have also assumed that minimal sets of axioms is a good thing, that doesnt follow from any of the 4 you listed (although I dont dispute that it is a good thing).

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Minimal is preferable only because the alternative is infinite. If 6 are good, and 7 is just fine, why not a million? It is simply practically preferable to have as few as we can get by with.

[Taraz]

I think this is a great thread.

Bunny, you make a good point that it is not self-evident that the minimum amount of axioms is a good thing. I just can't see any argument why more axioms is a good thing. Of course, I guess I'm assuming reason is a good thing . . .

[John21]

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I think atheists often try and claim they have no assumptions and that this is what distinguishes the two positions. I think it is more helpful to ask "Which axiom is better?"

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Well I certainly get caught up in this all the time, just in my own mind, let alone talking with others. Doesn't it seem like if we ask, "is there a God?" or "is there a Flying Spaghetti Monster?" we're presupposing the possible existence of either and essentially begging the question?

I haven't found a way to avoid this problem, but what I do, is ask myself why I'm even asking the question in the first place. Is it hearsay, as in the case with the God question, or direct sensory perception like, "did an apple fall from the tree?" If it's a hearsay question I figure I need to come up with enough positive evidence to go beyond merely the possibility of something existing - because that possibility was created by asking the question in the first place. With the sensory question I can use either positive or negative evidence to reach a conclusion.

So I'd say the axiom based on sensory perception is the "better" overall choice, and the ensuing statement even though circular, if it was based on sensory perception would also be "better".

[NotReady]

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So I'd say the axiom based on sensory perception is the "better" overall choice, and the ensuing statement even though circular, if it was based on sensory perception would also be "better".


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You appear to be arguing for an empirical epistemology. In order to do so you have to assume your senses are reliable. This assumption lands you in circularity. Not to mention the problem of "knowledge" that isn't sense based, such as math, logic and anything dealing with norms (ethics, for instance).

As to "better", that opens a whole new can of worms.

[arahant]

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This interpretation works too. My point is that atheists often try to make an argument that theists assume things and atheists dont (and it's often labelled circular). The circularity isnt the issue it's the obviousness of the axiom (or, in your terminology, the superfluous axioms a theist tacks on to the minimum required).

In passing, it seems you have also assumed that minimal sets of axioms is a good thing, that doesnt follow from any of the 4 you listed (although I dont dispute that it is a good thing).

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The real problem here is that theists ABSOLUTELY accept this axiom in every other area of their lives. Every one. No theist will seriously argue that the best way to come up with a belief about the force of gravity is to ignore the experimental evidence. Theists only ignore this axiom when it comes to god. They reject circular reasoning for other gods, too. If I create a book that says I am god, and try and argue that the existence of the book is proof enough, you would just laugh.

The question is, what is special about the bible that makes it ok to add in an additional axiom of 'the bible is true'.

[madnak]

There's a difference between acknowledging your axioms and being circular.

A Christian who say he believes that the Bible is the word of God (as an axiom) is much different from a Christian who believe in the Bible because God says so, and believes in God because the Bible says so.

Proposition B can rest on a fundamental proposition A. But proposition B can't rest on proposition A if proposition A is itself contingent on proposition B!

[madnak]

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Minimal is preferable only because the alternative is infinite. If 6 are good, and 7 is just fine, why not a million? It is simply practically preferable to have as few as we can get by with.

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Yes, it's simple and efficient, which can arguably be established given only the "basic four." But all things being equal, it's also more accurate.

Assume there are n axioms, and all else is equal (including the probability that a given axiom is true - let's call it 80%). Now, a belief system based on n=3 has a 51.2% chance of being true, but a belief system based on n=10 has a ~10.73% chance of being true.

Of course, it gets more complex than that. Typically we'll have a strong core of basic beliefs, dependent on a minimal number of axioms, or arguably even multiple independent "cores" based on axiom "clusters," and then we'll use inductive leaps or new premises to add "wings" or modules to the core axiomatic structures and eventually have a dynamic system that includes thousands of axioms in some form. It's hardly ever black and white. And since we're just big wet brain-bags anyhow, who knows how reliable the structure is and whether we can verify that reliability in any consistent way?

[Skidoo]

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You'll note that since we work from a minimal list of premises there is no need or way to claim trVth ( how could one?) or no place for belief ( in an absolute sense). Any further premises added could ever be 'believed' since the base premises can only on an 'as if' assignment as it is.

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You don't know if your list of premises is minimal, because you have no way of counting them all.

[madnak]

Warning: This is long and obscure.

I'd like to expand. Saying that we're biological machines is the result of a number of inductive chains that appear likely to be valid according to most educated people (but then, even that likelihood and the existence of "educated people" depend heavily on axioms). It's impossible to consider the validity of my reasoning process without accepting the axioms that allow me to consider validity in the first place - and those axioms depend on my reasoning process. At heart, there could always be an "error in the system" that is throwing everything off. That's part of what it is to be human. We're balanced very delicately on top of nothing at all.

But if I indulge myself and accept that there are other people communicating with me, and that I accurately experience their communications as English words on a Two Plus Two Forum (whether the English language or the 2p2 forum actually exist isn't necessarily relevant), if I indulge myself in that and assume some level of communication, then it becomes acceptable to conclude that I share certain assumptions with other posters.

I may not be able to determine exactly which axioms I share with these other entities. To some degree it's almost arbitrary in a universal sense, but based on my own framework I can have certain expectations. I can expect, first and foremost, that these other entities experience a world similar to mine, so similar that our worlds appear to be continuous. In fact, we're both aware of certain features of our respective worlds, all of which are consistent, and it might almost be inferred that we live in the same world.

Certainly I can expect, based on experience as well as various other rational supports, that if I were to go to a place I identify as Washington, DC I might discover a series of impressions that I can interpret based on my conception of physical reality, and that series of impressions might include certain individual impressions that would represent, within that conception, a human being. I might further extend my classification within my personal empirical framework and observe that the situational and behavioral attributes of this "human being" qualify it as a male medical student who claims to be the entity "vhawk" from this site. Assuming a meeting was planned, and vhawk and I had both created communicative structures sufficient to instill in me an expectation that we would be "meeting" in the "real, physical world" (don't ask, that stuff relies on way too many inherent assumptions), and if this appearance-of-a-medical-student is consistent with the information I have from the vhawk entity, then I might make the bold inductive assertion that the appearance of the medical student is actually a representation of the very vhawk entity represented alternatively on the forums!

All that is clearly based on many assumptions and even more propositions derived from those assumptions. Thankfully, vhawk agrees with the whole damn thing so all we need to do on meeting is say "hi."

I can expect to share 99% of my assumptions with the others on this forum, to such a degree that I don't need to walk through the maze, I can represent my forum experience as "other people from different places have created usernames to talk over the Internet, and we're doing that in a science, math, and philosophy forum." The level of kinship is so great I might even be able to compress it down to the terse "We argue on a message board."

Many other propositions also go without saying, like "Boston's on the East Coast of the USA," or "the Wii is a recently-released console" or "most people aren't mass murderers" or "gasoline is flammable." It goes on and on. And while we're here, to avoid rhetoric like the stuff in the earlier paragraphs, we try to work within shared contexts of understanding, complete with shared assumptions.

If two people have different basic axioms, and that is the source of their disagreement, then there is no way for either of them to accomplish anything in a logical debate. Thus both parties must enter the discussion under the umbrella of shared axioms. Some degree of "axiom probing" may be necessarily as a preliminary exercise, but a debate is essentially a question of "do the axioms a, b, and c imply the conclusion d?" And this is where we have a problem.

There are a few claims made by the theists here.

One is that they have a fundamental axiomatic belief in God, and they therefore can't discuss the subject of their own personal beliefs in logical terms. They can still "play" by assuming for the sake of argument or asking what the implications might be given a certain basic assumption, but they don't claim to be able to justify their belief in any way according to axiomatic principles accepted by the atheists. That seems to be your position, bunny.

Then some theists claim that atheism is not a valid conclusion based on the axioms of the atheists themselves. In this case they try to establish, using the axioms that the atheists accept, that atheism isn't justified. And there are those who claim that based on their own more basic axioms, the existence and validity and authority of the Christian God can be inferred. The authentic debaters represent these groups or variations on these themes - none of these groups are mutually exclusive, by the way, specific partisanism may or may not be involved here. I can argue that, given Atheist Bill's assumptions, atheism is unjustified. I can argue that, given Theist Jim's assumptions, Christianity is justified. But I'm considered an atheist because, according to my own assumptions, I think atheism is justified and Christianity is not. So personal belief gets involved in strange ways. But there's a lot of room for discussion with these types of approaches.

Finally there are those theists who claim that the atheists must accept the theist axioms, and attempt to use logic to support the idea that their axioms should be accepted. Simultaneously, they emphasize the fact tha these axioms are fundamental.

It's these theists who (in my opinion) make up the majority, and who are very circular. You can't "justify" a basic axiom, certainly not through another axiom (such as the validity of logic). And even when such theists try to suggest that their pet God axiom is secondary to (but necessarily implied by) the axiom of cause and effect or basic logic, they tend to get themselves into highly circular systems (in which logic is conveniently dissociated from their justifications, despite being the ostensible basis for them). This kind of thing can be justifiably called circular, and it's all hogwash that wastes the time and energy of those who'd like to have meaningful discussions rather than bang their heads against brick walls.