Oh this one is really good.

Ah ok

You can think I'm wrong, but thinking I'm a buffoon is pretty silly. I deal with these abstract philosophical ideas at a decent enough level of proficiency.

Edit: Unless you mean the other guy is a buffoon lol.

> Again, not believing it's real doesn't have to be so destructive! It's a simple belief. So what if it's not real. Why does that change anything at all?

You act according to belief. It is a necessary component of logical chains of action. You have to have certain facts you're committed to that explain why you do what you do. Again: you eat a banana believing that it will satiate your hunger. You don't eat drywall, in part, because you don't believe it's going to satiate your hunger (at least as much drywall as you can stomach eating). That is what beliefs are for.

> Lots of people believe in simulation theory, or that it's just a dream, or a samsaran illusion without starving to death!

No, they really don't. They talk as if they believe in simulation theory, or that it's a dream, but they don't truly and authentically commit to it. They can't. To truly and authentically commit to the idea that the world is not real would require you, for consistency, to remove any meaning from the idea that things need to be real to motivate action. You would need to treat the delusions of all hallucinatory schizophrenics as equally real as anything else you see, not just for them but for you. You would have to believe in all gods, fairytales, and supernatural entities, and live as though they exist.

True belief is not a mere fancy that you entertain mentally without integrating it into your chain of action. Belief is BELIEF, an earnest commitment to the reality of something such that you factor it into the decisions you make. If you make any decisions that are contrary to your supposed "belief", that's an indicator that you are not truly and authentically committed to it and therefore it doesn't comprise an actual belief.

> I suffered huge anxiety, PTSD, depression, etc from a childhood of sustained abuse. I met God. Now it's all gone.

It's very nice that you were able to delude your brain into thinking it healed by slapping a cure-everything placebo over it, but that has no place in philosophical discussions of what exists, or whether or not faith is a valid path to truth.

> God is with me, and it's as real as anything else in reality.

It's not, you're twisting and warping the definition of "real" because you aren't committed to coherency. You're arguing the topic in bad faith.

> You experience stimulus that you attribute to eyes, photons, and a materialistic universe.

Yes, and I am axiomatically bound to assuming at least some of those things are real in certain circumstances, otherwise the implications of not doing so would literally render me incapable of living as an acting being. The same is not true of God, as evidenced by the many atheists who are able to live without psychological contradiction.

> Mario is not real. Goombas are not real. Millions of people are making Mario jump on Goombas worldwide. Logically there is no reason to jump on Goombas. Yet millions do. So that argument is a bit weak, isn't it?

No, because while Mario and Goombas are not real, the screen that is displaying the images of Mario and Goombas is real, and based on the way it is programmed pressing certain inputs will objectively cause the images on the screen to behave in a predictable way. Treating Mario and Goombas as actual people is a mental delusion we engage in because it makes the experience more interesting, but from a logical sense it is silly to argue that the act of playing a video game is not grounded in something we can take to be real.

> That's no difference to faith in God.

No, you don't have to grant the reality of God. It is not a requirement to be rationally coherent, and in fact having faith in God is irrational.

No, you can't literally see and feel God. You experience stimulus that you attribute to God, but it is not literally equivalent to the experience of seeing a physical object with your own eyes. You are presuming that the cause of your religious experience is God, but you lack the ability to verify through repeated consistent observation that this is the case the way you do for your wife.

Assuming without cause the world is real is axiomatic because something being "real" to you is a necessary quality in something having a "real" result that affects your life. If you believe that a banana is not "real", then you also believe that its ability to satiate your hunger is not "real". If you believe that is not "real", then logically there is no reason to eat the banana because it has no actual tangible impact on your life, so you won't do it. Exploding this to its extreme means that, if you refuse to live assuming the world is real, you won't ever take any actions.

You have to grant the reality of the world, even if you know you're doing it arbitrarily, because unreal things do not have any tangibility, real qualities, or real impact. You can understand you don't REALLY know the world is real, but you can't COMMIT to this authentically and purely. It would result in you basically taking a seat and starving to death.

You're obviously lying though. You can see and feel your wife, chairs and tables, etc. You can't literally see and feel God. Any attempt at trying to say otherwise is necessarily metaphorical.

> That's suspension of disbelief. You know that if you make Mario jump on a Goomba, he'll destroy him. That's doing things and expecting results. That's not destroyed by Mario, the Goombas, and the entire world he exists in being nothing more than transistors firing.

Yeah? That's the point, just like we're able to pretend that Mario's world is real, we can "pretend" that we have "justifiable reason" to believe that our world is real, such that we can act in it. That's not faith, that's an intentional decision to suspend our lack of real justification for believing in the world because to do otherwise would render our ability to act impossible.

Engaging in arbitrary nonsense has no place in a philosophy subreddit.

Because "faith" is an English word and when you use it in an English-speaking context people will engage with you using that definition. You doing what you did is 1) adding confusion to the discussion, and 2) will cause you to operate according to both your personal definition of faith and the common English usage of faith in random ways, because you're human and all humans' brains are flawed.

It's even worse for you because you literally created an amalgamation of a concept between possibly two different ideas, so you will wind up conflating three different ideas, and your own personal definition of faith is functionally useless in all other contexts that aren't you thinking to yourself and feeling all erudite.

Like...it's complete nonsense and has no place here.

You can't just make words mean whatever you want. Not only is it disingenuous argumentation, it's bad thinking because you will mentally conflate your own definition you made up with the "normal" definition everyone else has, and that will confuse you internally. It's bad.

It's not a virtue to live life weaseling out of criticism by warping the meaning of words away from their actual meaning and into something you just made up to suit yourself.

> What is the source of presuppositions from which we start your reason processes?

Whatever we must logically accept in order to coherently exist in the world and make decisions as intentional agents. These are things like "I exist", "the world exists", "the world is predictable (physically)", and other extremely basic presumptions about the status of reality. If we were to completely shed our belief in any of these things, we would logically destroy our ability to act and expect results we had reason to believe were meaningful. We have to at least accept them on an informal basis, or we can do nothing else. This is entirely different from faith, which is the acceptance of a belief that is not necessary, for no reasons.

> I agree that reason provides significant confidence, but I find it to be rather retrospective than prospective, especially when it comes to life decision.

I mean, that's your problem, but I exercise reason to make life decisions and haven't been steered wrong yet as far as I know.

> What is a "bad" decision? How do you determine? What makes you think switching to something else will be better over the course of time?

A bad decision is something that causes an outcome that people (yourself or others) think is bad. We have seen plenty of instances where faith in God causes bad decisions, in that it causes people to deny medical care that could have saved their lives, it causes people to ostracize their family members, encourages some people to commit acts of violence against others, etc.

> Reason can verify our decisions, but cannot trigger them.

I'm not sure how you figure this. Let's say you engage in the following logical process:

I am hungry and want food > As far as I know, there is food in the fridge > If I get up and go to the fridge I will get the food > I want to get the food > Ergo I should get up and go to the fridge > I get up and go to the fridge > I get the food > I eat the food > I satisfy my desire for food

That is entirely a logical series of steps. It's not one we consciously work through, but it's logical and requires no faith. If you happen to get to the fridge and there is no food, your knowledge of the world was wrong, but at that point you can pivot away from that to something else. There's a difference between having a belief based on exposure to something, and having "faith" in the way people do in God.

> For example, you find good reasons and bad reasons to get married or not to get married. What makes you actually take a decision and not be stuck forever in the process of thinking?

You weigh the good reasons and bad reasons against each other and determine through thinking that the good outweigh the bad because they're more important to you.

> If "existentialistic" decisions are like mathematical formulas our life will lack individuality. 2+2=4 is the same for everyone.

2+2=4 is the same for everyone, but it's every person's individual preferences and desires that determine the numbers you slot into the equation. For me, getting married might be 2+2+4+12-8-1=11, whereas for somebody else the same question might be 2+2+4-12+2-5=(-7).

> In my opinion reason needs faith and faith needs reason. They are complementary.

They really are not.

You're wrong though. You are either too mentally weak to handle not believing in him, too arrogant to not accept there are things about the universe you can just say "I don't know" to, or too ignorant to understand that he isn't a logically necessary element of the universe. There's a difference between that and the belief that the world is "real", which is something that, if any of us were to truly commit to, would logically undermine our ability to perform actions in the world. If the world isn't treated as real, even on an informal basis, then our entire ability to do things and expect results that we interpret as significant is destroyed.

It depends on what you mean by "believe". If I hold myself strictly to only making truth claims for that which I have real, objective verification, then no I can't say whether reality is real or a simulation. I don't believe it is on faith, or I wouldn't really consider it faith, more so that I consciously choose to live as though I believe it is true because there's literally nothing else I can do. If I didn't internalize the belief, informally, that the world is real, I would cease to be able to coherently act as an agent. It just wouldn't work. So there's no way I can't even if I wanted to.

Contrast this with belief in God, which is a totally unnecessary belief. People are able to exist as agents totally fine without that belief.

You can give x because you believe it will work based on a rational process of hypothesis development. You don't need faith. The difference is that making a rational prediction will make you more likely to acknowledge if you were wrong and move on to try different things, whereas faith—which is belief in something without evidence—will cause you to falsely attribute your results to your faith-driven actions, will cause you to make up some sort of fake cause that explains the results which you have no reason to believe is true, and will blind you to flaws in your perception that could show you the actual truth. Faith has no genuine use and it causes a litany of problems.

That's nonsense. Reason finds problems in what we do, but it is also the source of validation of what we do and therefore a source of significant confidence. You don't need faith to stick to your decision, and in fact faith can cause you to stick to a bad decision that hurts people or not switch to a better decision that is more helpful.

I remember reading some of him in uni, but nothing too serious. I'm at least glad he didn't try to pretend faith in God is somehow rational, I just don't respect an anti-rational approach because it's somehow "the best path" (which I don't even think is demonstrable on the evidence).

I just find it hard getting behind a "philosopher" who's answer is essentially "don't think about it and just believe for no reason". To me, you can dress that up in however passionate and flowery language you like, but it's still anti-philosophical.

That is not what faith is, that's you massively twisting concepts through metaphor to appear profound.

> Perhaps you only know that. Be careful asserting what others understand - you have no awareness of what they experience.

No, it is literally impossible for anybody to know what is causing their own experiences or if their experiences accurately reflect reality, without engaging in suitable external examination. If you're only going by your own internal experiences, by definition you cannot verify your internal experiences. Internal experiences cannot verify themselves. It is a fundamental epistemic limit and anti-philosophical to imply otherwise.

> You say that as if that's the final step. For you, it may be. For others, there may be other approaches

Every person alive is fundamentally the same kind of person and their experiences draw from the same neurological basis, unless your brain is literally broken. There is no experience that is valid for one person that is not valid for another. Either things are windows to reality we can reasonably trust, or they aren't. There is no case-by-case basis on this.

> You're assuming they aren't lying.

Yes, that's what the peer-review and reproducibility elements of the process are about. People can fabricate evidence, or they can simply make mistakes, their bias can blind them to flaws, so that means other people then step in to reproduce the results or critique the method. And, at the end of the day, if you have an issue with somebody else's writing, you can follow their method and see what happens. Nothing is ever perfect, and all "knowledge" has a degree of uncertainty, but that uncertainty is not equal for all methods or all claims.

> You've skipped a couple of steps - you are now equating "science" with "knowing"

I was using science experiments as an example of how to examine the world in predictable ways in order to establish facts about the world, I wasn't equating anything.

> As such, our perception of the world you describe in practice is that knowledge is dismissed by ignorant people whose feelings are disrupted by new things they are being told... because the average person is mostly disconnected from understanding what their feelings are, due to their lack of practice in managing them.

What ignorant people's feelings are has no bearing on whether or not faith is a valid metric for reliable truth.

Faith is being presented with a thing and then deciding what it is based on no evidence. It's literally nothing but speculation.

The problem is that you only know what you feel, you don't know what causes that feeling in actuality or if those feelings are accurate analogues to reality. There are many things we feel that are complete fabrications or distortions of reality. Knowledge may be primarily based on the writings of others, but the power of those writings is that they meticulously document their process and ergo you can analyze that process for accuracy. For things like science experiments, you can see when those experiments have been reliably duplicated and you can duplicate them on your own id you put in the effort. That is the foundation of our science classes in school.

Faith is just feeling a thing and then arbitrarily deciding whatever you want it to be is what it is.

I would agree we shouldn't stake our highest passions on speculative reasons, but Kierkegaard is delusional if he doesn't acknowledge faith is the most speculative reason there is.