No, my belief doesn't make anything. However, what everything is sources my beliefs, so the incomprehensible complexity of life shows that opportunities, such as for parasitic mechanisms like viruses to hijack cellular machinery to reproduce, which is what viruses do, are eventually taken advantage of. Life is incredibly ancient, shown to have begun before ~4bya. In that time it is not credible to state that such mechanisms haven't arisen to take advantage of the available niche.
It's comparable to stating that if the government issues EBT cards no one will claim them. The nature of biological mechanisms, their literally inconceivable complexity, makes such parasitic mechanisms inevitable in time, and there's been far more time for such mechanisms to arise than is necessary to make such event certain.
In favorable conditions bacteria can reproduce asexually every ~20 minutes. Each reproductive event has a small chance of going slightly awry, which occasionally produces mutations. You can do the math regarding how many mutations that generates in 4B years, but with any plausible degree of error in replication that is more mutations than there are possible species on Earth. That many opportunities for relatively short chunks of RNA or DNA that happen to encode instructions to replicate statistically guarantees they have arisen.
It's not a list of genetic code of viruses, or the tiny subset that cause disease in people. It's not much of a philosophy, and certainly not nihilism. It's just acknowledging that things happen when opportunities to happen arise, and the extraordinary complexity of biology has created so many opportunities for self-replicating parasitic mechanisms to arise it's just inconceivable they have not. Taking that statistical certainty in view of the easily reproducible evidence in our own DNA of relic fossil viral DNA that is stated to exist by entire industries of specialists that have specific expertise in the field and agree on that evidence - even without the voluminous other evidence of viruses that exists - is enough to convince me viruses are real.
YMMV
Edit: I want to emphasize the word 'industries'. I'm not talking about AN industry, but a plethora of them, many of which depend on completely different kinds of products based on using the viral form to create economic returns. From vaccines to CRISPR, from bioweapons to food additives, mechanisms found in viruses are used to produce products that make money. I don't know what you call a philosophy that simply looks at what exists and acknowledges that it exists, but that's the philosophy I ascribe to.
If bacteria, viruses, parasites were really as threatening as I interpret them to be on the basis of your statements, how could the many species have existed at all in the course of their existence on this earth? Why don't people die in immense numbers all the time? How can it be that people grow old?
From my point of view, the assumption that humans are capable of biological warfare is due to the belief in the total feasibility and specific targeting of what is intended.
But it is also said that each organism's biome is distinctly different from every other organism's, according to another theory. What some researchers seek to identify as "hostile", "parasitic", "killing", others want to find out as "beneficial", "interacting" and "making healthy".
Some years ago I read a scientific paper on the subject of tapeworms in the organism, which until then had always been considered enemies of the organism and which were now considered to have their benefits. Unfortunately, I don't remember where I found it. The organism is far more than its DNA, the so-called building blocks of life, if you take it as the ultimate realisation that all life is the same, is in strong conflict with what is happening at the higher levels of the organism.
Similar to physics, where there have been or are efforts to establish an all unifying theory, I see this in biology, where the all unifying theory is genetics.
Ultimately, this leads to the long-standing dispute between pure materialism, according to which all living things can be explained and manipulated on the basis of their individual parts, and what people call consciousness or spirituality, according to which there is an intelligence at work that opposes materialism.
The "truth" will have to be assumed somewhere in the middle, I think, without being able to pin it down.
Placebo research and how one's mind influences one's body and vice versa are the great unknowns that materialistically attuned minds are reluctant to engage with because it offers them too much fuzziness and uncertainty.
For example, it is still not really known why anaesthesia works the way it does and there has been research into this where patients have been operated on by surgeons in hospital using only hypnosis and felt no pain at all during the operation. This raises the interesting question of how much the body/mind does its own to become insensitive to pain and how much is externally supplied and ultimately you can't really tell the two apart.
Let me respond by stating I strongly agree that life isn't mechanical, merely the sum of it's parts. I personally consider humanity to be sacred.
Neither do I consider genes to be some kind of ultimate blueprint, particularly in view of epigenetics and the glimpses researchers are beginning to get of gene expression. Further, I also expect that numerous genes have more than one mode of action. In other words just because it can be shown that a gene affects some particular thing, that does not mean it doesn't also affect others.
Generally, I do not consider the sciences mature at all, but that we are merely beginning to grasp some potential in scientific understanding.
I don't consider viruses and bacteria as generally threatening either. Pathogens are subject to the fact of evolution, and one aspect of that is that any organism that degrades it's environment reduces it's prospects for survival. A virus that is immediately utterly lethal almost completely eliminates it's ability to spread by killing it's hosts before much opportunity to be transmitted can be taken. The more lethal a pathogen, the less virulent it can be (the less it can spread).
The vast majority of viruses and bacteria aren't pathogens, at least not human pathogens, and some, such as I discuss in the OP here, are beneficial. It is not commonly understood that bifidobacteria in our guts is critical to human health, for example, and without our gut fauna we'd just die, unable to digest food or prevent infections.
However, there are pathogens, and that is why we have immune systems. Evolution creates a tension between host immunity and pathogen virulence and lethality that has been ongoing since life arose.
I do not only consider material, mechanistic factors real, but reason is the basis for understanding. Rationality is not materialism. Regarding cognition, consciousness, or how persons relate to bodies, I have strongly criticized the view that we even have a word to describe it. We are at a laughably rudimentary state of understanding what it is, and it is provable that consciousness continues when we are unconscious, such as when we sleep. This exemplifies the absolutely inadequate understanding presently attained by scientists studying it.
It is very, very hard for most people to honestly state they do not know, and the more educated and specialized they are, the more difficult it is to overcome hubris and not overstate confidence in their understanding. People allow insuperable speculation to overcome superable reason. For this reason I consider humility to be the foundation of wisdom, and try to carefully differentiate between my speculations regarding what I believe or think, and what I consider factual and have confidence is real.
It is useful to keep in mind that science is based on falsification of what can be disproved, not proving some theory is true. Every scientific theory will be found to be false in some way, and science will progress in that field when that happens. That's how science progresses. Therefore I try to be open minded regarding my beliefs, and prepared to change my mind when something I believe is fact is falsified. If I do not do that I will believe what is not factual, and that will cause me to act contrary to what is right. I do not want to wrong people, so I strive to correct my understanding as reason allows. This is why I find criticism so valuable, because that is what best falsifies things I erroneously believe.
For the most part, I can agree with what I find as overriding statements in your comment.
I think it is a paradox, in a way. As I noted in the other comment, "facts" are a word that comes from the origin "to do ", they are therefore always open to attack.
The moment you accept a fact as disprovable, you are following a logic given by others (which coincides with your logic, otherwise you would not be able to follow it. However, all inner logic ultimately follows conscience and what one subjectively deems significant).
Our entire modernity prides itself on being fact-oriented when it comes to research and experimentation, but it shies away like the devil shies away from holy water from naming the role of the scientific experimenter (as observer and evaluator of his work) as a decisive influencer on the success and failure of his research and experiments. The objective observer does not exist. Objectivity is completely excluded in human social interaction. You would otherwise have to have someone observing the observer, who in turn is observed by an observer, and so on. (I assume you will name blind and double blind studies, but they are not saving from many other experiments where nothing is done blindly).
I am not negating your statement, I am merely mentioning its weakness, but also accepting its strengths. But I differ little in my own attitude from yours, I would say.
While we all have biases, these biases do not completely exclude objectivity. Objectivity should not be considered only an absolute, but is a range. We are all more or less objective regarding the variety of things there are, depending on our beliefs.
Some of us strive to be utterly objective, and some of us strive to be utterly faithful to a given dogma. I strive to eschew the latter because I believe we are incapable of ascertaining understanding of the reality we are part of due to our limitations. I may be accused of taking objectivity as dogma I am faithful to, just as I note that Atheism is as insuperable and dogmatic is every other religion. Every argument that faith in God is insuperable factually also can be turned around and apply to belief there is no God.
You are right there are weaknesses in my rationality.
But that is exactly what prejudices do, they preclude objectivity, because otherwise they were not prejudices, i.e. preconceived views, but an open result. A result remains open as long as you leave it open. If one "closes" it, then one has subjectively agreed, nothing more. There is nothing wrong with that, one should just be aware that it is so.
I state that objectivity is not needed to move in relationships. It is, radically speaking, even irrelevant, to want to establish objectivity within human relationships and to even try is the horse's mouth here. I must first completely destroy my belief in objectivity in human interaction so that, relieved of this burden, I can talk to each other on a reasonable basis. One cannot "be a bit objective", objectivity is understood as absolute and is also applied in this way, trying to beat another's arguments to death by bringing his or her "false" subjectivity into the field against one's own "correct" subjectivity (backed up by "objectivity").
I consider it a misapprehension to give objectivity this relevance.
HaHa! Yes, I must always laugh at the claim to be an atheist. :D chuckle.
Nothing could be less true, IME. A lot of things have almost killed me. Only one thing has ever made me want to die, that most dangerous of things, a relationship. The utter lack of objectivity produces behaviours that are obviously crazy. Those people are pretty easy to avoid. What's far more dangerous is people that claim to be objective and aren't. If I believe their claims and trust them to view their skills and work objectively, and instead they're arrogant and conceited, they can ignore dangers that put me at risk, cost me money, or do harm to people I am trying to do good for.
Objectivity is born of humility, and part of the foundation of wisdom. Bias is always a negative, and extreme bias is obviously irrational. Many scientific papers are not reproducible, and bias is a terrible problem that degrades the quality of research, clouds our understanding, and reduces the prosperity and felicity of humanity.
Pretty hard to overestimate it's cost, or of the benefits of objectivity.
Heinz von Förster once put it this way- I guess, it is mostly him who influenced my stance on the topic of objectivity (I watched all what is available about him and some books as well as texts and interviews with him):
What you say about "objectivity" actually is more telling about you as a person than about objectivity :) Same counts for me, of course.