You’ve provided no evidence that you understand scientific theories or the underlying epistemology.
You’re attempting to shift the burden of proof: You are the one who is claiming that scientific theories are “objective”. So far, you have not provided evidence to support your claim.
You are the one who introduced the phrase “strong faith”. I’m asking you to explain why you said “strong faith” instead of just “faith”.
What would you consider to be proof for the existence of a god?
So, is it your *opinion * that faith is dangerous or is it an *objective * fact?
Mind if I add one little point? It seems like a lot of posters here know people, personally, who cling to a demand that their God should fix their problems for them. Or who use their Church as an excuse for controlling, judging and bullying other people.
I’m not sure those acts have anything to do with “faith” per se. I think those are just human flaws that a lot of people have, with and without religious affiliation, with and without “faith”.
Maybe churches collect a lot of those people because they’re turning to God out of fear – but the point of an ethical church is to transform our fear into love (which then leads to action) and not just use it for their own purposes.
Sometimes people who trumpet their religion are the most fearful of all, and I’d argue that’s not really having faith - faith isn’t controlling, judgemental. And sometimes people who are completely without faith are extremely fearful because there just isn’t enough in their verifiable reality to sustain them, give them hope, let them see possibilities.
Personally I think there’s a good middle in there somewhere, and the happiest people I know of occupy that space.
That’s a valid point. Nobody interprets their experiences in a void. We all judge them using previous experience and input from others. We don’t expect students to spend time personally affirming every bit of information they receive from their teachers, although they may discover later that some of it wasn’t correct.
It’s all part of the human process. It’s imperfect because we are imperfect. We couldn’t really function in a society without some element of trust.
When we receive new and different information are we willing to change our beliefs? We can see that within the context of religion many people aren’t. I’d say that element of faith is an enemy of truth. As I said, I’m not even sure I’d call that kind of emotional attachment faith according to Heb 11:1. Often the truth requires some change in people that they are unwilling to make. In those cases denying or minimizing new evidence, justification, rationalization, all those tools, come to bear to preserve a familiar path. Believers and non believers share this trait.
I still maintain that there is an element of faith that is necessary to human progress.
Probably true, but the problem is that faith is what allows them to think that. If they get told god is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, etc, then there’s nothing that can’t be attributed to him. ‘God can fix my problems’ is an easy one to justify with enough faith. Faith isn’t the only problem, but it’s used as justification, it’s an enabler.
Um, no, they’re opinions. They might have some objective information behind them, but they’re still just opinions.
I wasn’t aware that it being questionednor that I had to prove it.
No, I asked a question, just like you did. If you don’t think scientific theories are objective, then perhaps you should try to understand what science is first.
Yes, but I said nothing about weak faith. You were putting words in my mouth.
I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it.
I think it’s quite that it’s an objetive fact that faith can be dangerous. Ask Larry Hooper.
And faith has some objective information behind it. Religious believers are still able to function quite well in the real world.
So, even though you haven’t really thought about it, you said “Absolutely. Show me the proof, I’ll change my mind” in response to “Are you open to changing your mind about anything, including the existence of god?”
Seems that you’re good at making “absolute” statements without really thinking about it.
Does it? All faith? Can you give cites for objective information behind all faith? All religious believers? Can you give cites showing that all religious believers are able to function in the real world? You didn’t qualify your sweeping statements so I figured I’d ask.
Did you hurt your foot when you leaped to that wacky conclusion? I don’t think about god, I don’t really care about god, and I don’t have a handy list of things that would prove god exists to my satisifaction. You got some evidence you want to trot out, let’s hear it.
So, are you actually trying to debate? You got a point you want to make, part of my statement you want to question, something, then do it. Until then you’re just trolling.
Hmmm … isn’t it against SDMB rules to accuse someone of trolling (outside of The Pit)?
And, according to you, it’s an acceptable debating tactic to say “I think it’s quite that it’s an objective fact that faith can be dangerous. Ask Larry Hooper.”
I’ll say just one more thing to you: I think that you know very little about the underpinnings of religion and science, and you are stuck in a narrow-minded belief system that you think is objective reality.
That the complexity seems to have a design principle behind it. The idea that elements bouncing off of each other in the void does not appeal to me. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in evolution, only that I do not believe in random evolution. However, the converse of this argument would constitute a quantum jump into the infinite coincidence = causality thread.
It doesn’t necessarily. I am pointing out the role that faith plays even from such a perspective.
Intervention implies a hand coming from outside that wasn’t involved every step of the way prior to that.
Do a degree you are right that it is an anti-fatalism. However, what seperates my argument from Goddidit, is that I am not trying to explain it by saying that Goddidit, I am saying that Goddidit, but that doesn’t explain HOW Goddidit. My argument rests on faith providing purpose. That there is some sort of conscious organizing principle at work here organizing things. In some ways that is human beings, we have the divine spark that makes us conscious of what are seemingly random activities of elements. If they are totally random, then from where does the desire to maintain and manipulate form stem from? To me, random causality is as unsatisfactory as “Goddidit” as an answer. If you are nothing but random particles interacting with one another based upon the placement of their subatomic particles, then why do you have any desire for a particular outcome?
Here’s the thing I don’t get. You’ve admitted that it ‘seems’ to have a design principle behind it, and that elements bouncing ‘doesn’t appeal to you’. But you’re holding it up as a core belief. So you believe that things are the way you want them to be, the way you think they should be? I don’t understand how you can build a belief structure on that.
Very good point. I think part of the problem here is that ‘faith’ has been associated with some of the people who have it in the shortest supply. Many of the people who are the most strident about ‘faith’ are so terrified that they are desperate and are trying to manifest a larger degree of faith by harvesting it in society. Their faith is so weak that they feel threatened by anyone who challenges it. However, for the crowd that is skeptical of faith, they seem like they are representative of people of faith because they are the ones that talk the most and the loudest about faith. Faith IS NOT about irrationally clinging to a set of beliefs like it is a life raft in a sea of hopelessness.
I am not building a belief structure, I am building a practical cosmology. In my experience, the evidence for an organizing principle is more compelling than the evidence for randomness. I think therefore I am. I am evidence of an organizing principle, because I as a life form organize form every moment of my life. You are evidence of a greater intelligence than I, because we together are firing neurons and interacting on an intellectual level thus creating a state of being us that is greater than you or I individually. Take this aggregation a step further and a step further and so on, and eventually you have massive macro-intelligences organizing form in the macrocosm through the microcosmic lifeforms that in aggregate make up the macrocosmic life form. Kind of like cells in a body. We are human beings, the aggregation of cells, proteins and the like, organized and maintained by a conscious organizing principle i.e. our will and intellect, which is then aggregated further to create things like corporate identities such as our co-membership in the straightdope message board. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you belong to the American corporation like I do, if not then it’s highly likely that you belong to the Western Civilization corporation. From there we move onto all of humanity, then humanity’s support structure as life on Earth + our machines, adding in the sun’s light as a necessary part of that process, and the rotation of the Earth, its orbit around the Sun, and so on and so forth into both the microcosm and macrocosm.
My existance is compelling evidence of a conscious organizing principle in the universe, even if I am the only one.
Practical how? What does your cosmology enable you to do or predict?
Do you have objective evidence for your organizing principle? Sounds awfully close to intelligent design, and I haven’t seen anything valid come out of them.
How is that evidence of a designing power?
Um, how? What do we make up that’s greater than what the two of us have?
Um… nope I don’t get this.
Our bodies are not organized by a conscious organizing principle. Most of what our bodies do is not under our control. It’s quite possible to shut down the conscious part of our bodies without affecting the automatic part (sleep is one example), and it’s also possible to shut down the automatic part without (directly) affecting the conscious part.
The connection between you and me is much different than the connection between the cells that make up my body. I don’t see how you can compare them like that.
But how is it compelling? You said ‘I think therefore I am’ not ‘I think therefore I was created by god’. Your existance only proves that you exist. You’re interpreting your existance to mean the existance of god. God creates all things in existance, I exist, therefore god created me, therefore god exists.
hotflungwok I am organizing electrons in your direction right now. Because I have typed this those electrons are arranged in a different manner than the would have been otherwise.
Now if you reply, you will organize electrons back in my direction.
It’s an organizing principle at work. One that is larger than either of us individually, because it requires both of us to do so. The existance of Fessie proves that the organizing that we are doing has created an effect larger than the two of us, because clearly Fessie is reading and has contributed to the organizing, thus showing that our organizing principle is even larger than the two of us.
There are many ways that I could modify my body, or cause it to cease functioning if I so chose, so by choosing to maintain it I am organizing it. I did not have control over it’s initial organization, in that I did not create myself, but I have since modified my form through the ingestion of different chemicals in my diet, and by having some control over where I decide to reside in space. I am in New York City right now because I choose to be, I could be in California, Florida or Bali if I’d had a mind to be. Your location in space is part of the form of your body, and is one of the aspects of its form that you have a high degree of control over.
I am ‘defining’ (for lack of a better word) God for the purposes of this discussion as all the consciousness in the universe in aggregate.
I’m curious about how you define random vs. organized? For evolution, is the randomness you object to the fact that there was no inevitability about the development of humans? I assume you are aware that evolution is actually far from random, in that it drives towards adaptation, if not any particular way for an organism to be adapted.
Though you say that our will and intellect is the organizing principle behind our bodies, surely you are aware that most of our internal activities are controlled by neither. Your will and intellect does not control your breathing, and does not make you take your hand from a hot stove, and we’re not even sure that it controls voluntary movements, since our concious awareness of wanting to move our arm happens after we’ve arlready scheduled the move.
If we look at the universe, we see the result of fairly simple natural laws which tend to organize it. Complexity can come from simplicity, as anyone who has played Conway’s Game of Life can attest.
No what I am saying is that the body is a system of structures that are mutually dependent in order to complete certain functions. That a trapezius muscle has no purpose without a spine, a spine without a pelvis, a pelvis without femurs, femurs without adductors, adductors without calcium, calcium without circulation, circulation without a heart. In otherwords the complexity would have to evolve simultaneously in order to do so.
This is a misunderstanding of what I am saying. I am saying that we are individual pockets of intelligence in a larger aggregated macro-intelligence. However, I am not seperating the different hierarchies of consciousness from the overall definition of consciousness. Yes, there is what we are conscious of, ie what we are experiencing this instant, but there is also our subconscious and our unconscious. In a way, RAM and Hard Disk. The whole hierarchy of consciousness makes up the full human intelligence, not merely our awareness of what is occuring right now.
Sure, I am not disputing that at all. However, anyone who has played Conway’s Game of Life is supplying the intelligence that helps organize it from simple natural laws. The initial configuration is an act of intelligent design is it not?