I'm sorry, but I just don't understand any of the religious talk in this conversation, this isn't for effect, it is genuinely all lost on me. I don't know what 'God as absolute truth' means. But I can predict that no argument predicated on beliefs about God are going to resolve any question related to facts and I'm therefore unsure why we keep going down this road.Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Oct 22, 2021 11:44 amThere is substance in what you wrote. The substance is in your meaning not in the electronic traces of your keyboard activity.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Thu Oct 21, 2021 11:37 pmThere's what something is made of, and there's what it actually does, and over and over again people are only looking at the first of those aspects and then insinuating that two artifacts constructed from the same stuff (the mental for instance) are somehow equivalent.
"facts" might be human creations, but they don't do the same thing as "beliefs", so being constructs of mind or whatever doesn't make them the same.
Facts are exclusive, if one person states as fact that all moral truths derive from some principle of self-ownership, and another states as fact that all moral truths derive from a god-given principle, either one of these people must be wrong, or both of them are wrong, it is strictly senseless to suggest that they are both right.
If Henry believes that all moral stuff emanates from a principle of self-ownership, and Emmanuel believes that all good things are donated by god, that's fine, they can both believe their thing no problem.
This is because FACT AND BELIEF DO DIFFERENT STUFF and what they are made out of has no bearing on that. Anal beads and toothbrushes are also made out of similar substances, but I don't recommend assuming an equivalent function on that basis.
I submit that there is no essence of anything , and the meaning of anything is what it does relative to its environment.
The difference between facts and beliefs applies to social truth, not absolute truth
Is that social and absolute truths bit another religion thing? It seems like an artifical division. There is a difference of type and of function between beliefs and facts.
There is a strategic error of argument structure being made here. When you want to move an object (such as a moral asserion) from the category of belief into that of fact, you need to upgrade the object somehow to meet the standards of what we meaningfully refer to as facts (which includes a mechanism for resolving contradictory claims, something that belief doesn't need). This move to downgrade the target category instead such that "social fact" is nothing but shared beliefs just results in an inevitable paradox because that argument cannot be true.