I think there are two avenues to obtain knowledge: reason and trust. Trust is when somebody tells you something and you accept it as a fact because you believe the person is both telling you the truth and knows what they’re talking about. Reason is when you work out the facts on your own from facts you already know are true.
As a sentient being, you need a massive body of knowledge to function. And it’s a lot easier to gain knowledge via trust than via reason. Trust just requires you to listen. Reason takes a lot more time and effort. You’ll never acquire enough knowledge to get by if you insist on verifying everything you’re told. At some point you have to accept some knowledge via trust or willfully remain ignorant. The other downside of reason is what rational thinkers from Euclid to Descartes to Russell have found - that you can’t start from reason. You need facts to form reasonable conclusions so you can’t use reason until you’ve already acquired some facts. You have to take your first facts on trust.
The downside of trust is obvious. Is the person giving you knowledge trustworthy? Are they telling you what they honestly believe is true? And is what they believe actually true?
So getting back to the topic, faith is knowledge you acquire via trust. It’s not the same as scientific knowledge but it’s not necessarily better or worse than scientific knowledge.
All you can truthfully say is that we do not know everything and what I believe is not based on science. Faith is by it’s very definition belief without scientific proof.
Or you could really blow someone’s brain up with this argument. If the universe is infinite then there are infinite possibilities so therefore God would have to exist if everything is possible etc etc…Infinity is proof of God.
If the physical universe is infinite, there are infinite possibilities within the universe. A hypothetical God would (or at least should unless we’re stretching the definition here) exist outside of the Universe, so it is a non-sequitur. The universe is commonly believed to be a closed system.
Here’s one for you though, if the universe is infinite, and possibility works the way you seem to think it does, then there is a planet out there full of Jesus Christs.
All knowledge is contextual and interrelated. Contradictions do not exist in reality, and they shouldn’t exist in one’s epistemology. Because of that, a being that is omnipotent and omniscient cannot exist, because it contradicts so many things that we know are true in reality. Belief in such a being has to be ripped out of our knowledge of the universe, and somehow stand outside it, i.e. among hypothetical things that cannot exist, e.g. round squares.
On the other hand, something like a unicorn does not contradict anything in the universe, so its hypothetical existence is perfectly valid. We just haven’t seen one yet.
The real question is whether faith has any value. I’ve never yet encountered any good reason, scientific or anecdotal, to suggest it has. Faith is vice, sir, not a virtue.
If somebody’s brain is blown by this argument, they needed to take it into the shop anyway.
Infinity does not mean everything must happen. Here’s a quick example: Pi. It’s a string of numbers that goes on to infinity without ever repeating itself.
When does the first A appear in Pi? If infinity implies all possibilities must occur, then at some point not only numbers but letters must appear in Pi. And not just numbers - if Pi is infinite wouldn’t it contain punctuation marks and musical notes and hieroglyphs? If infinity contains all possibilities then Pi must contain material objects as well - rocks and plants and animals and people and stars.
But somehow none of that happens. Pi goes on to infinity, never repeating, with only ten characters. Thereby proving that infinity can actually be quite limited.
Quick trivia question: what’s the last digit to appear in Pi?[spoiler]Zero. It doesn’t appear until the 33rd number.
“Why does faith not need scientific evidence to be certain?”
…cause faith ain’t science.
Faith is blind and not a certainty by definition. (pure certainties are objective truths backed by factual universal evidence. The rest is a gamble or educated guess at best). Yet folks will believe their faith as if it were an empirical truth, but that is neither vice or virtue (or good or bad, or right or wrong…it just depends upon the practice the faithful follows).
Most ancient cultures that believed in and shared in a supreme dogma were generally stronger (more unified as a community) than societies that were poly idolized. This enabled them to be the chief well springs for modern arts and sciences as we know them today.
Examples: The concept of ‘god’ was the motivation for Guggenheim inventing the printing press. To uniformly praise ‘god’, monks invented the music staff for hymns. The earliest universities mostly were theological but taught Latin and Greek chiefly so the bible could be better transcribed. Also, nearly all the world’s faiths have contributed to classic painting, music, architecture, literature and especially the different faiths have provided the reason for warfare (so the Godly can be righteous and not merely materialistic or nationalistic), bringing us jet planes, rockets and atom splitting (field of nuclear physics).
Dude, everything begins with faith.
Point being let’s not judge faith too harshly. Judgement is suspect. I know.
Infinity is not the best example of god’s nature, but ‘nothing’ is a better one. ‘Nothing’ is the most clean perfection as it lays outside comparison and forces beyond itself . I am thinking true ‘nothingness’ as in a void; devoid of being or mass, rate of time, energy or anything apart from itself. The ALL.
From the ALL, which is all there is in and of itself, it becomes something, now a polarity. It becomes apparent by perfection’s continuing grace or holiness.
Question: How can a true endless eternal ‘VOID’ exist, be possible? (all there is, has been, ever will be and it’s all the same without headdifferentiation) at the same time we do?
Answer: It’s possible as we are just illusions of ourselves and in fact exist as manifestations of the cosmic. We are life as the cosmic is presence. As all in the void is one. ALL is One. When we die we are dead forever as who we were. No dreams. No heaven. Like sleep. Like nothing and eternal. Back to godhead which is who we were (pre-life) and who we become (in death).
he didn’t make any claim, he said it would be surprising to find no life anywhere else in the universe.
think of it like this, next Saturday the biggest telescope in the universe is going on line for the first time, we will be able to count the hairs on a gnats ass at a distance of eleventytrillion light years if we want…where do you place your bet, life on other planets or only on earth?
personally I would bet every single penny I could scrounge on life elsewhere, but I have looked into the subject further than most people.
We can’t be certain about anything even with scientific evidence, given an absolute definition of certain. Science is built on assumptions such as “events have causes” and “the rules of the universe doesn’t randomly change”. And this approach appears to work to gain new knowledge and examine factual claims. It’s also pretty much part of how our brains look at the world.
Now taking things on faith is also part of how our brains look at the world, but it doesn’t appear to be a fruitful way of gaining new knowledge and requires making exceptions to the basic assumptions mentioned before. It also doesn’t offer any way of distinguishing the validity of one believer’s exceptions from another. To use Mohammad’s and Joseph Smith’s revelations as an example, as a mormon you have the choice of:
a) Be an arrogant egocentric and say “I’m certain that my innate feeling of the correctness of the current amended interpretation of Joseph Smith’s revelations stems from its truth and not from the culture I was born into, the experiences I’ve had and the propensity of the human brain for religious belief, while any Muslim’s innate feeling of the correctness of whatever branch of Mohammedanism he subscribes to is either the work of Satan or stems from having been brough up in a Muslim culture with the accompanying experiences.”
b) All religious and spiritual thought has at its base a capital T Truth of a spiritual component of the universe, and while my particular set of beliefs isn’t universally valid, it’s valid for me.
c) Faith is incompatible with certainty and I’m just going to not think too hard about it because my belief comforts me and gives me a place in the religious community I’m part of.
i love these threads. they always challenge me and push me to rethink what i believe. usually, i walk away thinking about things in totally new ways. these always make me grow.
my 2 cents, adjusted for inflation–
i think i am one of the few Deists around here. i think most people are agnostic or atheist but there are a few stubborn christian types as well.
actually i don’t think i know any other deists now that i think about it…
anyway. i empathize with you because i started devout christian. i hung with it until i started expanding my formal education. i started running into issues of cognitive dissonance–not necessarily between religion and the observable scientific universe–but just between how things works within the confines of christianity itself.
faith was one of these components. turns out that whole “faith of a child” mantra is more like “look, just believe it. don’t ask questions, don’t look for proof. just chew and swallow and move along.”
this is a gross over-simplification, i know, but the treatment reads a little something like this:
God talked directly to and interacted directly with human people. the term “faith” was often used, as in parables like the one of Job, but that is not the faith we as modern Christians are asked to accept. Job has direct tangible evidence of God and a personal, direct interaction. so the greatest test of faith in the bible is not the intangible, “believe without any proof” faith everyone else is asked to buy into.
this is where i start having a lot of problems with Christianity. a bit off the track, here–but it is why i am wayward from belief. it seems patently unfair that God used to just interact with people or directly tell them things, yet now “god tells people things” like “god told Pres Bush to go to war in Iraq.” nearly all cases of anyone “hearing from God” these days result in absurdly terrible or utterly pointless outcomes (remember when the world was going to end in May? then October?)
so what we are left with is a book that is written by guys–human guys–and the book itself constantly reiterates the fallibility of man. but trust THESE men. then you get several thousand years of translation, mistranslation, and personal agenda–but somecrazyhow we should have faith it’s still holy and the absolute undeniable truth of this existence.
personally i see faith–religious faith–as a mandate on irrational thinking. it demands an irrational acceptance of so many conflicting things and kind of asks you not to think about it beyond that, and certainly requires you to not ask too many questions.
i do not, however, believe the only caveat to allow for a true God of this reality to exist is “faith.”
Religious faith requests that you live in a world full of observable science, then go "but this ONE THING exists OUTSIDE that world.
–which, btw, to me, science is just the observable reality and the correlations of events. it’s not like some polar entity to religion…it’s just how we see things ‘work.’ it’s constantly evolving as we learn more and more, but it’s a pretty solid model that enables us to exist and perform in this reality. it’s not anti-god or anti-religion–in fact if God is real in any form, then He is part of Science.
so far, every super natural thing in history has been nothing more than an event we lacked proper understanding of–but eventually, we usually figure it out and demystify it.
this model of reality works. and as a deist, my personal God-model fits into this reality without much conflict. but faith and prayer become a bit of a sticky wicket if i think about it too much, hence deism. and trust me, i think about this stuff the most of all things.
so why doesn’t faith need proof to be certain? in the case of proof of God, it works out well for the believer insomuch as science (or naysayers) can no more prove there IS a God than they can prove there IS NOT a God. so the faith is never challenged in that regard. faith cannot be challenged in that regard.
a good example of faith is this last election.
Conservo/reps all had “faith” their guy would win. this faith was more powerful and held more sway than the functioning, mathematical reality against it. they had this gut feeling, this fluffy logic about how they would win. facts and numbers be damned! but how’d that turn out?
faith seems like a pretty unreliable model. it works for a few things, but ultimately it’s a crapshoot. that doesn’t mean God isn’t real–because as i said, i’m irreligious, yet i believe there’s some model of God out there. i cannot logic that he does stuff to or for us, nor can i logic that cultural, regional semantics cut us off from whatever God is (nor do they grow us closer to It). one of the biggest anchors of my belief is that our understanding is limited. not just limited by the absolute current edges of knowable science, but because we are all individually bottlenecked by what we can personally know. i call this bottleneck “our IQ.”
so, for me, the ever-expanding sphere of cause and effect–known as reality–hits whatever arbitrary limits, and that’s where i start thinking there could be something more to the big picture.
a good example of this is the start of the universe. maybe i’m stupid and wrong, but from my point of view, “something” starting this universe is as plausibly the base-core of all things (what i call God) just as plausibly as it “just happened.”
that is not the judeo-christian creator God. it’s more like…reality glue.
and i think that glue will, someday, be more understood.
your question is a humongous one and i’m sad to see so many people marginalizing it how they have here. i often wonder the same thing, and i hope brainier folk than me will really honestly ponder it–
what is it about the gods of religion that are so appealing to us? why IS faith enough? i can, on one hand, eviscerate Christianity or organized religion, yet i cannot grasp why it’s so prolifically successful. is it because of the aspect of Hope? the appeal of being part of something that transcends this reality?
i used to think faith was a natural component of existence. i maybe still do, but my beliefs evolve so constantly.
faith is implemented all the time–my go-to example is driving. we have faith as we go through intersections when the light is green. we have a great deal of faith that other cars will obey their red lights and not t-bone us.
faith is not valueless, but faith alone is irrational.
i guess reality requires both?
Yes. So long as there is some transition period in which claims are evaluated (that is, as long as you don’t hastily discard anything before the evidence comes in) - yes, there is evidence that the activity of accepting evidenced claims is worthwhile.
But how would you test the hypothesis that the best method of determining truth is via the scientific method? If you use the scientific method to prove the scientific method is best, you’re fundamentally no different than somebody quoting scripture to prove Biblical inerrancy.
This only works if life is illusory. I hope we can all agree that it’s real enough that it provides some sort of consistency?
An easy test:
Close your eyes and try to draw an object.
Repeat this action 10 times.
Open your eyes and try to draw an object.
Repeat this action 10 times.
Which provided the most accurate representation of that object?
The very fact that you can repeat something and get the same results shows that it works. If when conducting a scientific experiment you got different results every time, and all your variables were consistent, then the scientific method would be meaningless - or in other words we’d live in a universe where nothing is consistent.
But the universe is consistent, because when we do things we get predicable outcomes. Sometimes we don’t take everything into account and get surprising outcomes, but in those cases we go back and examine what caused the surprising outcome, and then go ahead and make repeatable tests to get that outcome again. And then we understand how the universe works a little better.
Faith doesn’t work like this. Someone at work (who is highly prone to demanding you don’t ‘jinx’ things) once said something along the lines of, “You know, it’s funny. Sometimes when I think/believe , [y] happens. But then times when I think/believe [z], [y] still happens!”
And I responded with, “Haha! It’s almost as if what you think/believe has no effect on [y].”
Go back in time not so far and faith was all anyone had. Science is a modern study that only recently within human history began to make sense. I’m actually surprised by those who claim belief in God yet feel science somehow shakes their convictions. Oh! Ye of little faith! If you have faith then somehow it must be true to you despite the contradiction of science. Literal fundamentalism shows a lack of faith to me, if your belief in God is based on the reality of words written by unknown men then may be more enamored with a fantasy than holding to a belief in a supreme being of unimagineable powers and abilities.
A simpler thing to consider is the nature of miracles. If miracles have a scientific explanation then they are not miraculous. If you believe in miracles, there is no need for science, indeed there is a mutual exclusion with science.
Religions vary a lot on one subject of faith, both between and within religions. In some ways many religions stress that the faith will not be rewarded in this world, but in other ways emphasize the earthly rewards. I imagine the latter is for marketing purposes, and highlights the nature of man, that faith is difficult to hold without any proof.
This misses the point (my point at least, if not Nemo’s). The question isn’t whether the scientific method works; I don’t think anyone here would argue that it doesn’t.
The question isn’t even whether the scientific method is the best, or even the only, way of establishing many things.
The question is whether there are any truths that can’t be determined by the scientific method. And the scientific method itself can’t answer that question. If radar is your only tool, you can’t tell whether there are things that can’t be detected by radar.
The fact that it works is evidence - recursive, for sure, but I don’t see why that need be a problem. Self verification, against a framework of actual reality isn’t such a bad thing, and should not be equated to self-verification standalone.
That’s certainly a question, but not the one I responded to.
Sure, but in such a situation, is it ever really acceptable to say “so we can’t use radar - let’s use imagination”? Is it acceptable to keep on using imagination instead of radar, even when it produces no useful results?
Science is the quest for non-contradictory principles. The scientific method is an approach to decide which of two or more competing explanations is correct.
“Faith,” alone, is an assertion unsupported by evidence, and unrelated to scientific method. If you believe the Pink Unicorn looks out over creation and the reason you believe that is based on evidence, this is not faith. It’s (probably bad) science.
By definition, then, faith not only does not “need” evidence; when evidence is used, what we have is science.
Faith allows for multiple, contradictory assertions (“It’s not the Pink Unicorn. It’s a giant Turtle, all the way down.”) and if one accepts that mutually exclusive principles cannot all be correct, one can readily see why faith has no place whatsoever in establishing what is actually the case. Moreover, where faith disagrees with science, it has no chance beyond blind luck of being correct. Historically, conclusions based on a scientific method have beaten out faith-based assertions pretty much every time.
This is not to say every conclusion based on scientific method is absolutely correct. But it is to say that a faith-based assertion has nearly no chance of being correct.
You may not need any evidence to be absolutely confident a faith-based assertion is correct. However that confidence is unwarranted where the assertion disagrees with conclusions based on the scientific method.