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From: esk@wucs.UUCP (Paul V. Torek)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Ken Montgomery on Torek's wager
Message-ID: <798@wucs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 25-Feb-85 22:09:55 EST
Article-I.D.: wucs.798
Posted: Mon Feb 25 22:09:55 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Feb-85 20:29:08 EST
Reply-To: pvt1047@wucec1.UUCP (Paul V. Torek)
Organization: Washington U. in St. Louis, CS Dept.
Lines: 55

Congratulations Ken, on *totally* missing the point.  Where there is a
will to misinterpret, there is a way...

> The position of the medieval catholic church was that people ought
> to believe that the sun orbited the earth.  Was that belief, in fact,
> "correct"?

No, because people ought not to believe that the sun orbited the earth.
They ought to believe otherwise because the (*humanly accessible*) 
evidence is against it, and because it is a *can*-lose proposition.

>>Rich, you naive realist:  If there are realities which are unknowable and
>>hence uninteresting, then so much the worse for *them*.  

> That's like saying, "If I'm brained by a boulder, but it was
> unknowable to be because I could not have known what hit me,
> then so much the worse for the boulder."  Sour grapes?

Boulders are knowable.  Try again Ken.  (OK, maybe so much the worse for
*us* if there are unknowable realities, too.  The point is:  if something
is *ex hypothesi* unknowable it is *ipso facto* uninteresting, i.e. not
worth worrying about.)

> Belief is not the same as knowledge; believing something to be true
> does not make it so. 

-- he said, as if the person he was replying to had implied anything to
the contrary.

> The alleged "can't lose" nature of believing some proposition does not
> make that proposition correct.

It makes it worth believing.  That's what counts.

>> If you ... favor ... a "correspondance theory" of truth, then
>> you face exactly two possibilities:  either all such truths are
>> what we ought to believe, or some aren't.  If some aren't, THEN
>> SO MUCH THE WORSE FOR THOSE TRUTHS.

> Then (by the claim of the medievals as to what ought to be believed),
> we should pretend like the sun really does orbit the earth...  

Except for one all-important point:  the medievals were wrong about
what we ought to believe.  (See above.)

>>  Look at it this way:  accepting a hypothesis is a *decision*.

> One's decision does not change reality.  Acceptance of the phlogiston
> hypothesis does not make it (empirically) superior to combustion theory.

Which proves that there are better and worse decisions.  So what else is
(cough!) new?
				--YAWNING in Ken's general direction,
				Paul V. Torek, ihnp4!wucs!wucec1!pvt1047
Don't hit that 'r' key!  Send any mail to this address, not the sender's.