Essan: Sorry for the delay, i have been quite busy during the weekend.
Well, rather like the original idea that a rather obscure scientific usage of "belief" was somehow adopted unknowingly by all the worlds atheists, the idea that the notion of "degrees of belief" from a particular field of science has been adopted by all scientists and dictates their usage of the word "belief" would also have to be proven. Then, that they also used it in the context of "believing" in God's nonexistence would have to proven, and finally, if all this can be proven, we are back to the problem of explaining how this usage would have been adopted unknowingly by all Atheists.
I have been thinking about the discussion for a while, and as i understand your argument you claim believe implies faith; a procedure we both seem to agree has no real place in a scientific context; and while this is not really a scientific way of reasoning most scientist nevertheless adopt this and make statements which are not really rational, ie. "I believe gene X play a role in HIV".
Why faith? As i understand your main argument, this follow per the definition of the word "believe" as made in the dictionary. My main argument is that i see scientists use the word in a way which seem to strongly exclude they imply faith, and by a "words take their meaning from how they are used" kind of argument i argue it can also describe rational reasoning rather than only irrational.
If this is a correct way of stating our positions it is somewhat hard to continue since we have different ways of defining meaning of words. I did a little experiment however: i tried to look up "believe" in a thesaurus, http://thesaurus.com/browse/believe and the word http://thesaurus.com/browse/infer
I invite you to look through the lists. It is clear that the majority of the entries either implies or is compatible with your interpretation, but that much was clear from the onset. But many of the entries do strongly suggest the usage i advocate is possible. Most importantly, believe is listed as a sononym for infer. It is impossible, i think, to argue infer does not mean what experts in inferrense say it mean.
You call my usage obscure. So is quantum theory. I would argue that most scientists dont grasp the nature of information very well; that many can hardly give a proper defintion of entropy or the second law of thermodynamics. But i think all scientists will argue that the way they want the word to be defined - and they way they intend to use the word - is however the experts in the relevant field define it. For example, a biologist may say that "atoms are a bit like solar systems, except we dont quite know where the electrons are, they are sort of smeared out" - its a quite incomplete statement, but it would not be right to argue scientists are somehow diveded over the meaning of wave functions and quantum mechanics.
You write that I have to proove a list of things. Why? I just claim believe can take on a special meaning - that does not imply that one set aside the usual rules for plausible reasoning - and it is prudent to consider if atheists, especially those who happends to be scientists, use it that way. I am not a scientist, but i sure know I do!
Lets address Crispin Sartwell. What scientists are trying to imitate is plausible reasoning, and one - if not the most important! - part of that is that based on the same information, two robots who perform "plausible reasoning" should arrive at the same conclusion, whatever that may be. You can read Cox work and check that out.
Secondly, a very important lesson which he seem to allude to is that in order to reason on anything, one has to make assumptions, ie. assume some statements to be true. Once those assumptions are made, one can arrive at conclusions which carry different degrees of plausibility - the complete standard terminology is "degrees of belief" - and if one of those conclusions is especially plausible [my words: believeable], one can signify that by saying that on believe it.
We can formalize it like this. Lets call W all our knowledge of the world, and lets say we want to talk about our degree of belief in some statement A given our past experience, W. Formally this is written:
A | W (following the now standard notation first introduced by Cox).
As Cox showed, under mild conditions we can denote our degree of belief by a number, lets call it P(A | W), our "degree of belief" (yes, completely standard usage of the terms) in A given W.
What Sartwell notice is that we may have a degree of belief in A | W, but implicitly there is an assumption, namely that W is true (its a hard assumption!) and from there there is only one way to arrive at our degree of belief in A, which we call, P(A | W), and accept as 100% true per the work of Cox.
Thus behind every degree of belief (WHICH EXIST!), there is a belief that is held completely true, namely W and the value of P(A | W).
I think a more elaguant way of saying it is this: We have degrees of belief, but our degree of belief is fixed, or "we must assume the universe is there and is rational". Not exactly groundbreaking for a scientist :-).
There is abselutely nothing new in this. Its completely standard material in inferrense. The only thing non-standard is his statement "there is no degrees of belief" which is trivially false; the only thing he correctly argue is that there is not only degrees of belief, or no "naked" degrees of belief.
But assuming the opposite would seem to imply that two people with the same information could arrive at different conclusions. Not exactly something we want...
