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Comment by Fezzik | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it’s pedantic, but in my experience the best summation of a scientific approach to beleif is to say ‘I will withhold belief until sufficient evidence is provided to support the belief.’ Most noticeably, this stance does not exclude the currently unknown from being true or known at some point, it simply holds a person to the honest — and truly humble — mindset of never thinking things are true on insufficient evidence, no matter how badly the conclusion is desired.

You seem to be asserting that religious persons are willing to believe things on insufficient evidence, for example those “things beyond our understanding or currect capacity or ability to know,” and that is somehow a good thing?

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I think they're rather asserting that the scientific method is built upon materialist axioms, whereas religions are almost definitionally come with non-materialist axioms as foundational.

It may seem self-evident that purely materialist axioms are more useful as a basis for starting the discussion, but depending on the end goal, starting the discussion more easily may not be advantageous in reaching the end goal. It's possible that restricting ourselves to purely materialist axioms is a case of looking for our keys under the light post because it's dark in the alley where we dropped them.

This is just Positivism or Empiricism and there are huge problems with it as a method of epistemology. The link is discussing the First Cause argument and you, like others in this thread, are reducing metaphysical arguments to “others believe differently from me only because they want their belief to be true”.

As for the sufficient evidence, regardless of the personal perspective in the parent comment, you should know that a fundamental (Abrahamic) theological claim is that all humans have sufficient evidence of their creator’s existence. That’s mainly where the dispute is: the religious say what we all have universal access to /is/ sufficient; the non-religious claim what we have is insufficient.

If it were only that clear-cut. "What we all have universal access to" is (so far) ineffable, which makes it open to lots of individual interpretations. The result is a great deal of what H. L. Mencken called "a great deal of theological blather and turmoil" because there's no way of telling truth from falsehood.

Here’s the thing: the religious believe that everyone on Earth, in that they experience reality alone, have sufficient evidence that reality has a creator. That elements of reality may be indescribable or that individuals experience reality in a subjective way doesn’t affect that claim. Resigning truth and falsehood into a single category is a nonstarter. The conclusion here from HL Mencken’s quote is a fallacy called inflation of conflict.

That first sentence sounds too ontological to be useful. St Anselm made the same mistake - because he could imagine a perfect God, that perfection required God to exist. He (and countless other apologists) believed that the universe and its nature were subject to the requirements of their ideas of God, without accounting for the inevitable limitations and imperfections of those ideas.

The claim was “the world existing rather than not existing is proof of the existence of God”. Ideas about characteristics of God, limited and imperfect as they may be, were not cited.

Most Protestant christians believe that the christian bible is divinely inspired. Everything else they believe follows from this first unprovable belief. They may not accept an idea if they feel it conflicts with their personal interpretation of the christian bible, no matter how convincing the evidence. On the other hand, some protestants are not so attached to their beliefs, and can adapt them to mesh with reality when presented with convincing evidence.

Let's not confuse theologians with most theists. Most theists (and most atheists, for that matter) haven't delved deeply into the foundations of their belief systems.

"Everything else they believe follows from this first unprovable belief."

Not accepting an idea if they think it conflicts with their personal interpretation of the Christian Bible can be a crippling inflexibility, and it (IMO) betrays a kind of inverted hubris when it's not accompanied by a strong admonition to not be too cock-sure about one's personal interpretation, because that will evolve as a person changes through growth and experience.

Not being able to do this is the source of a lot of cognitive dissonance that happens when a religious authority (operating from a prophet motive, no doubt) makes a confident prediction that winds up not coming to pass. A really recent example is all of the evangelicals who predicted that Trump would be re-elected after he provably lost the 2020 Presidential election. Some of the "prophetic community" apologized online (which they then retracted under intense pressure); most of the rest of them took refuge in "Satan stole the election!" which helped facilitate the Jan 6 insurrection.

Can you determine an evidence is sufficient if you cannot understand it? You can accept what us happening but can you accept that as evidence of someone's explanation? Water boils at 100c , ok, but why? Because energy is being transfered in the form of heat? Or because the elemental force of fire is incompatible with water and the result is violence?

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