Interesting analogy by Taleb (1 Viewer)

[Hist]

sorry for jumping in the convo but i couldn't help myself.
I am a believer but the analogy is totally not accurate.
In both Christian and Islamic philosophy you will find intellectuals and philosophers who claim there is no relation between faith and reason, and philosophers who will claim there is a strong relation.
Let me take this piece by piece.
1) Those who believe there is no relation between faith and reason:
They will clearly see the analogy made between the stock and religion as absurd as the stock market is based on material real causes and effects that can be known and studied and understood if pursued. On the other hand they will say that the causes and effects about the Godly order dramatically differs from one religion to another and hence cannot be understood or tested etc.

2) Those who do believe in the relation between faith and reason:

Examples of these will be Thomas Aquinas for Christians and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) AKA The Commentator for Muslims.

They will not claim that religion is based completely on reason but they will say that the many major aspects of religion can be found by the practicing of reasoning without the need of scripture.
They both are Aristotelian and they both are the greatest philosophers of their respective religions and if you read their books you will find that they more or less say same thing about faith and reason.
Using reason alone, they both arrived at the existence of God (i can supply their main proof) and that he must be all perfect, one and omnipotent.
See any of the 3 major religions is divided in to 2 parts.

------------------------
1) Gray Area
(must be accepted on faith from the authority of scripture (be it bible or Quran)
as it is impossible to judge in matters you can neither know nor understand as will be evident from the examples i will give.
Includes:
A) For Christians: The Trinity, crucifixion, resurrection,Miracles etc..
B) For Muslims: The None existence of the Trinity, The other story about the crucifixion, Miracles, Djin, Magic, Curses, corruption of the bible, judgment day etc..
Note: They try to use reason to explain these matters but they all admit that their description is never absolutely accurate as it is by definition unexplainable.
------------------------
2) Reasonable area
(can be known through philosophy ie. the use of the intellect without the need of resorting to scripture)
Includes:
The build up to God's existence etc. (Many philosophers who knew nothing about scripture arrived at God's existence)
Ethics etc.
This Part is more or less common to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.
-------------------------

Now ask yourselves this:
Can you judge if Jesus was Crucified or not?
Can you say based on facts that he resurrected to the sky or not?
Can you prove That He is not God?
Can you Prove that any of the miracles in different scripture ever happened?
Can you know for sure if there was an angel called Gabriel who dictated scripture from God to the prophets or was it the holy spirit (a part of god)? Can we even say it exists or not?
These are all what we call the 3'aybeyat in Islam meaning Absences meaning they are abstract and cannot be proven to be true or false.. you just have to take them on faith in the authority of scripture NOT reason.
Then ask yourself this...
What makes me believe The Quran and not the Bible?
What makes you believe the Bible not the Quran?

They both agree in many things but also disagree at many.
Followers of the bible condemn followers of the Quran to hell and vice versa.
How can We be judged on a choice of our religion when both religions have a grey area that cannot be reasoned and each claims to be true and condemns the other to hell. We take their words on authority.. but whose authority? on books' authority (Quran and bible) but which book?
The 3'aybeyat (absences) by definition cannot be known for sure how can God condemn me to hell by choosing a side rather than the other when there is no reason i could judge upon to choose one over the other.


This is like putting a 10 year old kid in an advanced physics exam.
The exam is only 1 question and he has 2 answers to choose from. Some tell the kid to choose answer A and others tell him to choose answer B.
He asks: "why would i choose this and not that"
their answer is "You must choose based on our authority"
he asks: why would i trust your authority and not the other"
the answer is "because if you trust the wrong group you will fail the exam"
the kid asks "how can i know which answer is true i don't know physics"
They answer "follow your heart"

Lol we can be thrown in eternal fire because our heart made the wrong choice. A matter of luck a Russian roulette game where either you go to HEAVEN or HELL.
Anyway, i had to say this to make you understand the back ground i am speaking from.
returning to our topic, according to these people too (those who believe there is a connection between faith and reason) the analogy is weak as when you are talking stock, you can understand the factors influencing it if you wish to find out.. you can become an analyst yourself. On the other hand, The gray area in religions(which is the difference between the religions lol) cannot be known except based on scripture's authority as i've shown. if you wish to go beyond the scripture's authority you have to be dead and see for yourself (you cant be the stock analyst here) .. Not even the POPE knows exactly what the gray area is.

i hope you got my point.

 

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[rounder]

I don't see how all the talk about grey area fits in here but okay. Taleb's analogy was one that was critical of those who blindly follow stock analysts in a huge leap of faith while being atheists at the same time. I think most people didn't entirely understand the analogy's implications and although I personally think it is logically flawed to some extent, it does sound interesting.


So the 10 year old that simply invents his own formula is what, an atheist?

Anyway, I don't believe faith and reason are polar opposites. I think it would take more faith from my part to be an atheist rather than a theist, I believe that the implications of there being a god from a purely metaphysical viewpoint are far too strong to be ignored.

 

[Hist]

"I believe that the implications of there being a god from a purely metaphysical viewpoint are far too strong to be ignored."
i agree with you...
you totally didnt understand my ten year old analogy.
Assume you are an athiest... and through philosophy you found out that there has to be a god (not necessarily a manuscriptive god)
so what religion should you join?
which book's authority will you believe? they say the same thing except for the gray area they contradict. you cant judge which gray area is correct and which is false as you can't see god and you cant prove any of them correct or false. Philosophy does not fix this problem as its based on reason and the gray area by definition cannot be reasoned.
The ten year old kid in the physics test is any person who tries to follow a religion.

You as a christian.. why would you believe 1) jesus is god and he died then resurrected ..etc
and not 2) Jesus was a man sent by God and people imagined seeing him crucified.
Is (1) more reasonable than (2)? based on what?
your reply would be because the bible says so and i will tell you i believe in number 2 because the Quran said so. Then we will start questioning the authority of the bible and the Quran and we will never PROVE that (1) is true or (2) is true. we just follow the authority of our respective scripture blindly... and if we wish to find out we CANNOT.

Athiests follow a stock analyst but if one were interested to UNDERSTAND why the stock went up or down we CAN FIND OUT the causes to a certainty through studying business.

its the old science against religion.. : no one can question the existence of gravity as we can Prove it anytime anyday.
But we cannot prove the Quran or the bible were inspired by God because we cannot rationalize it.

 

[Alen]

I like you already and you have only 70 posts. Congratulations, you won over me faster than anyone else here.

 

[Hist]

midgets tend to have that effect on people

 

[Bjerknes]

What do you know about stocks, Snake?

 

[Hist]

not so much
but i know, like everything they are controlled with the principles of causality.

 

[Bjerknes]

Thought so.

But you are mostly correct though. Even if it is after the fact, the reason behind price moves in equities usually comes out sometime, whether it is due to earnings or market manipulation, or Madoff schemes.

 

[Eddy]

To say the war in Iraq was a war about oil is an oversimplification of the reality: part of the reason, yes, but only just a part.

The Sudanese people needed more help then the Iraqi's. Why didn't the US go there, especially that the rebels want a free democratic country and already 400,000 had died.

Oh, that's right, China is in the area controlling the oil already and the US are bound to stay away from China's interests so as a war is prevented between the two.

 

[Hist]

i think you are on the wrong thread.... but anyway the sudanese discovered shit loads of oil in Sudan... literally shit loads..

but its so fucked up down there its impossible for anyone to solve it except for themselves. but in the future? possible target if Obama flopped and became another bush

 

[swag]

You can dismiss my thinking here because I actually thought The Black Swan was a pretty cool book. While I don't agree that the atheism<-->stock market comparison is a very good analogy, I think it raises some good points of discussion.

People's religious beliefs take many forms. "Domains", as Taleb might say. Behind them are projections for the future based upon potential truths masked by uncertainties. And the belief in things greater than themselves coming out from the individuals who participate. Some people approach these scenarios with traditional religious constructs. But I can wholly see where financial markets also can fit a similar model. But then things like our approach to global warming/climate change, environmental causes, social causes, etc., all have real parallels as well.

One perfect example I see here in lefty San Francisco (oddly enough, where this video was recorded) is in green causes. Secularism, in my own unproven theory, sometimes creates a void of belief in people that must be filled for some kind of spiritual fulfillment. In places like SF, that void has been filled with social and environmental causes to a large degree -- they have become surrogate religions for a lot of people.

And you see it in public spaces where there are surrogate "churches": everything from the iconography and religious sloganeering you find on the walls of a Whole Foods Market, to public spaces like SF's green-themed California Academy of Sciences Museum or the Crissy Field park in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. To see the iconography, the messaging, the heavy-handed themes... they entirely evoke the expressions of religious belief that you find in the churches, mosques, and temples of "traditional" religious society. Just swap "Jesus died for your sins" for "fair-trade and eco-friendly" or "sustainable". It's a bit of a stretch at first, but is it when you start thinking about how people invest their beliefs and approach these concepts ... and how these concepts are elevated by a community of believers? How far are they from being modern day druids?

I may not be 100% accurate in my hypothesis, but it's rare that I find any true "atheist" to the extent that they believe that they are. We each all have our different gods, and yet we often approach the religious experience of these "gods" in similar ways.

 

[Eddy]

i think you are on the wrong thread.... but anyway the sudanese discovered shit loads of oil in Sudan... literally shit loads..

but its so fucked up down there its impossible for anyone to solve it except for themselves. but in the future? possible target if Obama flopped and became another bush

It isn't the wrong thread, that quote was some 2 pages ago.

 

[Hist]

maybe i dunno... sorry
i am going to sleep. goodnight!

 

[Eddy]

Goodnight

 

[Bjerknes]

i think you are on the wrong thread.... but anyway the sudanese discovered shit loads of oil in Sudan... literally shit loads..

but its so fucked up down there its impossible for anyone to solve it except for themselves. but in the future? possible target if Obama flopped and became another bush

China controls the Sudanese oil fields with Sinopec. That is China's oil and nobody can do anything about it, hence why the US and UN does not stop the Darfur genocide.

Obama, unfortunately, even though I voted for him, will probably be a major flop due to our economic situation that he can do nothing about, besides not do anything. He will be a flop because people will become so outraged with job losses that they will turn on him no matter what, even if they try to sell it as simply capitalism failure. This is predictable.

Either bail out nobody or bail out everybody. Nothing in between. We are already pseudo-socialist so we better become entirely socialist if we want to fix problems.

 

[Eddy]

China controls the Sudanese oil fields with Sinopec. That is China's oil and nobody can do anything about it, hence why the US and UN does not stop the Darfur genocide.

Obama, unfortunately, even though I voted for him, will probably be a major flop due to our economic situation that he can do nothing about, besides not do anything. He will be a flop because people will become so outraged with job losses that they will turn on him no matter what, even if they try to sell it as simply capitalism failure. This is predictable.

Either bail out nobody or bail out everybody. Nothing in between. We are already pseudo-socialist so we better become entirely socialist if we want to fix problems.

Thinking about it, a closed socialist market would help the US right now

 

[Bjerknes]

Thinking about it, a closed socialist market would help the US right now

Maybe in the short run.

But all this is nonsense.

 

[Eddy]

Maybe in the short run.

But all this is nonsense.

Not really, I'm a leftist so this is an interesting thought Andy

Social Democracy in the United States of America has already been experimented before in the early 1900's. But I don't know if it was good intended or bad since I have no clue how it was viewed as.

 

[Bjerknes]

Not really, I'm a leftist so this is an interesting thought Andy

Social Democracy in the United States of America has already been experimented before in the early 1900's.

Never was there a true Socialist Democracy in the US. I'd be all for socialism as long as human greed did not exist, but it does, so that's why it could be worse than what we see now. What we can't have is any hybrid of these methodologies to try to fix problems, because that is like giving kindergartners several chemicals and telling them to make some sort of mixture. It will explode in your face. Can't do that shit.

These bailouts are essentially handouts to Wall Street for people to pocket, so they need to end. But Obama will continue them to my dismay.

 

[Lawnchair Bes]

You can dismiss my thinking here because I actually thought The Black Swan was a pretty cool book. While I don't agree that the atheism<-->stock market comparison is a very good analogy, I think it raises some good points of discussion.

People's religious beliefs take many forms. "Domains", as Taleb might say. Behind them are projections for the future based upon potential truths masked by uncertainties. And the belief in things greater than themselves coming out from the individuals who participate. Some people approach these scenarios with traditional religious constructs. But I can wholly see where financial markets also can fit a similar model. But then things like our approach to global warming/climate change, environmental causes, social causes, etc., all have real parallels as well.

One perfect example I see here in lefty San Francisco (oddly enough, where this video was recorded) is in green causes. Secularism, in my own unproven theory, sometimes creates a void of belief in people that must be filled for some kind of spiritual fulfillment. In places like SF, that void has been filled with social and environmental causes to a large degree -- they have become surrogate religions for a lot of people.

And you see it in public spaces where there are surrogate "churches": everything from the iconography and religious sloganeering you find on the walls of a Whole Foods Market, to public spaces like SF's green-themed California Academy of Sciences Museum or the Crissy Field park in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. To see the iconography, the messaging, the heavy-handed themes... they entirely evoke the expressions of religious belief that you find in the churches, mosques, and temples of "traditional" religious society. Just swap "Jesus died for your sins" for "fair-trade and eco-friendly" or "sustainable". It's a bit of a stretch at first, but is it when you start thinking about how people invest their beliefs and approach these concepts ... and how these concepts are elevated by a community of believers? How far are they from being modern day druids?

I may not be 100% accurate in my hypothesis, but it's rare that I find any true "atheist" to the extent that they believe that they are. We each all have our different gods, and yet we often approach the religious experience of these "gods" in similar ways.

which is why i am not too fond of environMentals. what i am trying to figure out though, is if my life would be happier if i "let them into my life"