I don’t think I believe in God anymore—certainly not in the way I used to—but I think if you’d asked me 3 years ago, I would have said that I take it as axiomatic that God exists. If you have any kind of consistent epistemology, you need some base beliefs from which to draw the conclusions and one of mine was the existence of an entity that cared about me (and everyone on earth) on a personal level and was sufficiently more wise/intelligent/powerful/knowledgeable than me that I may as well think of it as infinitely so.
I think the religious people I know who’ve thought deeply about their epistemology take either the existence of God or the reliability of a sort of spiritual sensory modality as an axiom.
While I no longer believe in God, I don’t think I had a perspective any less epistemically rational then than I do now. I don’t think there’s a way to use rationality to pick axioms, the process is inherently arational (for the first few, anyway).
Surely some axioms can be more rationally chosen than others. For instance, “There is a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars” looks like a silly axiom, but “there is a round cube orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars” looks even sillier. Assuming the possibility of round cubes seems somehow more “epistemically expensive” than assuming the possibility of teapots.
This is why I added “for the first few”. Let’s not worry about the location, just say “there is a round cube” and “there is a teapot”.
Before you can get to either of these axioms , you need some things like “there is a thing I’m going to call reality that it’s worth trying to deal with” and “language has enough correspondence to reality to be useful”. With those and some similar very low level base axioms in place (and depending on your definitions of round and cube and teapot), I agree that one or another of the axioms could reasonably be called more or less reasonable, rational, probable, etc.
I think when I believed in God, it was roughly third on the list? Certainly before usefulness of language. The first two were something like me existing in time, with a history and memories that had some accuracy, and sense-data being useful.
All your examples of high-tier axioms seem to fall into the category of “necessary to proceed”, the sort of thing where you can’t really do any further epistemology if the proposition is false. How did the God axiom either have that quality or end up high on the list without it?
I’m not really sure how it ended up there—probably childhood teaching inducing that particular brain-structure? It’s just something that was a fundamental part of who I understood myself to be, and how I interpreted my memories/experiences/sense-data. After I stopped believing in God, I definitely also stopped believing that I existed. Obviously, this-body-with-a-mind exists, but I had not identified myself as being that object previously—I had identified myself as the-spirit-inhabiting-this-body, and I no longer believed that existed.
I don’t think I believe in God anymore—certainly not in the way I used to—but I think if you’d asked me 3 years ago, I would have said that I take it as axiomatic that God exists. If you have any kind of consistent epistemology, you need some base beliefs from which to draw the conclusions and one of mine was the existence of an entity that cared about me (and everyone on earth) on a personal level and was sufficiently more wise/intelligent/powerful/knowledgeable than me that I may as well think of it as infinitely so.
I think the religious people I know who’ve thought deeply about their epistemology take either the existence of God or the reliability of a sort of spiritual sensory modality as an axiom.
While I no longer believe in God, I don’t think I had a perspective any less epistemically rational then than I do now. I don’t think there’s a way to use rationality to pick axioms, the process is inherently arational (for the first few, anyway).
Surely some axioms can be more rationally chosen than others. For instance, “There is a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars” looks like a silly axiom, but “there is a round cube orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars” looks even sillier. Assuming the possibility of round cubes seems somehow more “epistemically expensive” than assuming the possibility of teapots.
This is why I added “for the first few”. Let’s not worry about the location, just say “there is a round cube” and “there is a teapot”.
Before you can get to either of these axioms , you need some things like “there is a thing I’m going to call reality that it’s worth trying to deal with” and “language has enough correspondence to reality to be useful”. With those and some similar very low level base axioms in place (and depending on your definitions of round and cube and teapot), I agree that one or another of the axioms could reasonably be called more or less reasonable, rational, probable, etc.
I think when I believed in God, it was roughly third on the list? Certainly before usefulness of language. The first two were something like me existing in time, with a history and memories that had some accuracy, and sense-data being useful.
All your examples of high-tier axioms seem to fall into the category of “necessary to proceed”, the sort of thing where you can’t really do any further epistemology if the proposition is false. How did the God axiom either have that quality or end up high on the list without it?
I’m not really sure how it ended up there—probably childhood teaching inducing that particular brain-structure? It’s just something that was a fundamental part of who I understood myself to be, and how I interpreted my memories/experiences/sense-data. After I stopped believing in God, I definitely also stopped believing that I existed. Obviously, this-body-with-a-mind exists, but I had not identified myself as being that object previously—I had identified myself as the-spirit-inhabiting-this-body, and I no longer believed that existed.