Being right for the wrong reasons

While religion is inherently dogmatic, it is not a requirement for dogmatism. Some very anti-religious people possess a dogmatic nature which is at least as dangerous as holding a religious view. They feel contempt towards religion without really knowing why; they insult religious people with no true knowledge or reason of their own position and they automatically label such people as intellectually inferior. I fail to notice how this is any less dangerous, or different, than the religious people they often criticize -both types of people share a lack of mental elasticity characteristic of dogmatism, which might compromise positive changes. I might hold a similar position as any atheist regarding religion, but if I am going to live in a world where people are right because they know that they are right, then I will debate a dogmatic atheist with as much vehemence as I do any theist. What I try to promote is free thought and skepticism, not dogmatic views of any kind.

Ignorance is a pit.

Ignorance is a pit.

/ Those who are curious, explorers and truth-seeking refuse to accept the darkness; they strive to climb their way out and let the sun wash their face, even if for a moment before another fall.

/ Those who are not, have made themselves comfortable in the pit, which has become their own home. It is no surprise that, when incited to abandon your own home, you vehemently refuse to do it.

Nonetheless, I cannot help but notice that most of the great achievements in human history have depended on the former type of people. I do not know of any stronger weapon against ignorance than curiosity, just as I cannot imagine any way of departing from darkness other than light.

Believing Everything = Believing Contradictory Things

In some discussions, I have often seen people who defend that it is not unreasonable to believe something without good evidence; then they, as a matter of consistency, claim that they will believe anything even if it has not been proven to be true (even though I don't believe that they are being honest most of the times). It is unreasonable and contradictory to accept every claim as true (i.e. believing anything at face value). Take the following claim:

1) Fairies exist.

If you believe everything at face value, you have to accept this proposition as true. Then you also have to believe the following claim as true:

2) Fairies-eating monsters that caused all fairies to be extinct exist.

Both of them are just assertions with no ground for support, but you cannot believe these two propositions at once, since they are contradictory. Therefore, it is impossible for someone to accept every proposition as true, or to hold a belief of every possible claim as true. Do not forget that, however, it may be the case that both 1) and 2) propositions are false.

Russell's Unobjectionable Statement

In his book a "A History of Western Philosophy", Bertrand Russell concludes that something which is unperceived, such as an "unperceived house" is unobjectionable, in the sense that it cannot be proved to be true or false (at least logically). I partially disagree, I think that such a statement, in certain cases, can be proved to be true or false. This is not so much a critique, as an extension of thought on this issue. Consider the list of existing houses that are perceived by us:

{h1,h2,h3,h4,...hn}.

We do not perceive an unlimited number of existing houses, therefore this list is necessarily limited, since "perception" of a house requires a mental concept of a certain house that we suppose to exist. If someone states "Actually, there is an unperceived house which you are not considering", I will add this house to the list of existing houses, with the only difference being that this one cannot be perceived.

{h1, h2, h3, h4,...hn, h1(unp.)}.

Now we have n+1 houses in our list of existing houses, n perceived, 1 unperceived. Then I will ask if there are more houses which are unperceived. If there are not, then it is refuted. If there is, I will add one more:

{h1, h2, h3, h4,...hn, h1(unp.), h2,(unp.)}.

Now, if we do this a sufficient number of times, the statement "There is unperceived house which you are not considering" must necessarily be, at some point onward, false, since the number of existing houses on the (observable) universe is, by definition, finite, since matter and energy are finite in this case. However, whenever we can accurately evaluate the quantity of matter or energy present in a certain region of spacetime, we know not only that this statement must be false at a certain point, but we can even estimate at which point it is false, rendering the statement logically objectionable. Thus, the statement "A exists unperceived" is only unobjectionable (both logically and empirically) when we consider an infinite universe with infinite mass and energy.

Time and Causality

Suppose A and B to be simultaneous events happening at time t.

If C imples A that implies B (C -> A -> B) then no time passes from A to B because both arise at the same time. It follows that C -> A -> B is indistinguishible from C -> B -> A, or from C -> A and C -> B. Therefore, it is not possible to infer causality on two simultaneous events, or, put another way, to infer causality is to implicitly state dt > 0 between any two events.