I was recently directed to a NY Times blog post by a coworker about moral facts. I found the post very interesting in subject and execution.
Moral fact is something philosophers debate and the idea is that some actions are morally right or wrong on a factual level. It's not really so simple though. As with most things in philosophy, you could spend a lifetime debating it (and many have) and be no closer to a resolution than when you started.
The writer of the article asked his son:
Moral fact is something philosophers debate and the idea is that some actions are morally right or wrong on a factual level. It's not really so simple though. As with most things in philosophy, you could spend a lifetime debating it (and many have) and be no closer to a resolution than when you started.
The writer of the article asked his son:
“I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”
What a tricky question to be asking a grade school student who has been told facts are verifiable and opinions are what someone believes or thinks.
What's funny is, I read this as a guess or assertion, not an opinion or fact. This is probably due to the fact that intonation doesn't translate into text. The statement can be proven true or false though, so his opinion on the matter is meaningless. If he had said he believed Abraham Lincoln was the first president, he'd just be wrong, opinion or guess. But if he said he thought Abraham Lincoln was the first president because he abolished slavery, paving the way for a US which was true to the Constitution (all men being created equal,) then I could not prove that's not what he thought. But Lincoln would still not be the first POTUS.
It brought me down this line of thinking that opinions on matters of fact have no value because there is a factual answer. What does it matter if you have an opinion on whether an oak tree has leaves or that mammals have hair? Eventually I asked myself, what value does one's opinion have on god? Not necessarily the God of the bible, or Allah, but just a deity if any exist. In truth saying there is or are no gods has no value. It is either true, or it is false. You cannot assert something exists and it be true if it does not and vice versa.
My first though was that belief or unbelief is a guess because it is about something asserted to be real or factual. Here's the problem though, I cannot prove something nonexistent isn't real.... can I?
Do you believe aliens have visited earth? I once saw something in the sky in my early teen that I still cannot explain to this day. It was a light that flew out of the clouds and then returned to them. IT FREAKED ME OUT! It was a ufo in that I couldn't identify the flying object, but the probability of it being an alien craft are pretty darn slim. Maybe it was a helicopter with a spotlight pointed right at me and that's why it moved so weird or some other much more terrestrial cause, but I still can't explain it and any effort towards that end is a guess, but I found this in a paper written by Steven Hales:
What's funny is, I read this as a guess or assertion, not an opinion or fact. This is probably due to the fact that intonation doesn't translate into text. The statement can be proven true or false though, so his opinion on the matter is meaningless. If he had said he believed Abraham Lincoln was the first president, he'd just be wrong, opinion or guess. But if he said he thought Abraham Lincoln was the first president because he abolished slavery, paving the way for a US which was true to the Constitution (all men being created equal,) then I could not prove that's not what he thought. But Lincoln would still not be the first POTUS.
It brought me down this line of thinking that opinions on matters of fact have no value because there is a factual answer. What does it matter if you have an opinion on whether an oak tree has leaves or that mammals have hair? Eventually I asked myself, what value does one's opinion have on god? Not necessarily the God of the bible, or Allah, but just a deity if any exist. In truth saying there is or are no gods has no value. It is either true, or it is false. You cannot assert something exists and it be true if it does not and vice versa.
My first though was that belief or unbelief is a guess because it is about something asserted to be real or factual. Here's the problem though, I cannot prove something nonexistent isn't real.... can I?
Do you believe aliens have visited earth? I once saw something in the sky in my early teen that I still cannot explain to this day. It was a light that flew out of the clouds and then returned to them. IT FREAKED ME OUT! It was a ufo in that I couldn't identify the flying object, but the probability of it being an alien craft are pretty darn slim. Maybe it was a helicopter with a spotlight pointed right at me and that's why it moved so weird or some other much more terrestrial cause, but I still can't explain it and any effort towards that end is a guess, but I found this in a paper written by Steven Hales:
You can’t prove a negative! You can’t prove
that there are no alien abductions! Meaning: your argument against aliens is inductive, therefore not incontrovertible, and since I want to believe in aliens, I’m going to dismiss the argument no matter how overwhelming the evidence against aliens, and no matter how vanishingly small the chance of extraterrestrial abduction.
that there are no alien abductions! Meaning: your argument against aliens is inductive, therefore not incontrovertible, and since I want to believe in aliens, I’m going to dismiss the argument no matter how overwhelming the evidence against aliens, and no matter how vanishingly small the chance of extraterrestrial abduction.
Honestly, I am quite certain that life exists elsewhere in our universe, galaxy and maybe even solar system, but I don't have proof... yet. It's my conjecture. I also think giving my ufo a terrestrial origin in favor of the more fantastic is speculative. It's a guess.
Now replace all the alien stuff with a deity.
I know myself. If I found evidence for a deity I would be happy to think there was something beyond this world to go to after I'm done here. I'm not dismissing evidence which supports that idea because I don't want to believe. I'm only relinquishing my faith because of the blinding lack of evidence to support it. I have said many times that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but maybe, sometimes that's all the evidence we have.
Now replace all the alien stuff with a deity.
I know myself. If I found evidence for a deity I would be happy to think there was something beyond this world to go to after I'm done here. I'm not dismissing evidence which supports that idea because I don't want to believe. I'm only relinquishing my faith because of the blinding lack of evidence to support it. I have said many times that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but maybe, sometimes that's all the evidence we have.
