I think the OP has a different (I’d say wrong) definition of faith from what is usually meant. Faith is not the same as “blind faith.”
Presumably the OP has faith that his car will get him to work tomorrow, or that the sun will come up, or that his parents love him. He can’t prove any of these things, although he has experiential evidence. Religious faith falls into the same kind of category.
Faith is good and necessary to live a functional life. You have to have faith in the laws of physics, but also faith in the good intentions of other people. How can you drive down the road if you don’t have faith in the other drivers not to veer into your lane?
No. I think that most people with religious faith (and they can step in and correct me if I’m wrong) believe that the facts, whatever they are, support their belief. I don’t think they go around saying, “it’s obvious that my faith doesn’t reflect reality, but I’m going to believe it anyway.”
Their facts may be wrong (they think God is real when he is not, perhaps), but the act of faith is still the same, even if it is misplaced faith.
No it doesn’t, because there’s no evidence for religion. And on top of that, it makes plenty of claims that violate physical laws or are mutually contradictory. Religious faith is blind faith. It isn’t remotely like having “faith” that your car will start in the morning.
Okay, I see my previous post is making an argument that has already been made, and the question is ‘is religious faith equal to the “good” kind of faith, like in your fellow humankind, or is it “blind” faith.’
Well there’s not going to be any kind of agreement. There is no scientific basis for religious belief. But billions of people experience real results, real benefits from it – comfort, hope, encouragement, charity, etc etc. Whether that’s a real, supernatural power or a pyschological illusion doesn’t really matter in terms of the faith having value and purpose.
Because they are sufficiently irrational to deny such facts when they look right at them. Religion isn’t subtly wrong, it doesn’t take some great intellect to see that it’s nonsense; anyone who isn’t outright mentally disabled is smart enough to see through religion. They just don’t want to.
Contradictory like light being both waves and particles at the same time? Science has contradictions too, and we all agree it’s because we don’t competely understand it all yet. That doesn’t stop you from appreciating the sun.
As I already pointed out, the evidence is against you. Faith is not good for society; that’s just one more baseless assertion the believers like to make.
Only because we have a better understanding of quantum mechanics. It certainly seemed like a contradiction when it was discovered.
First, I claimed it’s good for me. I didn’t claim it was good for society. “Religion” as an institution has been used for both good and evil, just like most other human institutions. That’s not a reflection on the value of faith, it’s a reflection on human nature.
I don’t want to get into an argument with you about how ridiculous religion is, both because I think I’m pretty clear on your position, and also because I agree with you; I think it’s all dead wrong (simplistically; I don’t feel a need to get into an in-depth discussion of my personal ‘spirituality’, or whatever, here).
I do agree with your first sentence. But, my point is that all humans are sufficiently irrational to deny all sorts of facts, usually in such a way that they don’t even realize that they are doing so.
A prime example is relationships; people think they love other people when in fact they do not. People think other people love them when those other people do not. People build emotional realities around themselves all the time, despite a hypothetical rational and objective analysis of human interaction. You do it. I do it. Everybody does it.
We are not all mentally disabled; this is a feature of humanity.
It may be that Religion, or religious faiths are unproductive/unhealthy/encourage other sorts of irrational thought/manipulative, but the act of faith is not unique to religion, and is universally human.
Despite the OP’s no doubt spotless intentions, this is a discussion about what words mean (again! sigh!) rather than a discussion about whether faith is harmful.
We could have had a discussion like this:
OP: There is a particular kind of faith that seems harmful.
Chorus: Ooh that’s interesting, let’s discuss that.
But instead our discussion is:
OP: Let’s redefine the word faith to exclude the good kinds. Faith is always harmful. QED.
Chorus: But that’s not what the word means.
OP: Yes it does.
Chorus: No it doesn’t.
It seems like it’s impossible around here to have a discussion about atheism or religion without redefining words. It’s very tiresome.
We can examine faith by examining the actions of those with faith, and how they react to their faith being broken. People with strong faith do not try to find things that will break their faith, and are quite blind to them. (That’s why scientists don’t have faith in theories - their acceptance is provisional.) Someone with faith in Madoff never processed how they could get big gains in a falling market. People with religious faith let archeological evidence disproving the Bible wash right off of them.
If you make an investment with your eyes open, and it flops, you are disappointed but no more. The Madoff investors felt betrayed. Many people waking up to the implausibility of their religious faith find it quite disturbing. I guess I never had strong faith, because my deconversion was rather painless.
So, admirable? No, since nothing that makes people close their eyes to the world around them is admirable. Which is what I was getting at in post 2, since conmen work on the faith of the suckers in them, which keeps the suckers from seeing that the scheme is too good to be true, or asking embarrassing questions.
Simply because something is wrong is not proof that it is irrational. For example, eugenics. At the time, it represented the very apex of modern scientific thought. We now know that the essential premise was mistaken, but many unfortunate people were subjected to needless suffering.
Overall, given his time and circumstances, I think Marx had some very worthy points to make, though mostly he was stating as revelation the thundering obvious. His description of the problem was valid, his prescription for the cure was snake oil. Being sworn to absolute and unflinching rational materialism, he had to make the foundation for his edifice to rest upon, and it had to be wholly rational. So he made one up. What else could he do?
My political views are, as you may know, progressive. I have good and rational reasons for that, but its not “turtles all the way down”, the structure finally rests on a foundation of morality, and that rests upon my irrational feelings about the nature of good and evil.
I will use a wholly rational approach to ending malaria, for instance, or distributing food. The rational mind can tell me the most likely approach to doing good, it will never tell me why I want to.
Examining the spiritual experience (for want a any better term) from a purely rational perspective is like hunting butterflies with a hammer.
It is hard to come up with critiques that are valid for every form of atheism, as while all forms of atheism lack a belief in God they affirm that different things other than God really exist. However the most common form of atheism around here seems to be naturalistic materialism, which states that the natural world is all there is (ie: Gods, spirits, anything supernatural does not exist) and that the world unfailingly operates according to natural laws. Given these premises then some of the questions that arise are:
Can humans know anything truely?
If naturalism is correct, then humans are merely the producty of a blind process of evolution. As such evolution selects only for survivability, not for mental abilities or other higher level functions. Earth is full of creatures that have little to no mental faculties and yet exist because they survive quite well without them. Why should we expect that what we perceive as reality is actually true and that our intuition is valid. It is entirely possible, given naturalism, that there are elements in the way that we percieve the world that is in some ways a group delusion that, nevertheless, persists because it helps us to survive.
Does morality have any meaning?
Given naturalism, the universe simply exists for no reason and for no purpose. There is no way that the world aught to be, it merely is. Therefore since there is no purpose of the universe there is no action that is against the purpose of the universe. A world where homeless people are rounded up and executed is exactly equivalent to a world where homeless people are rounded up and clothed and fed. There is no purpose inherint in the world that allows us to select one situation as preferable over the other. As Dostoevsky says, if God does not exist (ie: the world has no purpose) then everything is permissable.
Does the self actually exist?
Descartes said that “I think, therefore I am”. However in the materialist view thoughts are really nothing more then a result of electrochemical processes in the brain. These process, as are everything else, governed by the laws of physics, be they Newtonian (deterministic) or quantum (probabilistic). What is important is that there is no possible feedback mechanism between our thoughts and the processes in the brain. We cannot through our concious thought change the way our brain works any more than we can change the orbits of the planets. So given naturalism while we may believe that there is an “I” or self that exists, ultimately this is an illusion. Thought is just an experience that is forced upon us over which we have no control. The self also cannot exist as in the materialist world there is nothing that is able to make free choices.
So overall because I believe that I can know things truely, morality is objectively real and that I do actually exist I cannot be a materialist.
It really surprises me when people have no idea of these types of criticisms. These are all things that have not just been raised by the religious, but have also been raised by the non-religious existentialist and post-modernist philosophy of the 20th century. Naturalistic materialism is really a 19th century philosophy that is now I think completely untenable, yet it is the seems to be the form of atheism that I encounter the most amoungst those that identify with that label.
Hearing and seeing are not the only reasons people have for believing things. I (and I think you too) have never seen or heard Antarctica, but yet we believe it exists. Proof too is difficult because really no metaphysical principle, atheist or religious, can be proven. Proof is for mathematics and alcohol.
There are though a number of good reasons to believe that god exists based on observation. There are several arguments from natural theology (such as the contingency argument, cosmological argument, teleological fine tuning argument, ect) that conclude that the existence of God is at least more likely than not. There are historical arguments based on life of Jesus and specifically his resurrection which conclude that Christianity is likely true. Even arguments from personal experience, while they may not be broadly applicable, can still form a rational reason for an individual to believe in the existence of God.
To claim that there is no rational basis for any religion is simply ignorant of the beliefs of religious people themselves. You may not be convinced by their reasons, but that does not in of itself make them irrational. I know a lot of Christians and not a single one of them that would say they have no reason for believing in the truth of Christianity. I think the atheist insistence that religion is without rational basis is simply wrong, and ironic since it is usually itself something that is believed without rational evidence.
