Why believe anything? The reasons I'm a skeptic

This is really probably the most important post I could make, and it will involve really just two concepts coherence and evidence. The reason to believe something is reliant on how well something fits in with what else is you know, and also on how strong the evidence there is for that thing being true. There is a sliding scale that goes along with that type of thinking as well. Something that makes sense and is complimentary with what you already know requires only a minimum standard of evidence, while a belief that goes agianst many of the things you know has to meet a much higher standard of evidence. An example of this would be that it would only take one article, from a reliable source, for me to come to believe that chimpanzee's are self aware and has culture, but it would take many many articles and even a scientific consensus to convince me that coral is self aware and has culture. I don't want to get in any Rority and the argument that the truth doesn't really exist, this is just meant to understand how I come to believe in something.
   
There can be second hand evidence where someone tells you something, and the knowledge of that source can attribute to the strength of the level of belief you can have in something being true. There is also knowledge that is gained from first hand experience where you do something or sense something and create an understanding of what went on. However, those two ways of understanding how something is true, while sometimes helpful, are just as easily wrong.

More dependable truths can be formed on the basis of scientific testing. When people here that all you believe in is 'science' then science is somehow lessened to them and becomes a dirty word; Then 'science' is a religion to you is often claimed. This may be true if all you are talking about is a system of belief, but science is a religion without faith. No one is asking anyone to believe anything that can't in some way be demonstrated. A likely retort would be that you have faith in science being right, but this isn't faith in science itself, but faith in evidence given derived from something repeatable.
   
While this first part of truth, as a reliance in repeatable demonstration, seems to be pretty simple, it has very dire consequences for a number of things. First is God, there is no test for god, no proof of his/her/it's existence, and no proof of any link between god and any holy book. Scientific evidence of god is nil, which may not be a problem if God was a simple matter like which steak tastes the best, but when something is telling you how to live, what is right, who is wrong, and various other things, the level of the importance of evidence increases. This is really just a bastardization of Hume's view on miracles, which is that great things that defy belief and the ordinary require a higher level of proof.
   
Another area where the reliance on evidence has cause some tension with other people is when people speculate something like, "Well the Russians could have landed on the moon before the United States", or "The Romans could have had gunpowder before the Chinese."  Bertrand Russell deals exactly with this type line of thinking with a thought experiment about a teapot. It starts by postulating that there could be a teapot between here and Mars floating in space, but it is too small to see through a telescope. Now by saying this, he intentionally created a situation where there is no proof of something, but the problem is that there is also no way to disprove it. No one can be sure if there is or there isn't a teapot between here and Mars. That's fine though, because there weight of the argument should be on the other side, someone has to provide some evidence for the existence of the teapot in space between here and mars before there is any reason to disprove such a thing. So when someone makes any could have suggestion or might have been suggestion with no evidence to provide for that thing being such a way, they are really saying nothing at all, of course something could have been different, but the real topic comes in providing evidence for why that is the case, rather than an appeal to ignorance.
  
Well this post ran a little longer than expected, so I'll pick up my next  post with a coherence style of truth and probably touch on where real truth is and how useful it actually is.

Thanks for reading,

The Moral Skeptic

History and Morallity

The subject for this post came up recently when I was talking to someone, and I had the chance to develop this posting mainly from that conversation. For that reason I hope this post flows a little better than the posts previous to this. Yet before getting into the topic itself some information has to be provided. For my argument to have any bearing morals have to exist in a somewhat permanent way. Anyone who proclaims to be a moral relativist will not be persuaded in the least by what I have to say later, but I will attempt to show first that there is some evidence for moral semi-permanence.

To start I'll use the description semi-permanence because many things fall into the category of morality that seem to exist in an nearly universal fashion. Not long ago it was proper to use the terms, 'white meat' and 'dark meat' because the use of the words breast and thigh were considered taboo. What language is considered offensive, what people are supposed to wear, and even some things like suicide are dealt with a constantly changing cultural morality. That cultural morality is a great thing and allows for much of the moral progress that has happened in the past few centuries, but there is a morality long ingrained within our species because we are social animals.

That ingrained morality is where the more permanent morality exists. The best way this morality can be seen is by what doesn't happen in almost any society. The people of a society aren't killed openly by people of that society unless there is a good reason to do so, or at minimum an attempt for the justification for committing an act like that. Of course there are people who die in those societies for no good reason, but when this is done the society is offended when it happens, it collectively knows that something wrong has happened. This line of reasoning can be extended to theft (among non-collectivist societies), and anything that really causes an unjustified great damage to someone else, and I'd like to be able to extend it to slavery and racism, but I don't think it's possible, but that's the subject of a different post.

This argument could go much further, but it doesn't have to for my purposes, because as soon as some moral permanence is given than that moral permanence can be extended over the length of humanities existence and while the morality may seem not to amount to very much, it does have some ability. It allows a person to condemn wrongful killings, genocides, mutilations and thefts in the past.

For instance the context of the society and culture of Nazi Germany doesn't have to be taken into consideration when making a statement such as the, 'The holocaust was a defilement of morality and sullied mankind's moral opinion of itself.' All that really matters in this judgment is that a permanent morality exists and that the act was in violation of that morality.

Yet the killings don't have to be on such a gross scale, they can be as small as single death. Socrates was sentenced to death for being an atheist and corrupting the youth (teaching them how to argue and make their parents look foolish). These scant reasons are unjustifiable to cause the sentence of death, and so long as the reason is insufficient throughout time, than a moral judgment can be made on the issue today with disregard to the context of that particular culture and time. Killing Socrates was always a moral wrong and will always continue to be morally wrong.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic