hotflungwok I think you are making the same mistake that most rationalists make when they enter into this argument.
For a person of faith, God is at the root, the beginning of all things. You implicitly accept that knowledge is attainable. However, as I pointed out before, you have built that knowledge on the premise that the sensory input you received is valid. You accept physical principles that were shown to you by your subjective experience as a baby before you started to question the evidence of your senses. You are implicitly accepting that the ‘mystical revelations’ you received as a child are a reasonable foundation to build all of the rest of your knowledge upon. A mystical revelation is kind of like discovering something new as a child. Astronauts have reported such experiences when they escaped the atmosphere. Having a new experience that is outside of the realm of your carefully crafted internal cosmology would count as a ‘mystical’ revelation. You have crafted that cosmology on a foundation of experiences that you had no prior modelling for, the conditioning and imprinting that as a child you trusted enough that you learned to repeat experiences that you had only had once until you were able to accomplish a similar effect. Every single step that you made as a child, before you turned the knowledge into rote mechanical behavior was an act of faith. All subsequent steps have been built upon those early acts of faith. However, the one step that is all-encompassing that is relevant every moment of your life is the idea that knowledge can be attained at all. You have accepted it implicitly because you have developed an internally consistent and repeatable cosmology. However, many people’s hallucinatory realities are internally consistent as well. It is an act of faith to believe that one can interpret data from the random energy fluctuations that we know of as particles. To hang a consistent form upon these building blocks requires the trust of our senses, and the trust that we are interpreting them correctly.
Faith is at the core of everything we know. Faith is where the objective and the subjective intersect.
Reasoned inferences are not faith. Accepting your senses is not an act of faith, certainly not when you acknowledge both the axiomatic nature of doing so and their faliability.
These are all very poor attempts to justify faith. They rely on equivocation and category errors. Accepting that your senses show that you are holding a gun to your head is just not the same thing as pulling the trigger with the “faith” that the gun isn’t loaded, even though you haven’t bothered to check.
Maybe we can split faith into two different parts. The first is a guess, an expectation, about what is going to happen in the absence of evidence (or when the evidence is not complete.) Everyone has this type of faith, if only that a safe won’t fall on you when you walk down the street. Even when you’re position is backed by induction, you never know for sure. This kind of faith is necessary to survive in the world, and is not at all the enemy of truth.
There there is the faith that consists of a position held despite the absence of evidence, or in the face of evidence. I’ll not bring up religion. The poker player who is sure that this time he’s going to win, despite losing for years has this kind of faith. My brother has made money off of this kind of guy. The husband ignoring evidence of infidelity. Some politicians have this kind of faith also.
This kind of faith is the enemy of truth, since truth and evidence is very threatening to it. If you give the gambler a spreadsheet summarizing his performance over the years, you are not going to get thanked. The best that will happen is that he’ll tell you why next time will be different.
I think you’ve been defending the second type of faith, the one we’ve been attacking, with examples of the first, which is fine.
lekatt, you have zero right to say anything about the debate over science. When confronted with DIRECT EVIDENCE that your claims are false, you continually run away and shift to other threads or topics, ignoring facts that do not support your claims.
Pam Reynolds was not brain dead for hours. Her “NDE” began under nothing more than drugs: LONG before her heart was stopped, let alone her brain showed no activity. And so on. You haven’t bothered to defend these points: you’ve simply run away from them. Until you address them, why should anyone bother to debate you over the validity of science or evidence when your conduct is thus?
The above is sort of unfair. I’ve been reading your arguments and finding them quite admirable. The good works that a Christian does are of a different character than those of a scientist, but I do not believe that they are of some quality that is somehow ‘better’ than a scientist. How many fewer people have died because of the discovery of germs?
It’s not a matter of ‘justifying’ faith. It’s a matter of defining it. Most rationalists use it incorrectly because they are seeking confirmation bias. IE, people of faith are idiots, once that is proven, I can move on. People make leaps of faith all the time. Because of this linkage of the words faith and idiocy people will go into these long arguments trying to defend reason as though faith and reason are even in conflict.
Faith DOES NOT mean: A belief in a fairy tale imaginary being that doesn’t really exist. Which seems to be the definition many people are working with. Faith is much deeper and more intrinsic to the human condition than that. What’s disingenuous in this argument is that most of the argument is centered around defining the playing field in such a way that a pro-Faith argument cannot be made properly. Why are discussions of faith in economics not valid? Why are discussions of faith in macro-systems irrelevant to an overall discussion of the value of faith?
People who believe in god are also impelled to kill people who disagree with them. Doing good things for people doesn’t require faith. You could have charity and homeless shelters without religion. People do the charity work, religion is just an excuse.
Spiritual experiences? This word that you’re using, ‘evidence’? It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
:rolleyes:
These ‘skeptics’, you can prove that do little or no good? I would argue that getting people to shuck their illusions and try to see the world as it is and not as they want it to be is good.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Where did you go to school?
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Wow. Scientists don’t understand the world we live in?
No, nothing a baby does is an act of faith, it just does them. There is no understanding, no questioning, just action and reaction. If I do this then that happens. Therefore, that happens when I do this. These ‘mystical revelations’ are only mystical if you choose to call them that. New things are not always mystical, and investigation should clear up any mysticality around them.
It is not an act of faith, nor is it a belief, that we can interpret data from the ‘random energy fluctuations’ that we know of as particles. We do it repeated, accurately, and consistently. If something is wrong with that input, like from hallucinations, then there is an outside problem, regardless of inconsistencies.
Empirical evidence is a perfectly good model to base predictions on. You don’t need faith to do it.
You are making an argument on semantics. Yes, things are defined the way you define them because you choose to define them that way. A mystical experience is like having the experience of a child after you are no longer a child. You have defined ‘mystical’ as some sort of disease that needs to be cured. I have defined mystical as an experience that is outside of our phenomenalogical field.
All interpretation is subjective. At some point you took a leap of faith that allowed you to believe that your interpretations could be accurately modelled. If there was no understanding as a baby, when did this understanding suddenly manifest? I see understanding as a process, you seem to see it as an event. I have a baby who will be 5 weeks old tomorrow, and yes her initial experiences are all action/reaction, but as she becomes aware of the results, understanding occurs.
Sure it is: that’s what these equivocations are all about. Attempting to convince folks that just because they assume that the sun will rise tomorrow that believing in faeries is laudable and no different.
A confirmation bias is when you ignore failed results and only accept positive ones, giving a skewed perspective on results. I think you are misusing or misunderstanding the phrase.
Please try not to lie. I’ve never said that people of faith are idiots.
Again, you’ve just equivocating here. Inferences are not faith beliefs or convictions.
But they clearly are. Reason rejects the method of faith.
Because these are changing the meanings of “faith” on the fly, i.e. equivocation.
Actually that’s not true. I’m not sure where you’re delineating between “baby” and “small child” (lots of people call 2-yr-olds “babies”), but developing trust in caregivers is an essential task of infancy. Starting at 7 months (which is about when they realize they are independent beings), they develop separation anxiety. There are so many cites for “babies/toddlers need to trust their caregivers and need predictable lives” - start with Erikson if you’d like.
Also, small children don’t generally know the difference between fantasy, dreams and reality, and they have no real sense of time. Pretty much everything is “mystical” to them, and it all happened “yesterday”.
Actually we’re pretty much defining them the same way. The difference is that a rational person will try to make an event non-mystical by investigation. They will expand their phenomenalogical field. If you have what you think of as a mystical event, and conclude that it was god, then you haven’t actually explained anything, you’ve just shrugged your shoulders and said ‘godidit’. That conclusion doesn’t even have to have any evidence for it to be accepted, just a perceived lack of evidence of other explanations. Or even a strong desire for it to be the right explanation, regardless of evidence. I think that saying something is ‘mystical’ and leaving it at that without objective investigation is a failure of intelligence.
Yes, understanding does occur, but without the need for faith. Your kid doesn’t need faith right now to use her senses, she just does. Things behave as if they were working. Once she gets older and understand them better she won’t need faith either, because she’ll have all the empirical evidence necessary to come to the conclusion that her senses work. She passed the point of faith without realizing she ever came to it.
It’s not a dichotomy at all, where did you get that? My contention is that empirical evidence can serve as sufficient evidence to make predictions without having to use faith. I didn’t say that you had to choose between the two, just that one was unnecessary given the presence of the other.
The delineation point doesn’t matter. Children pass the point of faith without being able to know it was there. By the time they could have needed faith to conclude that their senses were accurate, they have enough empirical evidence to come to that conclusion without it.
Is “empirical evidence” a model? Or is evidence interpreted within the model? (Perhaps you meant “framework” or “worldview” or “epistemology”.)
Are predictions based on evidence or on hypotheses that are formulated from the evidence?
And how have you determined what is “perfectly good”?
In any case, from what I’ve seen in this thread, there are those who think that there is value in faith and those who think that faith is useless. Some of the disagreement seems to be about the meaning of faith.
I think that is “perfectly good” to say that I have faith that what I’ve read from well-respected scientists is, in fact, true. I have not independently verified everything that I’ve read (nor am I the one who determined which scientists are “well-respected”). But, based on what I know and what I’ve experienced, I think that it is reasonable to assume that many scientific claims are indeed true. In that sense, I think that I have “faith” that is consistent with the first meaning of **faith ** in The American Heritage Dictionary: Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
Please show me where I made any mention of faeries? After you discover that I didn’t, please define faery for me.
I disagree.
I said, you implied it. If you disagree with that implication, by all means show me where I am in error, but I think it’s a little bit early in our discussion to start calling each other liars don’t you think?
Every action we ever take is based off of incomplete information. To have complete information we’d have to know everything. Acceptance of probability is an act of faith.
Faith isn’t a method.
No one is changing the meaning of faith. I am going with the dictionary definition. You made an assumption, see above as it regards faeries. Please do not place the responsibility for your inaccurate assumption on my argument.
Mystical and Mystery have the same root. Mystical is essentially the experience of a mystery. To state that mysteries can be solved through reasonable inquiry is a truism. The fact that a mystery can be solved doesn’t change it’s nature as a mystery prior to it being solved.
I disagree. It is through faith that you and I can come to a common comprehension that I continue to use some of my life energy to communicate with you. Barring that, it is through faith that I might be able to glean some new perspective from you, you from me, or we from one another that I continue communicating with you. Or thirdly, that someone reading this will gain or provide some insight. If I did not have faith that some variation of understanding could occur I would not waste my time speaking to you.
It still appears like you are making them mutually exclusive to me.
It’s not faith in their senses, though; it’s faith in the world, in their world. Faith in their efficacy (because their actions consistently cause reactions) and faith in their inherent value (because their needs are met). And there are kids who don’t get it - Reactive Attachment Disorder is one possible result.
Those experiments with physical reality have significant ramifications for their emotional reality, that’s all I’m saying - it’s not “random and meaningless”.
[QUOTE=Alwrong]
Is “empirical evidence” a model? Or is evidence interpreted within the model? (Perhaps you meant “framework” or “worldview” or “epistemology”.)
Shrug, pick one. You seem to understand what I mean.
Does the distinction matter?
Verification? Objectivity? Repeatability?
True. The word faith can mean several different distinct things, and I think people are mixing them up. I’m arguing against religious type faith, where there is no objective evidence for the object of faith. Having faith in something because empirical evidence leads you to that conclusion is another type of faith, one I am not against.
Yes, it’s perfectly ok to not know something. It’s when you’re happy with that, not investigating it or making an attempt to find objective evidence to explain the event, or you just slap some non-explanatory conclusion (goddidit) on it, that the failure of intelligence occurs.
Is it faith or evidence? Do you have an actual reason to believe I’m communicating with you, or are you just hoping really hard? I’m arguing against the second kind of faith. The first kind of faith is just a conclusion drawn from evidence. I think you’re using the first, and not the second.
Why? I’m not excluding the possibility of using evidence and faith, or of just using faith, I’m just saying that unreasoned faith is unnecessary, and empirical evidence can stand on it’s own. I’m not mandating anything, just ascribing attributes.
I never said it was random and meaningless. Children have trust in their parents, drawn from empirical evidence. Mommy feeds me, so I trust mommy. Unreasoned faith never enters into it.