Reason, Faith, Consensus & Government Decision-making Pt. 3

On August 16, 2007, Freedom Party of Ontario leader Paul McKeever was the guest of "Just Right", with Robert Metz, on radio CHRW (FM 94.9 FM, London, Ontario). The one hour interview was on the topic " How should government make decisions". The discussion concerned 3 common ways in which a person might come to believe something: reason, faith, and consensus.

The nature and definition of reason, faith, consensus, belief and knowledge are discussed. Along the way, McKeever and Metz address actual examples of government decision-making based on Faith or Consensus, such as government's response to a belief in a man-made, CO2-driven, global warming catastrophe, and a recent Progressive Conservative election promise to fund private religious schools - but not non-religious ones - with taxpayer dollars.

The interview has here been broken into 3 parts to control file-size and download times. This is Part 3 of 3.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• reason
• faith
• consensus
• government
• religion
• religious
• schools
• global
• warming

[PaulMcKeever]

My pleasure.

[pitcalco]

Thanks for that excellent answer.

[PaulMcKeever]

On that standard, having investigated the claims made by Al Gore in his movie concerning ice core samples and alleged CO2-driven catastrophic global warming, I would not believe a word uttered to me by Al Gore...with the exception of the phrase "I've lied."

[PaulMcKeever]

If the purported source of the belief is "sailors travelled there and mapped it" or "satellites took this picture of it", and if there were no evidence to the contrary, then a strictly rational epistemology would treat the existence of Australia as rational if experience told one that the source of the information had demonstrated his word to be worthy of trust.

[PaulMcKeever]

If the purported source of the belief is "God told me that Australia exists" or "We took a vote and 50%+1 of us were in favour of the view that Australia exists", then a strictly rational epistemology would treat the existence of Australia as a falsehood. (cont'd)

[pitcalco]

I have never been to Australia, but I believe that such a place exists. But it is within the realm of physical possibility that the whole world is just lying to me about such a place. How does such a matter fit in epistemologically?