From: "Andrew Bromage" <>
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,alt.atheism.satire,aus.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Ignorance for freethinkers?


> G'day all.
>
> "Muddy Boggs" <> writes:
>
> >There is no proposition that is not expressable in symbols, but if you
are
> >not comfortable working with the symbols, then forget symbolic logic.
>
> One of my majors was mathematical logic.
>
> However, I do agree that I didn't express myself well.  Perhaps a
> better way to state it is that formal reasoning about human beings
> (e.g. the nature of belief) is doomed to failure down the track,
> since human beings are not conveniently axiomatisable.
>
> >> Take yourself, for example.  You appear to believe that my sweeping
> >> assertion is false, so there you go. :-)
>
> >See how you are trying to shift the burden of proof to the non-believer?
> >That is logical fallacy (argument _ad ignorantium_).
>
> Actually it was a joke.  I thought that was obvious given a) the
> self reference and b) the smilie.
>
> >Let's see if we can agree on a definition of 'belief'. The definition I
see,
> >from http://www.m-w.com says that belief is faith in the truth of a proposition,
as
> >the tenets of a religion, not supported by logical proof or material
> >evidence.
>
> If you mean this to be the definition of "belief" in my statement that
> all people believe something which is not true, I can't agree with
> Some incorrect beliefs are indeed supported by material evidence
> (presumably by inaccurate or incomplete evidence, as evidenced by the
> dominance of Newtonian mechanics for a few centuries before it was found
> to be not entirely accurate) or logical proof (presumably from incorrect
> axioms or incorrect inference rules).
>
> By the way, was this the five-minute argument or the full half hour?
>
> Cheers,
> Andrew Bromage