"why do people hang onto beliefs even when they are shown to be unreasonable?" -Nielsen(but why someone doesn't believe in God has similar causal conditions)
Nielsen thinks there are 'neutral fallibilistic reasons for not believing in God, reasons which an impartial adjudicant could accept...i.e., his attempt at converting people to atheism doesn't violate his respect for religion, or his desire to avoid explaining away religious belief
(impartial on the question of God?)-- what does that mean?
what kind of impartiality?
being prepared to be wrong is a kind of impartiality: being open to hear other arguments...
(fallibilism isn't a secularist doctrine-- it may lead one to secularism though)
but what are the commitments of fallibilism?
how do you see the world? What commitments do your bring to fallibilism?
What should we see as the role for our our enculturation?
(What does our background have to do with fallibilism?)
does it forbid impartiality?
"an eror theory of religion" (??) (religious beliefs as projections of emotions onto a fictitious being)
!!-- "if you take the emotion out of religion, it pretty much disappears" -Nielsen
Philosophy/living a meaningful life= trying to make something coherent, making things hang together well
You can't just change the subject with religious believers like you can with global sceptics because religion is connected to a sense of life, it is more of a live option than scepticism
--->but doesn't that mean you are convincing people not to be religious for reasons other than coherence? (global skeptics are incoherent too, but we're not worried about this)
(Is this talk about incoherence just a way of pricking up the ears of intellectual believers?)--a tactic?
(is the reason to attack religion precisely because Nielsen thinks the world would be better without religion?
--Nielsen: he uses incoherence instrumentally only sometimes
Nielsen on Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein holds that all metaphysical claims are nonsense, he also holds that all religious beliefs are necessarily metaphysical (or at least involve metaphysics)-- and thus all religious beliefs are nonsense. But Wittgenstein also holds that we can't judge a form of life, so how can Wittgenstein judge religion as 'nonsense'?
This seems wrong from beginning to end (about Wittgenstein, not in its structure necessarily)-- but how is it wrong? --specifics! (reread Wittgenstein on this)
Wittgenstein's problem with metaphysics is that it unreasonably emphasizes ordinary language, but religious metaphysics is the same as ordinary religious talk: so there is no objecion here. Perhaps.
Nielsen: the metaphysical claims are inseparable but not completely coterminous with religious claims as such (can we separate 'ordinary God' and 'metaphysical God')?
Is this reponse missing the point? The point that religious metaphysics is livable and, in fact, lived?