The nature of "Truth"

[realthinker]

When it comes to understanding what someone belives and why, how many of you have looked into the logical mechanics of what makes up what someone belives?

Whether a statement is regarded as "Truth" is decided by two facets of understanding, coherency and correspondence.

Correspondence is regarding whether a belief corresponds to absolute fact. The sky is blue. Gravity is a fact. Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is all provable, and regardless of what we believe it's fact. We, in general, respect this and it contributes to our beliefs. You have trouble negotiating life if your beliefs don't correspond to facts.

Coherence is regarding how well a set of beliefs works together. You cannot believe X and ~X. You either believe that the sky is blue or you don't. The two don't work well together. When you try to maintain contradictory beliefs you're not taken seriously. You lose credibility.

Someone whose beliefs are lacking correspondence are simply ignorant. There's no real fault in that. We all start that way, and there are obvious ways to correct it. What's faultable, however, is being to lazy or resistant to make those corrections.

Incoherency though is a bigger problem. What's trouble is that as our belief systems get more sophisticated our inconsistency is harder to spot. Coherence takes some real effort because we're not so conscious of what we believe. We have to evaluate our statements and measure ourselves. And our rationalizations are more sophisticated as well. We make up 'beliefs' that bring things back to consistency.

And that is religion's trump card. Miracles, the nature of God, the fact that we can't expect to understand the supreme being, are all artifacts that make anything regarding religion coherent. Then, couple all of that with the fact that there are no knowable consequences to believing or not believing (all real consequences are exacted after death) and you've got something pretty bullet proof. Give me thousands of years to set it up and I can have a religion for you that makes scrambled eggs a divine being. All it takes is enough 'facts' that are inconsequential and coherent.

What's become troublesome for society is that where once a religious set of beliefs was a local phenomenon, our society is so diverse now that these sets of beliefs are in close contact. Each is a coherent set of beliefs but none are compatible. So there is constant friction.

If you're looking for more understanding of "truth" look at a little book called "Being Logical". It's where I got these ideas. And it has nothing to do with religion, just logic and truth.

[QED]

This post has been moved out of the Philosophy debating forum as it has no clear question for debate. Please familiarize yourself with the Debate Forum Intro and Rules and in particular rule 3:

3. When you start a new topic in a debate subforum, it must state a clearly defined question(s) for debate.

Thanks.

[romat]

Ah but there is no such thing as color only in your vision. Nothing has any colour without light and from that point of veiw one can argue that the sky is not blue but just apears to be so.

According to einstien it is (theorectically at least) possible for something to "fall" upwards.

And light is the electromagnetic spectrum (meaning that it is comprised of things that travel at constant speed)