Hacker News Reader

If "worship" means anything it means an unconditional, faith based obeisance.

If you define "worship" as merely seeing something as larger or more important than yourself, then yes, everyone "worships something". But this "observation" is not profound but rather a verbal card-trick leaving you with nothing useful. What interesting is the difference between worshiping a God, formulating a rational, ethical system, attempt approach reality scientifically, cultivating the "be here now" attitude and what-all, rather than the comforting new age claim that "all beliefs are really the same".

"If "worship" means anything it means..."

Whoa, there, stop right there. Meaning flows into definitions, not the other way around. Worship can mean many, many things, and when specified by the author (as it seems to be reasonably, if implicitly, done here) unless they're trying to do something really stupid like redefine worship to mean "purple", you pretty much have to take the definition as given.

Declaring "No, the word worship really means X" does nothing to counter the original text, nor does it further your understanding or anybody else's. As evidenced by the fact that your second paragraph strongly suggests you were too caught up in enforcing a wrong meaning to even see the point, as "all beliefs are really the same" is very contrary to what you are replying to, which is a discussion on the very different results that different beliefs can have! And I would note, at no point in the quotation as given did the question of "truth" come up, it was simply talking about beliefs and their results. (Right or wrong. I'm not defending it per se except inasmuch as I'm suggesting you completely missed it. The full context may contain the idea of truth of the belief, I don't know.)

Similarly, to use another example I've seen more times than I can count, logically defeating religion requires substantially more than to simply declare that "by definition, faith is belief in something that doesn't exist" and QED your way to victory in the next sentence. Not everybody uses the term in that way, and all you can do with wordplay like that is preach to the choir, you'll convince nobody who didn't already agree with you with that sort of thing.

That is a weak defense of an equivocation fallacy. Claiming he didn't play along "hard enough" doesn't undermine -his- point that the original statement is an equivocation fallacy.

While there is no platonic definition of the word, any two people communicating have some definition, and each has some sense of what the other's definition is. Intentionally violating that is acceptable in certain cases when you are careful to ensure you don't poison the conversation. No such care was given here.

It's a shifted definition of the word "worship" which then shifts the definition of the word "atheist" which then shifts the definition of the word "belief" in your post, and which then shifts the definitions of the word "faith". We've created an entire parallel vocabulary which will do -nothing- helpful to the conversation.

And two posts away you have this: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2365864

A guy talking about how atheists have faith. Except it's not atheists, it's "atheists". And they don't have faith. They have "faith". The equivocation fallacy is complete.

This is what happens when you let someone poison a conversation with an equivocation.

"We've created an entire parallel vocabulary which will do -nothing- helpful to the conversation."

You haven't created one. It already exists. I'm not proscribing, I'm describing. This is well within normal definitions of worship, which is a fairly fuzzy word as it is. Go ask ten people on the street to define it and see what you get. You'll get at least one that fits this close enough. "Spending ones mind and body on that which you prioritize the highest" is not that far out a definition, which is at least close to the sense used in that quote; when one talks about "worshiping money" we do not generally mean that a Benjamin has been placed on a literal pedestal and one is literally bowing in front of it and expecting favors from Mammon, yet the phrase is clearly in common use and has some sort of meaning.

The quote does not equivocate and you've misdiagnosed the fallacy. Equivocation is when you change your definition halfway through. There's no change in that quote. It starts with a certain (though as I said implicit) definition and it carries it through. If you think it changed, again, I'd really suggest reading it more carefully and considering the possibility that it is in fact not out to trap you in linguistic wordplay but actually has something to say that is in fact not even particularly religious (or perhaps more accurately supernatural) in nature. It's an observation about human nature that can still be true in a purely mechanistic universe. I'm not even sure what better terminology there might be.

The conversation isn't being poisoned with equivocation, the conversation is poisoned by people being simply unclear by their word usage, and refusing to grant the author any benefit of the doubt because they have their own baggage surrounding certain words. (That's two distinct things.)

English sucks. If you agree that there are no platonic definitions of words, then you need to be willing to follow through with the implications of that and bend a little to follow people in good faith. You're getting caught up in particular definitions and also appear to consequently not actually understand what the quote was saying. Right or wrong (because I'm not sure I 100% agree with it as is), how can you fairly judge it if you choose to not understand it?

It is a Rene Girard line of thinking - worship is closely related to envy. If you think about envy - it is not really unconditional but it can be seen as such.

I can't stand this platitude that there are no atheists in foxholes. I have been inches from death and never questioned my atheist beliefs.

The foxholes platitude, as I understand it, posits that when faced with death, everyone turns to spirituality. I don't think that's what the parent's quote was really about. It seems to me the quote is saying that you can stop worshipping the spiritual world, but you can't avoid worshipping something... money, prestige, science, comfort, fun, etc.

While I disagree with the "worshipping anything other than god will eat you alive" sentiment... in general I agree with the concept.

The idea that you could rid yourself of unexamined, culturally imprinted beliefs is a charged mixture of hubris and absurdity.

Atheists shed some small set of (generally preposterous) beliefs, and then imagine they are free of faith. It's like rich white kids eschewing BMW's and designer clothes and thinking they've escaped privilege.

Atheists ... imagine they are free of faith.

Don't assume.

you can't avoid worshipping something

Don't assume.

Anyone who comes to a conclusion about something inevitably in the end has faith. The fact that I sit in a chair right now, I know obviously that the chair can support me. But at the end of the day, I don't know for sure, so that knowledge is also rooted in faith that it will continue to support me and won't spontaneously break. And I've had chairs spontaneously break on me before too, so there's physical evidence in my history that my conclusion isn't a sure thing.

The only people who don't have faith are skeptics, and I'm talking about skeptics who are skeptical about everything here. Like they aren't even sure of their own existence.

Faith is a logical requirement of any personal conclusion whether you like it or not.

http://xkcd.com/242/

Even if you experiment to beyond reasonable doubt, you still risk that you could be wrong. Any true scientist trusts in the scientific method, but the scientific method itself leaves things open to new questions, new evidence, and new experiments. That's what makes the scientific method wonderful. But that's also why any conclusion by the scientific method also in the end has a final requirement of faith for any immediate conclusions.

You've moved the goalposts considerably with your definition of faith being merely a reasonable acceptance of a proposition based on evidence. This is far from the prescribed as well as the descriptive definition of faith.

I doubt it? Take the following statement, "I have faith in your ability to get the job done." Do not such statements arise from reasonable acceptance of a proposition based on evidence?

You're playing a semantic game with the word faith here that makes it indistinguishable from the word "believe" in every single one of its definitions. A typical next step from there is to equate an atheist's acceptance of a scientifically supported theory to a religious person's belief in a supernatural claim. Thus all belief is faith and all faith is belief and everyone is equally justified in it.

I think you're worried about me lumping blind faith and assured faith together as one thing. I don't think that's what I'm trying to do here. Also, I think it's erroneous to dismiss all religious faith as blind faith, and that most people haven't thought through the logic of that. But that's a lengthy debate that shouldn't be done here. This comment alone would probably be enough to get me downvoted plenty. :)

Nobody is playing semantic games here, nor have the goalposts moved, because faith is the application and confidence in a given belief.

From a Christian perspective, the Bible defines "faith" as confidence in that which we hope for and that which is unseen. (Hebrews 11:1)

That's pretty simple, and secondly, that pretty much lines up with every "dictionary" definition of faith -- i.e. a confidence (or an assured belief) in that which cannot be presently assured. Everything in this world has differing degrees to which we must use faith.

When I drive my car, I don't need much reassurance of faith (i.e. confidence in a belief) that when I turn the wheel left, the car is going to make the turn. (My belief being in the car's ability to make the turn). However, if you were rationally honest, you would agree that just because the car turned left 1000 times prior, that does not truly give you a reason to be 100% rationally confident that it will continue to do so.

Why? Because the environment and every single factor has changed. The road is different, the car is older, the wheel bearings may be a little less greased, the tires have worn, the gravel lays differently, the weather is different, thousands of tiny different universal factors have changed, which really forms an entirely unique model for the 1001st left turn you are about to make. Not to mention, you aren't God, so you have no possible way of knowing all those factors. The perfect mathematical model exists for determining whether that car will make the turn, but you will never know it, so you can only generalize based on prior experience. So you go on, ignoring that tiny little chance (using faith -- a confidence in a given outcome) that the car will not perform as expected.

Faith is the confidence in an expected (hoped for) outcome, don't make it out to be more than it is. Some things in this world require larger doses of faith, like whether or not God exists. Empiricism helps to make faith easier.

So you have defined faith as the thing that fills the gap between the amount of confidence we can reasonably have in a proposition based on evidence/knowledge and the amount of confidence we would like to have. Let me be the first to rush to the common ground here, as I believe this to be a useful definition.

Some things in this world require larger doses of faith, like whether or not God exists.

Exactly. To put an even finer point on it, it would also take a great amount of faith to confidently assert that there are dragons in your basement.

Ok, so you've facetiously applied our correct definition of faith to include dragons in basements. However, under further analysis, we also realize it takes an equally great amount of faith to claim that science can rationally answer questions that cannot be empirically validated. Existential questions like:

- Where did we come from?

- How did we get here?

- What happened X billion years ago?

- etc, etc.

We can establish mathematical and physical models in the present, but knowing present models does not rationally give us any clue as to whether those models were the same in the past, especially as we go farther back in time. Even knowing present rates of change do not establish whether that delta was the same throughout history. Extrapolating present models into the past functions on several underlying assumptions (oh hey, faith!), and ultimately we realize we truly have no way of empirically validating the past.

So yes, I think it's good we've come to common ground on a definition of "faith". Now apply it to your own models of thinking, and you can see why on existential issues we stand on common ground of faith. I'm all for science, but it's good to recognize the limits of empiricism.

I don't know if you're trying to denounce the scientific theory of evolution or if the question you're really trying to get at is, "What is the universally applicable cosmic meaning of our existence?" If it's the latter. then I'd suggest to you that the problem lies in the question.

As far as your past versus present comments go, I cannot tell whether your indulging in philosophical navel gazing about the Problem of Induction, or if you actually have a particular scientific theory in mind that you think doesn't stand up to the evidence. In the former case, you can quickly reason that accepting any scientific principle takes as much faith as picking your nose, which renders the conversation meaningless and contradicts your given definition of faith to begin with. After all, you don't know that the universe wasn't created 15 seconds ago with all of our memories intact. If it's the latter case, and you really believe that there are some important underlying assumptions in a specific area of science that scientists have not stated up front, then I think the best thing to do would be to contribute your insights to the scientific community by writing a paper on it. If you can demonstrate previously unknown shortcomings in a widely accepted scientific theory, then you will be listened to and heralded. If you cannot, then your vague accusations that scientists overstate their assumptions and thereby use "faith" to back up their research are baseless.

Eh, I think I may have somewhat got off track about the original "Atheists ... imagine they are free of faith." statement.

Regardless, I think we both came to agreement that faith is a necessity.

After all, you don't know that the universe wasn't created 15 seconds ago with all of our memories intact.

You're being absurd. What I was trying to get at is that empiricism has its limits (and that everyone uses those "large doses" of faith). The only valid past that can be legitimately (i.e. rationally) studied is the past which has been subjected to empirical observation.

We cannot rationally establish beliefs about a past which we have not (nor any human) ever empirically observed. The scientific method relies on empiricism to validate its claims. Therefore science which attempts to describe a past that nobody has ever experienced is functioning on faith (origins, existential answers, etc). Pretty simple and really all I was getting at for a typical atheist's worldview.

It's not a "semantic game" to present the correct definition of a word when someone else has misused it.

It is, however, a fallacy to poison the well by suggesting that the person who has presented the correct definition is about to engage in the "typical next step" of making an erroneous claim that the person hasn't actually made.

Pick your favorite ancient European or Middle Eastern religious or philosophical writing and look at the actual usage of the word "faith" (or the word translated as "faith"). You'll find that its definition is something along the lines of "reasonable acceptance of a proposition based on evidence" with the followup of "acting upon that proposition in the face of emotional uncertainty". Or, more simply, classical faith is the triumph of reason and experience over emotion and fickleness.

It's only been about the last 140 years (with the rise of Christian Fundamentalism and the associated mysticism and anti-intellectualism) that "faith" has been used to refer to belief without reason or evidence. The parent poster is moving the goalposts, but he's moving them back toward where they actually belong.

It doesn't matter where you think the goalposts should be. Moving them in order to make a counterpoint is a fallacy.

It's not a fallacy to move the goalposts back to where they belong after someone else has misplaced them. It is only a fallacy when the same person places them in one place and then another.

Maybe we're not seeing eye to eye on what was being said. erikpukinskis defined faith as "unexamined, culturally imprinted beliefs". Okay, fine. Then he states that atheists imagine they are free of those. crasshopper's comment basically means (correct me if I'm wrong), "don't assume that atheists imagine they are free of unexamined, culturally imprinted beliefs." I agree. At most, atheists claim freedom from a more severe subset of those kinds of beliefs specifically regarding religion. PakG1 then stretches the definition of faith to include even those beliefs which are examined and based on knowledge and past evidence. Let me know where you think the first misplacement was.

The first misplacement was long before this comment thread. But erik was the first to explicitly state it and use it in an argument (arguing for a position I would not agree with.)

That said, PakG1 is not stretching the definition of faith, he's correcting it. It is appropriate to classify erik's position as incorrect and his definition as lacking, but not to classify Pak's correction as a fallacy.

Not much longer than 140 years ago, /nice/ had pretty much the opposite meaning it does now.

You can't just pick a word's meaning from hundreds of years ago (worse, a foreign-languag equivalent) and drop it into modern conversation without stating that that's what you're doing.

Let me state it more strongly: the definition of faith I gave is not only the historical standard from prior to 140 years ago, it's also the modern standard among religious scholars and in most religious traditions. It's only in the last 140 years, within one particular anti-intellectual religious tradition (and among critics whose primary experience is with that tradition), that "faith" means the other thing. Their usage is decidedly in the minority. As such, I think it's perfectly fair for people to use the more correct definition, and it's unreasonable for those who are ignorant of that definition to cry foul when presented with it.

Ever hear of the philosopher Charles Pearse? Or the school of American Pragmatism? You're touching on some of what he was into. "Links in the chain of credibility".

I like that XKCD gets cited in rhetoric here. =)

While an interesting personal anecdote, your comment has nothing to do with what DFW is talking about. He touches on multiple platitudes throughout his speech (and names them as such): this is not one of them.

It relates in the following way. DFW presumes to know the internals of other people's minds, and to instruct them on how to be better. Same with the no-atheists-in-foxholes conjecture.

Is this serious? After reading my comment did you even bother re-reading the speech? By your analogy, every philosophical, psychological, sociological, et al text relates to the platitude your originally mentioned. The actual meaning of your original comment still has absolutely nothing to do with DFW's speech. This whole thread is like watching a student defend a paper about a book he never read and doesn't understand, but whose opinion is bolstered by yet more students with even less comprehension of the text than him.

No need to get upset, mon. I'm sure they just feel similarly.

I dislike this: Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

To me that says people cannot choose what to do with their own minds. Like the atheists-in-foxholes saying, it denies a freedom that I cherish and denigrates a goal that I aspire to.

This is all very much a sidelight. We're just messing around on the internet, right? No hard feelings.

Your harsh words have been bothering me so I'm writing again.

* I did re-read the speech.

* Not every text relates to the foxholes platitude.

* Even if you don't think there's a connection between what I said and what DFW said, so what? We are on a tangent off a tangent off a tangent in the middle of the internet.

* I feel like you maybe are frustrated at somebody or something else and taking it out on me via the internet. Not nice.

Maybe not a foxhole but a child of ours who was very sick. Since then I just don't partake when there is an argument about the existence of something bigger than ourselves. Each to his own.

What an interesting thing to take away from the quote, maybe I assume too much because I've read the whole speech but certainly I did not think he meant to say what you are implying.

What I took from it personally is that people tend to find meaning in life from something - a deity, a job, money, fame, looks, their own business - and that it doesn't really which of those you choose you're essentially taking a leap of faith that it will deliver happiness.

David,

I find DFW's perspective interesting but overly didactic.

The above was not meant as a takeaway or summary of what he wrote.

I always took it to mean that atheists were too smart to wind up in a foxhole in the first place.

I regret so very much that David Foster Wallace is no longer with us. I'd love to see an E Unibus Pluram for the internet.

Btw, the best way to experience this is the original audio recording of DFW's speech: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAudiob...

So a "set of ethical principles" are "spiritual-type" even if constructed in pure reductionism.

Such a stupid nonsense ...

Could you elaborate?

The word 'worship' has a widely accepted meaning (as defined in dictionaries, etc.). This quote tries to change the meaning of the word, while having no useful information/ideas.

The comments here to this overall incredible speech are very surprising. I can't argue that it doesn't have any useful information/ideas, that is a subjective value judgement (as crazy as it seems to me); however, in what way is he trying to change the meaning of the word? One of the examples given in merriam-webster is:

extravagent respect or admiration for or devotion to an object of esteem <worship of the dollar>

I don't know what's more disappointing, the fact that your original comment, which added absolutely nothing of value, was voted up or that this explanation has even more votes.

All it takes is a simple Google search to show that the author of the quote uses worship quite routinely in one of the word's many "widely accepted" meanings:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/worship

The only contentious thing he has done is draw parallels to atheism, the definition of which is not so sensitive to context. The merits of doing so I think would have been a good talking point, but instead all you contributed was "a stupid nonsense."