Well, if you insist on the Readers Digest version, I would say that the greatest inherent value of faith is that it makes reality accessible.
How is faithless reality inaccessible?
I mean, the above statement seems like a bit of a drive-by in it’s simplicity, but, to be more verbose about it, if you assert that faith makes reality accessable you must show that faithless reality is somehow wanting… somehow less in a significant way.
I don’t want to straw-man you, so please correct me if i’m wrong, but if you are going to assert that knowledge/relationship/understanding of God is that missing value then I suppose it’s fundamentally clear where we differ. I don’t consider the inability to separate out figments of my imagination from reality to be a worthwhile value.
I suppose the “Value” of faith will turn out to be something that like “Faith” is immune from any outside measurement, which should cast doubt on whether there is truly any value there at all. Ethereal, intangible value of ethereal, intangible faith smells a bit too much like snake oil. Og sure has a lot of bottles of it in the back of his wagon though.
I suppose an argument could be made for the value of the comfort some people derive from faith. That belief in certain falsehoods, or ideas that defy actual measure could have psycological value, especially if these ideas are the accepted social norm, which allows an otherwise awkward person to blend in, or where the idea fills some nagging why and allows the person to move on to more important and direct problems in their life. Can faith be a valuable crutch for a poorly adjusted mind, or for a mind unprepared to parse through harse reality?
Please tear the above to shreds. I’d love a deeper glimpse at this idea.
In the same way that a married bachelor is.
Hey, don’t blame me! 
You very specifically asked for something “condensed and focused”. I could write volumes about this stuff if I had the time, but I was honestly trying to accomodate your wishes.
It actually is a strawman, so thanks for catching that up front. There wasn’t anything about a “missing value”. Rather, you asked for the opposite of that: an “innate value”.
I honestly don’t mind, and I know that you’re new to these discussions, but unless I’ve given you some cause to believe that I have the mental acumen of a five-year-old and the character flaws of a serial killer, it really doesn’t facilitate our communication when you phrase things in the most rude and dismissive manner possible. If you won’t call my deity frivolous names, then I won’t call your mother a bitch. And if you won’t dismiss my faith as snake oil, then I won’t dismiss your doubts as ignorance. Fair?
Reality is that which is essential, necessary, and eternal. God is real. The universe is not real. It is nothing more than a probability distribution. “The atoms or the elementary particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” — Werner Heisenberg.
We’ll see whether that’s true. When come back, bring civility and respect.
Talk to Descartes. At some level, a priori axioms rule the roost, even for the most hardcore of rationalists.
The belief in objective, materialist reality requires a faith, or belief, or a supposition of the axiom that your senses are feeding you data that corresponds with something that is tangible, independent in its existence, and consistent in its rules. Liberal’s reality, on the other hand, adds an additional axiom concerning the existence of a God who is a priori supernatural and who can manipulate reality in a way that’s both consistent with the rules and potentially wildly improbable (the quantum water-into-wine argument as an example).
Now, if you accept Occam’s Razor as an axiom, naturally you’ll trim Liberal’s axiomatic God out of there, as it adds no power, only complexity. But what many people seem to forget is that Occam’s Razor is in itself an axiom, there’s no evidence that supports it being any kind of a deductible universal law.
This is starting to ramble. I’ll post more if my head clears.
An insightful post, but I’d like to correct one point. I don’t add an additional axiom. I merely begin with a different one. God is real, leaving the universe to be the unnecessary complexity.
ETA:
In keeping with the gist of your post, it is worth mentioning that the philosophical principle of falsifiability — the principle that underpins the scientific method — is itself not falsifiable.
Sez who?
I thought god was supernatural? You never did answer me.
That’s interesting, cuz this burrito feels totally real.
Me. (Helpful hint: you can almost always tell who posted something by checking the name at the top-left of the post.)
Actually, I answered you here, here, and here.
And what makes your feelings real?
Oh, you’re just making it up then. Alrighty.
What about here?
They can be measured by the appropriate medical practitioner, and affect this reality.
So since a bachelor cannot be married I can then assume that you similarly believe those who have no faith cannot access reality? Or am I misinterpreting your meaning here?
Just looking for some clarification really…
Well, no. That would be an affirmation of the consequent. A cow is a bovine, but not every bovine is a cow.
What I said was that “the greatest inherent value of faith is that it makes reality accessible.” I then said that only God is real. Therefore, the meaning you may take is that faith gives one access to God.
No problem. I’m glad you asked.
Several of us made it up, actually. It is deduced from the philosophical definition of reality, which is “Existing objectively … regardless of subjectivity or conventions of thought or language”. The source for that is cited in the linked thread.
You did not ask me any questions in that post. What did you mean by “answer” when you wrote “You never did answer me.”? If you meant that I’m unresponsive generally, then what did you mean by “never”? And if you meant that I didn’t respond to some particular post, why didn’t you just link to it when you complained?
But that’s just his feelings measuring your feelings. Sounds to me like your reality is a trivial tautology.
Nonsense. An oven is not part of a cake.
Still not really following the married bachelor analogy. Not terribly germain to what I’m actually trying to understand here so I will skip further clarification on that topic…
Let’s simply follow the course here as I understand it:
Faith equals access to reality. God is real(ity?). Let’s assume you mean that by God is real that you also mean God is reality (please correct me if this is not the case as this is the basis for how I proceed for the rest of my post). Therefore those without faith, i.e. “faithless”, do not have access to reality or what is real.
How do you define reality? Is God the sum total of reality? Is it not possible to “access” portions of that reality, i.e. feeling cold in winter even if you don’t understand reality is this way because God defines it as such? If your point is ultimately that God is an inseparable portion of reality I can accept that. I’m just trying to wrap my mind around the meanings of the words you are using here. Does access mean 1 or 0, yes or no, complete access to being able to comprehend reality, or total incomprehensiblness in regards to reality? Or does access mean being able to understand the underlying supernatural meaning, i.e. God’s will in regards to a portion of reality? Does reality also mean laughter, math, cheeseburgers, and anything else we can define with our limited perceptions, or is reality simply God?
Am I making sense?
OK, so what’s wrong with the philosophical definition? Why are you tacking on ‘essential, necessary, and eternal’?
I didn’t use a question mark, so you just ignored my post? Interesting. I was responding to your post, I figured you might want to respond to mine.
Um, no, why would you think it’s his feelings measuring my feelings? That doesn’t make any sense. I actually specified medical practitioner because they have access to various equipment that show bodily states, and knowledge to know what the number mean.
The heat the oven changes the cake, and can be measured as independent from the cake. If god affects this universe, then his effect should be measurable independently from the universe itself. Seeing as how I would like a response to this, I will put a question here: ?
Okay, no problem.
But you can’t draw the last statement from the others. It affirms the consequent. In other words, it’s non-validating. Let’s call faith “F”. Let’s call reality “R”. And let there be a rule of implication, such that F -> R does not imply R -> F. By that rule, although faith gives access to reality, it may or may not be the case that faith and only faith gives access to reality. Maybe something else, say “S” also gives access to reality, such that F -> R And S -> R is true.
I define reality as that which is essential, necessary, and eternal. Breaking that down in brief:
(1) Essence is that which a thing is to be. (Plato’s phrase, then to the Latin essentia.) Reality ought to be of such a nature that it could not have been anything else. Otherwise, there exists the possibility of alternates that are equally real but not the same. A contradiction of implication would emerge: R -> Not R.
(2) Necessity is metaphysical ubiquity. Reality ought to be of such a nature that it cannot be true that anything non-real exists. That should be self-evident, because otherwise, a contradiction of operation would emerge: R And Not R.
and (3) Eternity is a timeless state. Not all time, but the absence of time (and space, since time and space are incontrivertiably entwined). Reality ought to be of such a nature that it will not ever cease to have meaning; i.e., no loss of information; i.e., no entropy. Otherwise, a negation would emerge: Not R.
Yes. I’m having no problem understanding you so far.
To deduce does not mean “to tack on”. See my post to Sockswsandals.
It sounds like you’re all mixed up. You asked me three times why God is supernatural. I answered you three times that it was because of definitional tautology. Your “question” was simply a post that I missed seeing. You are not the only person with whom I am having these discussions. As I said before, a simple polite request with a link was all that was necessary.
Well, I think you’re giving medicine a bit too much credit; it’s largely still a guessing game at this stage, though there are some semi-consistent principles involved in it, and it does continue to evolve. But you’re missing the point in any case. The sensory object doesn’t make any difference. Whether the doctor is looking at you directly or looking at data from machines that looked at you, he is still seeing nothing more than light collected (upside down) on his retina. He’s not seeing you or the numbers. He’s seeing light. Physically, you are nothing more than a massive electromagnetic spasm suspended in a field of gravity.
Again, nonsense. Cakes don’t measure. You must allow for an agency outside the universe to measure God’s effects, just as you must allow for an agency outside the cake to measure the cake. It is useless to apply science to God; science is empirical by nature.
I don’t know why you think that frivolous silliness will add anything to your points. :dubious:
I hope you don’t mind me saying, but if you’re this much of a sophist in regards to those things that can be directly measured by your senses how is it that you feel that complicated ideas which arise from the complicated interaction of those senses (primarly the firing of neurons in the area of you brain that deal with experience and knowledge), like the idea of God, are more valid than simple ideas like hunger?
It seems that if you believe so strongly in being unable to truly know the world in which you live you should disbelieve even more strongly in the end result of what surely must be a very complicated internal process. The idea of God.
Basically, I’m calling you on an inconsistancy.
I am not a sophist. Not that I disagree with the philosophy per se. The problem I have with it is that sophistry is pointless, even if true, so one might as well act as if we truly do have some limited access to reality. I feel this a priori is rational, even if not AS rational as a sophist interpretation, and since I happen to enjoy collecting and exchanging knowledge I can be okay with that.
If you’re calling the above jump from complete sophistry, to limited empiricism “Faith” then you’re using the word in a context that is misleading and confusing. Sure it can be seen as a kind of faith, but it’s at such a basic level that it is required to even communicate. This communication is required to even comtemplate the idea of examining your reality empirically by cross-referencing some of your experiences with others in the same boat. Calling this step “Faith” is like calling 2 trout a “school” of fish. You might be right about it but it’s hardly significant enough to bother.
The problem with using Plato as support is that he lived in a world that lacked modern physics as was thus pretty unfamiliar with the behaviour of elementary particles. While this may work as a “philisophical” basis certain maths exist that accurately describe the real world and are expressed just this way. R -> Not R.
I have no disagreement with this (though that obviously doesn’t mean we’re right.) King of the non-real things that defy metaphysical ubiquity, I present to you “The Idea of God.”
Since Entropy is a demonstratable physical phenomenon, and the Universe may well have both a beginning and an ending in the timeline (this hasn’t been determined, and may be indeterminable) this idea forces you to exclude everything that reasonably could have caused you to want to define reality in the first place from your definition.
I think the problem here is not that the physical universe is not real, but rather that you’ve misdefined reality by basing your definition on the macro world and outdated philisophical ideals, then falsified it by aknowledging the seeming ubsurdities of the micro world (instead of generating a definition borne with those aknowledged), but unwilling to admit that your defininition is flawed you have appealed to “Faith” and ultimately invented a God that satisfies it.
Here’s a direct question, are you calling the entire universe God, or is God an outsider in your philosophy?
I LOL’d @ this btw. I suppose I could have injected a bit less venom. I kind of let my inner diatribe write that bit. >.<
Did I do any better?
(He’s right?) The problem with this kind of thinking is that people who use reason and logic to navigate through this world would never consider proof as “evil.” Your biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is that* if * you were to prove the existence of god, you’d also have to prove that it is worthy of worship over any other real thing in our experience. This line: I might prove to someone that God exists, is particularly strange. Religion already gets people one at a time. Real proof would convince us all. Since god, if it exists, doesn’t really want all of us, there’s really no point in believing without proof. God has chosen to exclude the majority of people from knowing him. Evidently we’re all on the “B” list.
Nearly 20 minutes later, I’m done thinking about Tris’s post. Not only don’t I see the clarity, but it doesn’t offer substance deserving of a month of pondering.
Is it supposed to have clarity? It strikes me as prose.