And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Amongst these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear: o clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
From The Guardian:
More people in Britain think religion causes harm than believe it does good, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today. It shows that an overwhelming majority see religion as a cause of division and tension – greatly outnumbering the smaller majority who also believe that it can be a force for good.
The poll also reveals that non-believers outnumber believers in Britain by almost two to one. It paints a picture of a sceptical nation with massive doubts about the effect religion has on society: 82% of those questioned say they see religion as a cause of division and tension between people. Only 16% disagree.
When a nation has an established religion that races to the bottom pell-mell in it’s desire to adopt and in some cases anticipate the dictates of secular progressivism, this is what happens. What has been substituted? In what do people believe? In socialism, in Gaiaism, in climocaust, in the BBC, in The Guardian, in the EU, in the UN, in pop science, in vague meliorism, in Oasis, in Dawkins.
For a spell in graduate school, there was a meme going around that Catholicism was a “comfort” religion. Some moron once asked me, on finding out that I was a practicing Catholic, whether I found it comforting to be so. I told him that I didn’t embrace my faith in order to be comfortable, particularly in grad school; that, as a matter of fact, it kicked my ass every day. The number of times I had it insinuated to me that it was impossible to be both intellectual and Catholic would make for a wearying litany, particularly from people who were ostensibly studying the Renaissance and ought to know better. I was in one seminar on Calvinism, and reaching for a packet on the seminar table well into the semester, my crucifix dropped out of my shirt as I leaned over to get it. The sudden calculation that this forced on the attendees, scrambling to consider what they had said about my faith and how it might have offended me, the startled silence–I’ll never forget it.
Intellectuals often believe that membership in a faith community proves narrow-mindedness and establishment leanings. They love to pride themselves on their independence from such purveyors of false consciousness. And yet, even as they speak of the transparency of others’ ideologies to themselves, they never consider their own, nor do they acknowledge their own arrogance. Christ, when asked why he spoke in parables, replied that if a child asked for bread, who would give him a stone? Where is Lacanianism for the masses?
What I believe in, in transsubstantiation, for example, is it absurd? Of course it is. But its promises are glorious, and its effects are palpable to me. Tell me, you who see this as a flight into ignorance and a refuge in hokum, what it is that what you believe has to offer me. Show me how you are transfigured by your knowledge. Make me believe in something worthy of my belief.
I am listening.
Man’s mind, his use of reason, is his only tool of survival, his only means of remaining in existence.
To provide for the simplest of his needs requires a process of thought—even to find a cave, and a bearskin and an apple to eat requires that he think and acquire knowledge. To exist beyond this level requires an even more sophisticated use of reason—to provide the food you will eat today, the car you will drive, the fuel that powers it, the structure that provides you shelter, the computer on which you typed this post, the vast electronic net known as the Internet, the life-saving medicines that protect you against disease and early death—did you know that just 100 years ago at the turn of the century the average life span in America was only 47 years?—the movies, the DVD players, the cell phones, the plasma tvs, the microwave ovens, the shoes on your feet, intercontinental air travel, internal combustion machines …………. I could make this list 10 pages long….. all of this is the triumph of reason.
Not a bit of it will ever come about by sitting and praying. Men existed without reason for centuries—and a terrible existence it was—yet he had all the religion he could swallow during that time. But he had nothing else, and his life was a brief, 25 – 30 year struggle, dawn to dusk, to find enough food to remain alive one more day, until starvation or disease or predator or rotting teeth or exposure or a simple accident or any other agent of death claimed his miserable life. That is man’s existence without reason—and religion doesn’t change it.
If this truth about reason versus faith is not “transfiguring” and “palpable”, then I don’t know what it will take to impress you—nor can I imagine what value you see in religion.
I will only add one thing. Faith is arbitrary. If faith is a valid means of gaining knowledge or validating beliefs, then anything goes, because anyone may claim to believe anything on the basis of faith—and there is no way to discriminate between claims, no way to say that so-and-so’s faith-based belief is “valid” and “proper”, while the next guy’s is not.
Thus, the faith of the 19 hijackers who murdered 3,000 people on 9/11 is every bit as valid as yours, it was every bit as “glorious†and “palpable†and “transfiguring†to them as your belief in transubstantiation is to you. And having claimed that your faith is valid, you negate any basis for condemning theirs.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the left embraces reason because it supports their politics; they don‘t, because it doesn‘t. The alternative is not reason-based socialism versus religious-based capitalism. Socialism has absolutely no basis in reason, as can be easily demonstrated by any five minute conversation with a socialist. By contrast, the moral validity of capitalism is based firmly on the fact that reason is man’s means of survival and reason demands one precondition to work: freedom. Only when he is free can man exercise that faculty—reason—on which all human survival ultimately depends.
And that is the knowledge that inspires me.
“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it” (Vaclav Havel)
Explains why the little British tykes religiously worship the ‘celebrity’.
My faith does not require me to overthrow reason, and it inspires me to compassion beyond the mere calculations of reason, or as Dawkins might say, the metrics of “altruism.” Why cannot they coexist?
Those who sat and prayed, I think it is safe to say, also were those who kept classical knowledge alive during all of those years of darkness. You may say that they valued that knowledge incorrectly or for the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t change the fact that they transmitted it, kept the classical tongues alive, provided the basis for what would become science. Would it be equally true to say that your faith in science and technology will prove to have been morally bankrupt when a terrorist detonates a nuclear bomb?
And what was happening during those dark ages? Who was building machines, who discovering new uses for plants and herbs, who introducing new technologies? Religious man. What provided the impetus to a new appreciation of nature? The desire to better understand God’s creation. You write as though reason and faith are mutually exclusive positions. My personal experience is that they are not, that they can and ought to be complementary.
But even assuming that reason were enough, would it be enough for the likes of me, whose desire is insatiable? And in practical terms, how would reason tell me to live?
The distinction is not between “faith” and “reason”. That’s a strawman. The distinction is between different types of unreason—a fact which used to be understood quite clearly, but has been lost as the self-declared advocates of reason ceased to study, and therefore to understand, faith.
Nor is the “faith” side blameless. There are plenty of instances of people flatly endorsing unreason, and gaining followers. What happens then is a cycle. The Michael Smiths see unreason, do not understand its source, and attack it—which then drives the faithful toward greater unreason. This is not to say that attacks on faith cannot be valid. It is to say that attacks based on faulty understanding will fail, precisely because they violate the premise that they are based on “reason”.
1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
…
10: And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
…
31: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
And there, right from the beginning, is the endorsement of reason among the faithful. God saw that it was good. Whatever the Creation actually is is the word of God, and He got it precisely as He intended. An atheist scientist attempting to elucidate some aspect of the Creation, and honestly accepting what is rather than a theory, has offered up a better prayer than many a chant intoned while a censer burns, and is more submissive to the Word than anyone insisting on the literal interpretation of a Book.
Regards,
Ric
While I am personally a Deist, I believe religion has been overall a positive force. In fact it is my thesis that civilization is not possible without religion. Religion imposes a moral code that allows large groups of people to co-exist in relative harmony. Unfortunately most people require the imposition of a moral code from an external source in order to behave in a civilized manner.
People who are Catholic get to enjoy G. K. Chesterton more fully. Bastards.
How do you figure, when x does not = y?
Think about that statement for a second. Faith is not always “arbitrary”, some faiths, like Dan’s and mine, because I think they are the same based on the long fancy words the nuns taught me, are supposed to be based on reason. Now you may not agree, but the Pope would, and so would thousands of monks and theologians who spent thousands of years trying to figure out how to justify their faith when they had all of this classical education behind them. Remember, the Catholic Church didn’t spring wholly formed from the head of some guy living in the desert. It had to first convert most of a pretty sophisticated society, people who understood scientific observation, the principles of logic and all of that stuff the Greeks thought up earlier.
When you say Dan’s faith is arbitrary, I think what yau are thinking about is the athority of the Holy See, because that can seem arbitrary, but arguably without that authority, there would be no tradition of reason behind the Church and faith alone would take precident. And that would be arbitrary. And is, in some severe cases of Christian fundamentalism.
So just to clear the above rambling up, Michael, I think your definition of faith is a bit off if you define faith as being the opposite of reason, and every Catholic Chatechist would agree with me.
..and that gives me all the basis I want to condemn theirs, or just quote an eight hundred year old speech where someone else does.
Dan,
What you say about your personal experience in grad school and the rampant hatred of Catholicism amongst center-left cum self-righteous Mainline Protestants is fascinating- E.B. Tylor, the father of modern anthropology saw little difference between “primitive†Mexican Indians and their Spanish Catholic masters, and that type of anti-Catholic attitudes is still at work in some quarters today (see Samuel Huntington’s verbiage on the “lack of civic sense†amongst Iberian and Arabian societies…).
The truth is that Mainline Protestant theology and Mainline/Sunni Islamic fundamentalism are based on precisely the same set of books known as the Pentateuch (The “Torahâ€Â) that forms the core of the Hebrew Old Testament.
The paradoxical fact that American Calvinism and Middle-Eastern Wahhabism are so different and antagonistic today even though they share a common theological source tells us a lot about the power of Interpretation, a legacy of Renaissance Europe: while Mohammedan fundamentalists sought/seek to imitate (“Taqlîd†or “imitation†in Arabic is the cornerstone of Koranic jurisprudence) Abraham, Moses, Joshua and Salomon, deliberately refusing any variance or adaptation to any change in context, Calvin and Luther chose a radically different path: that of toying freely with symbols and meanings.
The Protestants’ “return to the Scriptures†was only a mean to get rid of Vatican Orthodoxy: opening the door to continuous interpretation was the real goal, and the most enduring achievement of the Reformation.
For Islamic fundamentalists in general and Arabian and Afghan Wahhabis in particular, the return to Biblical/Jewish Law is actually an end in itself: unlike Protestant reformers, they don’t seek to interpret and won’t tolerate any argument. Their goal is clear: imposing Shariaa Law by the sword in every corner of the world.
Why Bush and his Neocon handlers view the government of Saudi Arabia as “our allies in the war on terror†evades me…
Dr. Vic is back!
Did the home give you a weekend pass for Christmas?
Dan, great testimony to the hope that lies within us. Thanks.
And Merry Christmas. Not in the modern sense of meaningless greetings, but in the rememberance that God took the form of Man to be our Sacrifce, and chose Mary, Joseph, and a little town called Bethlehem to begin that journey to the Cross. For this we can be very merry, indeed.
Thus, the faith of the 19 hijackers who murdered 3,000 people on 9/11 is every bit as valid as yours,
Ah, Michael, that’s the secularist multi-cultural cant that holds all religions/cultures are equally valid.
Reason is, indeed, practical. But it isn’t (or shouldn’t) be considered the opposite of religious faith. Catholisism (and Judaism) have long historys of reason being used as the primary tool to explore, expand and validate their faiths.
Ethical monotheism holds, by faith, that there is a God that expects you to do good. It is then up to you, aided by your God-given gift of reason, to figure out and pursue that good.
Radical Islam, aka Islamism, rejects reason in favor of suspending any thinking/reasoning on the mechanics of society. Their faith is not in God/Allah, their faith is in the word of the warrior, plagarist, pedophile Muhammad.
They may have roots in the same teachings, but they went in wildly different directions. A Methodist and an Episcopalian have very little in common with a Sunni Wahabbist when it comes to religion.
Let’s define our terms. Reason is the human faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the data provided by our senses. It is the faculty by which our minds use the information provided by our senses to acquire knowledge about reality.
Faith is the act of suspending reason, of accepting the truth of a proposition or assertion in the absence of, or even in contradiction of, any evidence, proof or logic.
The desire for these two to “coexistâ€Â, then, is the desire to exempt some aspect of reality from reason. It is the desire to believe in something that you know reason will not permit.
I have much more to say, but first a question: Why do you wish to exempt anything from reason?
Precisely. And failing to understand and account for the difference is not reasonable—it is a violation of the very terms by which reason asserts its ascendance. Reason has to be based on knowledge, has to have validated basic assumptions from which to derive its results. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you can’t reason on that subject.
As several have noted, “reason” and “faith” are not polar opposites. The two are incommensurate. They can’t be measured in the same units, or even on the same axis. At a deep level, faith is necessary for everyone. Quantum mechanics tells us that the impossible happens regularly, and that just about everything occurs by chance. We have to have faith that the physical world we interact with will continue to be logical and mechanistic in order to reason about it.
Regards,
Ric
[who composed this before seeing Michael’s last post, and feels it still adequate]
Let me put it this way. How do you know that the 19 hijackers were not acting on God’s orders?
”Why do you wish to exempt anything from reason?”
Because doing so is necessary to accept the validity of any mathematics rich enough to do arithmetic in, which in turn is necessary to construct even a non-reductionist version of physical theory.
TW: I am able to read not only Gödel, but Aquinas and Rambam as well.
No, this is not true at all. This is a misrepresentation of Quantum mechanics.
If you believe in God, Dan, then believing in transsubstantiation is not absurd at all. Once you believe in God you must believe that God can bring about anything He wants to bring about.
As an Anglican I regard myself as a member of the Catholic (Universal) Church. As a Protestant I do not owe fealty to Rome and I find Protestant theology more Christian than I find the Roman message. But these are petty human conceits which have nothing to do with the real point, which is Christ.
Michael, I don’t think you have answered Dan’s question about science and the nuclear bomb yet.
Can we proceed one point at a time?
Everytime I took communion I believed in the mystery of transubstantiation. Otherwise I wouldn’t take communion.
For myself, I do not think religious faith is incompatible with rational skepticism about religious faith. Dawkins undershoots what religious faith provides. He buys into, even as he objects to, the idea that without religion we wouldn’t have morality. It doesn’t work like that. The practice of religion is simply to remind us of our personal insignificance, our personal faults (sinfulness, if you don’t mind), and yet lead us to a place where we recognize, first, an underlying sense of order and purpose to reality (call it God), and an underlying sense of identity with that reality, and, in particular, with all living (and dead) creation. It is from that space that all sense of perspective (Spinoza’s “aspect of eternity”) empathy, and compassion springs. All great religions take you there, but I was born a Christian, so, there it is.
One thing I really like about Christianity is its veneration of new life, or, as Chesterton would put it, hope. If you are a parent, there’s an immediate resonance.
Merry Christmas to all.
Because I don’t believe that there is such a thing as an uncorrupted sensory datum, and I wouldn’t know how to apply that information with any conviction to the way I lead my life. I’m willing to reach for a heuristic if my experience and my reason tell me that that is necessary.
Michael
No one is arguing your definition of reason.
But no where in that definition about “acquiring knowledge about reality”, is anything about what to do with that knowledge and if that what leads to GOOD or EVIL.
Values … what to value and why … becomes the realm of faith. Not that we must take each faith as equally valid, but that we test those values—using reason—on how they effect the individual, the community, the nation.
Even Ayn Rand’s stance of atheist values, man qua man, has an element of “faith” (an irreducable assumption that must be made if one even wants to begin to function).
Reason can only help identify the best ways to achieve good or bad values, but it cannot identify what ARE good or bad values until faith provides a foundation.
Hate to ask a second question before the first has been addressed, but Michael, I wonder if you could explain infinity to me, using rational scientific terms?
Thanks. Back tomorrow.
Correct the alleged misrepresentation, if you please.
Or are we to take it on faith that you are correct?
In terms of a worldview (or weltanschaung when I’m trying to dress up my arguments), I am probably in agreement with Michael Smith.
Where we differ is that first of all I think the religious is a reasonable (rational even) reaction to a lack of good data and better theories. Unfortunately, nowadays, this lack is often replaced by a disbelief in the data and theories. This is often why the irreligious turn anti-religious.
Second, the irreligious and especially the anti-religious simply don’t believe (heh) that good, reasonable, rational people can be religious. This is simply wrong.
One of the internal conflicts that has marked both Judaism and Christianity for a long time was how to merge the religious and the rational. The fact of the matter is that “this list 10 pages long…..” is not solely the triumph of reason, it was assisted by the Judeo-Christian culture that accomodated and encouraged reason.
The question is actually how do you know that the 19 hijackers were not acting on God’s orders? Whatever answer you give, it contains an element of your spiritual perspective, not mine, not his, not hers.
There’s nothing easier than seeing everything as purely nihilistic machinery everywhere one looks. Nothing. But make no mistake: Only personal choice makes that possible, that being the point.
Explaining the mystical requires mystical terms. Understanding the non-sensory requires insight, not instruments. Hip reductionism requires nothing.
As usual, Ric gets it:
You won’t find truth in knowledge. You will find truth supported by knowledge.
Is it just possible that faith is integral even if it’s core component—its not being sensory—is by design? First prove that God does not exist, then there’ll be no rational use for faith.
What’s a string, Michael? I’m curious what the essential component is believed to be these days, and how it faithfully does what it does, based as it is, on sheer nothing.
Is it not an act of supreme faith to believe that that the entire universe is based on the perfectly consistently behavior of an abstract?
Obviously, faith is everything, including existence. Perspective is the key, reason is a test, and accountability is an essential ingredient. Without them, in a vacuum, knowledge is a fairly arrogant illusion.
Michael continues to attempt to frame the argument according to his definition, which is that “faith” and “reason” are opposite ends of the same line. It isn’t so. They are two different things. Reason is, at bottom, a mechanical system for reaching conclusions from available evidence. If the evidence is interpreted wrongly, or the assumptions upon which the process is based are in error, it is perfectly possible to reach conclusions based on flawless reasoning which are nevertheless incorrect. (Faith is equally capable of coming to incorrect conclusions, of course.) Quantum mechanics isn’t necessary to the argument, but it makes for colorful illustrations.
Your body is made up of a large number of elemental particles, all moving “at random”—that is, without any directing order. There is nothing preventing them, purely by chance, from all taking up a direction radial from a central point, whereupon you disappear in a puff. There is no law of physics, and nothing you, your friends, or your enemies can do, that will either prevent that from occurring or causing it to occur. You have to believe that it won’t, in order to continue making plans that imply your continual existence as an ordered entity.
It is in principle possible, though cumbersome, to calculate the probability of that happening. The resulting number is preposterously tiny; the occurrence is unlikely in the extreme. This is no more than to say that reason supports your faith—you may reasonably assume that you will continue to exist. The probability remains, as it must be, nonzero, so the requirement for belief—faith—is still there.
Off to visit my brother for the holidays. Merry Christmas to all it’s applicable to, and best wishes of the Gorging Season to all others.
Regards,
Ric
That’s one impressive piece of hooey.
Rather, faith is the supreme act of reconciling global reason and evidence, of accepting the essential truth of what appears to be at first blush a proposition or assertion but what actually precedes, envelops, and transcends materialism, and to naturally do so in full view of logic.
Consider that the physical universe itself not only prevents you disproving God, but that it points to another “parallel” universe of spiritual transcendance. The fact we’re using the words lends them meaning: To suggest that the Universe is really a Giant Chromed Fladirumpter is pointless purely because such an entity as a Giant Chromed Fladirumpter has absolutely no context and no meaning. “God” does, and has and will, forever. Even to nineteen guys in crashing planes. Your challenge is to decipher how it all works, if you can.
The always prescient Gagdad Bob has a post partly on this just this morning:
Well, I’ve never heard such talk in all my epiphenomenal delusions stemming from the interactions of blind, natural forces.
The irony of material reductionism seems to be that it keeps groping in a dark closet, just knowing it’s going to find The Thing at any moment, but that The Thing simply cannot include the source of all the stuff that’s not material: Going deeper—into deeper and deeper logical absurdities, such as complete abstracts supporting impossible numbers of tons of flaming matter— doesn’t seem to strike the reductionists as at all odd. Below atoms, already abstract probabilities, were subatomics. Below them, even odder subatomics, below them, well, these little vibrating entities we’ll call strings, as they seem to have violated Void. Somehow.
But yet somehow not be extranatural means, in this our fascinating extranatural sub-Newtonian Universe of non-cause Causes and extramechanical Mechanics.
But even when we add in all the spiritual stuff—all the worlds of evidence of Supernatural reality—we surely cannot, as humans, conflate those other, somewhat less abstract abstracts such as Infinity Cause and Infinite Meaning and Infinite Knowledge, justice, principle, love, reason, beauty, hope, grace, awe and the like with God. We are eternally prevented knowing Truth by the most limiting and most limited of self-described Truth seekers.
Blind. Hmmm. What Force keeps them communicating? Surely not sight, so “blind” works. But what then? Maybe just a little deeper…
And natural? Surely the most faithful of all faiths, that which accepts that stuff works simply because it does.
A materialist can’t even explain gravity. Cracks me up.
Uh, wrong. As an uninformed secularist, you’re laboring under the misapprehension that all religions are identical. Christ’s key message is to ‘love others as you love yourself’; Mohammed’s message is ‘to the infidel, the sword’.
You lose.
David Deutsch (inventor of the quantum computer) on our special-ness:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7314894620678494575
Double hooey.
Science has demonstrated that our senses routinely lie to us about reality. Trusting our often faulty senses is therefore unreasonable and often an act of faith.
That may be what you believe faith is. I happen to believe that faith is an acceptance of or trust in a concept beyond what reason can deliver. God has given us senses in order to gather evidence and reason to assemble that evidence together to form logical conclusions. However, when there isn’t enough evidence to conclude anything logically, we develop theories based on empirical evidence we have. That’s when faith starts to enter into the equation. The less evidence we have, the more we rely on faith. Consider again the Creation. Don’t the first four verses ring similar to the Big Bang theory? If faith was irreconcilable with reason how could religious scientists such as Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday and Wernher von Braun manage the torment within themselves? Quite the contrary. Faith and reason are both necessary in order to comprehend reality in all its mystery, since reason is necessarily conditioned by just the four dimensions of space (comprising three dimensions as its elements) and time (one dimension) and as such rational reasoning, or faith, alone can only scratch the surface of reality.*
God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.
You’re doing a great job, Michael, but it is, of course, a waste of time. I’ve been over this terrain here before, and it ends in a massive, insurmountable wall of stone. Following the conversation down, I’m seeing the same familiar landmarks: the attempt to obscure the difference between faith and reason; the claim that without faith, values are impossible; I can see the attempt to equate men of reason with intellectually lazy, nihilistic, sociopaths looming up on the horizon.
I have to admit that Ric has thrown in a new bit of landscaping, though. Outside of This Is Spinal Tap, I’ve never known anyone to worry over being suddenly and spontaneously transformed into a small green globule, or a puff of nothing, as the case may be. My “faith” that this won’t happen to me is based entirely on the fact that it has never happened to anyone else in the recorded history of mankind.
It is interesting, though, how the Left and the Religious Right both make use of bad interpretations of quantum physics to attack the concept of causality in nature, and thereby undermine the foundations of science. For years the Left atacked bourgeois reason and bourgeois science, using any sophistry available. Now, the religionists are cashing in. All the Left’s weapons are belong to them.
TW: programs89
Me: Whew! For a minute there I thought you said “pograms”.
Have you reviewed the entire recorded history of mankind, and do you think that it has correctly recorded all happenings everywhere and ever?
If not, then your assertion and your reason are matters of faith, Ardsgaine. Your fact is truly unknowable, and yet you believe it. It is a relatively reasonable leap of faith, and you’re probably right. But you might not be, and you really don’t know. You believe.
And by what means did you determine that one of these was morally superior to the other? If there’s no rational method for establishing, based on the evidence of history, that one way of living is better than another, then you can’t possibly prove that you are right and the Muslim is wrong.
Really?! Now, how in the world did they do that? Have scientists learned how to perceive the thing-in-itself directly, unmediated by any actual form of perception?
But that’s just exactly what he said. You’re putting a slightly different spin on it: Reason can’t deliver the goods–i.e., can’t support your belief–you want to believe anyway, so you rely on faith. I don’t see any disagreement there over definitions, just disagreement over the epistemological (and moral) implications of relying on faith.
I have a sneaking suspicion based on looking at how this cookie is crumbling presently that no good can come out of this topic… and there’s not even a troll accelerant to really build the fire (and yes, to mix metaphors).
Ardsgaine, I’m curious: what is the foundation of science to you, then?
LOL. You’re not really going to try to argue for the possibility that people have on occasion simply vanished into puffs of nothing, are you?
Dismissing an arbitrary assertion as groundless is not faith. It’s reason. It is not reasonable to assign a probability to an event when there is no evidence that it will ever occur. Even if I stepped out of the house tomorrow, and saw my neighbor suddenly disappear into a puff of nothing, I would still insist that, based on the context of my knowledge prior to the event, it would have been unreasonable to think that it could happen.
We can bring this part of the discussion back into line with reality, though, by coming up with scenarios that at least have a probability greater than zero. How about the “possibility” that someone will drop a golf ball out of a passing plane that will land on my head and kill me instantly? At least it doesn’t contradict any laws of physics. Should I therefore consider it possible? No. Any man who took precautions against that event as if it were a real possibility would be considered at the least eccentric, most likely crazy. Ignoring the possibility of events which have a probability of near zero is not acting on faith, it is acting on reason.
I wouldn’t say exactly the same. Perhaps I’m reading too much into what Michael stated. My impression of his statement is that faith and reason are two separate concepts and that never the two can meet. My take on faith and reason is that they reside on a continuum—reason, theory, faith. Theory is that muddy gray between the two where reason and faith intersect. Instinct as well as intuition come into play. Where do they lie in the continuum? How do they interact with faith and reason?
They did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That whole matter into energy thing.
Man’s conceptual faculty. We observe the world, and we form concepts based on observation. Science is advanced concept-formation. In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Ayn Rand identified three axiomatic concepts which are the foundation of this process: existence, identity, and consciousness. Each of these concepts is implicit in every observation of reality: There is an entity that exists, and a consciousness that is aware of it. An attack on causality is an attack on the concept of identity. It is the assertion that objects have no specific identity, and can act in an arbitrary manner.
Its no big deal. The only problem is when it stands in the way of reality. Other than that, reality can sometimes use a little decor. Some people like it that way.
Over the last 200 years, Reason itself has been deified to the point that Man is now isolated from several valuable dimensions of existence that make life worthwhile and meaningful. If we rely on Reason alone, our lives are absurd and life is just a temporary joy-ride on an icy rock hurtling through space. For many, this spells nothing but emptiness and despair.
I’m not in any way against Reason–everything in proportion–but Reason alone does not, and can not, represent Truth.
Imagination, for example, is vital to our reality, yet is composed in large part of the irrational. But how else could we produce illuminating works of art? Or conceive such lofty ideas such as freedom at a time when most men died within a mile of where they were born? Even Einstein’s principle of special relativity is the result of a wild moment of irrationality.
Art, like religion, requires our submersion in the irrational, but we love it anyway. For example, when you’re reading a novel, I doubt you constantly remind yourself that it is a fiction; you’d never enjoy it. No, you submerge yourself into what is essentially an irrational experience: staring at an object and dreaming. In truth, the very existence of Art is irrational: there is no ‘need’ for art. If it disappeared tomorrow–and, at the rate it’s going, it very well may–humanity could get along quite well.
Or could it?
You’ll notice how much great painting has been one since Reason became ascendant and man turned his back on the life of the Soul: virtually none. It’s the same with literature: empty souls create empty art. In fact, humanity has lost quite a lot to Reason in the last 100 years.
Imperfections in religion and religious practice are, almost without exception, introduced by man himself. And only someone unaquainted with the main beliefs of the major religions would maintain the fiction that they are fundamentally indistinguishable.
In short, I choose a multi-dimensional life encompassing every conceivable facet of existence, including the irrational. Yes, they can co-exist.
Bring me my chariot of fire!
Ards: With all due etc., etc. While that assertion is, coincidentally, an article of faith, it is also a rational assertion based on empirical evidence: when I am loved, I feel joy, when someone cuts into my flesh, I feel pain. An informal survey I conducted at a bar one night appeared to yield reproducable results: everyone I stabbed in the ass called the cops.
I could very well be wrong, though. Perhaps, when someone cuts into your flesh, you do not feel pain. I envy you.
I could say that, logically, we don’t need faith–just as Terry Eagleton said we no longer need heroes. But that’s making religious faith into a mechanism for behavior.
Faith is as valid as love, another invisible, non-provable item in humanity’s molecular structure. I’m sure Mr. Smith will be eager to deride love. After all, love is unreasonable and illogical. It’s certainly not scientific.
Ardsgaine, don’t be bringin’ spontaneous combustion to the table. It makes a mess, especially when we’re serving spaghetti.
Well. All I know is that in the Garden there were two trees. One was the tree of knowledge and the other was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. One we could eat freely from. Not the other.
I think I’m going to go watch “Dogma” now.
twskoogins
On the contrary, I’m referring to your assertion that it hasn’t and its basis in your faith. And then, Mishu points out that is has indeed happened. But that’s another issue.
Faith can be a bitch, huh? But where would you be without it?
You are guided by your faith whether you like it or not. But your faith is only in yourself, and not in God. It’s still faith, and you may very well be wrong.
Nope. Its not odd at all. They’ll keep going, understanding more, making new things, while the rest can sit (or kneel) in the satisfaction that they know (when really, they just believe).
Sure. But they try.
They are definitely two different concepts. They often try to coexist in the same person. That seems to require a compartmentalization. “Here are the questions that I will allow faith to decide, and over here are the questions I will allow reason to decide.” Faith gets all the questions normally associated with religion: existence of a god or gods, existence of an eternal soul, nature of the afterlife, ethical values, etc. Reason gets the rest: means of survival, creation of wealth, prudential values, etc. The problem is that there is a lot of overlap, and they can’t seem to stay in their own yard. When Reason is ascendant, it begins to ask troubling questions about how Faith can simply accept certain beliefs without any evidence, and the sphere of questions Faith is allowed to answer shrinks. When Faith is ascendant, it tells Reason to stfu, and the sphere of questions Reason is allowed to answer shrinks. An example of the former type of person would be Thomas Jefferson. An example of the latter would be Osama Bin Laden.
I think I’m about to miss your point entirely, Ardsgaine, so here are some random thoughts. It’s an obvious fact that observation produced the non-sensory concept of a transcendant higher/deeper/farther entity—a “God”—with that entity (or Being, depending) to many observers at the least, also embodying an entirely reasonable causality characteristic pertinent to physical existence.
Because neither have found It, whether the secularist seeker or the faith-based seeker seek the same thing is irrelevant, but the assumption is that both will find the Source, at which point, also presumably, comprehension will ensue and a new language will emerge. Another great irony is that the Spiritualist accepts not knowing virtually indefinitely, but the materialist bases contemporary perspectives and therefore values, on one day Knowing. Without blushing.
Because why else seek? That Source is for the materialist a mystical abstract, and it is for the Spiritualist a mystical abstract.
And are we quite convinced that the notion of a faith in “God” (that Entity containing all, presumably along the same sorts of faithful abstracts for the human soul as those faithful abstracts that support the sensory human body) is incompatable with that physical reality?
It’s not difficult to realize that, should purpose exist, it does so within the Christian model, which is the growth-progression of a human soul through a construct designed for free will. This reality fits that notion to a tee, and that notion then appears to be the highest purpose. Amusingly, when the materialist secularist dismisses traditional theology as being not divine but mortal, when one accepts that premise, one must accept that it was a human, mortal view that observed Christian principles in action within this physical universe! Therefore, Christian theory and values (and Hindi, and Muslim, and even Hollywood) came from someplace observable.
That they are not completely sensory isn’t any reason to dismiss them as not existing. Rather it’s their relative effectiveness (where Michael Smith’s comparisons go completely upside down) and/or their philosophical validity and/or their logic and/or their reason that gives them relative merit.
Nothing new there. If this is the argument, surely non-sensory evidence is not only key, the universe was apparently built to support it.
Nothing in this conflicts “God” and nothing in this disproves God. Therefore the universe doesn’t disprove God, and should God have, for the purposes of this argument, created precisely the Christian-model universe claimed by Christians (those who know a bit more about the underyling philosophy of it than the average stereotypical Bibleist) then it would be precisely as it is.
For this reason and others I propose that useless constructs—Giant Chromed Fladirumpters—don’t rationally exist, yet meaningful entities—beauty, truth, justice and a source commonality for them, or that Something sought both by materialists and spiritualists that will eventually transcend only materialism—surely supports immediate onging faith, whether material or spiritual. As a word, “faith” being a mere device to parallel physical mystery and exploration with soulful mystery and exploration.
Which brings us back to the essential, paradoxical reality of, as I said, endless billions of tons of flaming matter and energy being based purely on the abstrations of quantum physics. That spiritual faith is also based on highly apparent “evidence” strikes me as no more mind-blowing than the observable fact that the physical universe is based on equally or more faithful concepts, observations, realities, theories, and what-term-have-you. This is probably about perspective and language more than it is what we think or assume or conceptualize are “real” nuts and bolts.
I don’t follow your point…except to suggest that had you wanted to initiate a discussion on soul, you almost couldn’t have choosen finer language.
No, that’s not what Reason tells us. That’s what the attempt to look at life from some Godlike, outside-the-universe perspective tells us. Looking at life from within ourselves, we see that our lives are imminently important to us. The universe itself may not give a damn about us, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t either.
Sorry, but the greatest painting was done during the period of the Enlightenment. There is more than one form of irrationalism; religion doesn’t exhaust the field. What became ascendant in the late 19th century and remained ascendant for most of the 20th century was a secular form of irrationalism. You tell me who was more rational: David or Pollard? I’ll take the answer as a given. Good art is rational art. (To head off an objection: I do not mean rationality in the sense of Spocklike passionlessness–I mean technique guided by reason in the service of passionate human values.)
Exactly. It is a rational assertion based on sound evidence. It is not an article of faith, and you don’t have to ask anyone to accept it as such. That makes you imminently superior to the Muslim fanatic who cries “death to the infidel!” When you present your moral beliefs as being grounded solely in faith, you bring yourself down to his level, and place your beliefs on an equal footing with his. You shouldn’t do that. Reason is what makes us better.
Which secularist seeker does this? All I know is that there are people seeking natural explanations for natural phenomena. And they find them sometimes. And then improve on them. But capital-S source? no i don’t think so. I think thats something in your head.
Heheh. What Mishu pointed out was that people had been blown up by an atomic bomb. That’s not what Ric was talking about with his example of spontaneous dissolution into nothingness.
If you really want to pursue the same line of reasoning that Ric was on, you should pick up the golf ball to the head example. Asserting that people can simply spontaneously disappear doesn’t help your cause, that is, if your cause is to make Faith appear more rational.
Sometimes my Faith takes the form of an inductive hypothesis which allows me to accept a conclusion for which I can find no rational supportive premise. I take comfort in ‘knowing’ that ‘things’ are going to work out just the way they are supposed to (a Voltairian dupe!). How do I ‘know’ this? Because they always have. Here I am. My Faith allows me to tweak my world view model when what I inferred isn’t so. I can accept ‘uncertainty’ as part of life – God’s plan. I don’t have to waste my energy certifying what’s good and bad for my future. That road leads to “Gloom, despair, excessive misery. Deep dark depression…â€Â. We can learn from Hee Haw’s Buck Owen’s and Roy Clark’s shtick of endless assignations: “I had to jump out of an airplane.â€Â, “That’s bad.â€Â,â€ÂNo, that’s good because it was on fire and I just had time to grab a parachute.â€Â,â€ÂThat’s good.â€Â, “No, that’s bad because I didn’t see the parachute was marked ‘defective’.â€Â,â€ÂThat’s bad.â€Â, “But there was a haystack below me.â€Â…
My Faith allows me to carry on without corporal certainty. When I apply this same inductive reasoning to the things at hand I end up learning by accepting what is. Adjustments can and will be necessary continually. It seems logical to me.
Oh yeah, I’m not a relativist but a linkest. I try to do good things because God blesses the effort. I believe God damn’s those that fly airplanes into buildings killing thousands of people. It just seems logical to ask what good can come from something that starts in such a way? From what is, not much.
Uh, no. For me, a big part of faith is understanding and accepting that there are things beyond my capacity to comprehend them, and that reasons may exist that will not reveal themselves to me in my lifetime. For many people, it isn’t necessarily faith but rote repetition that makes then believe the things they believe to be true. You can come to faith from any number of directions, some of which perfectly rational. But everyone’s belief system is founded in a fact set, faulty though it may be. I’ll turn to the new millenium’s greatest-as-of-yet poet/philosopher:
This, of course, is the same wise man who said:
I’m not clear on your question. Are you asking how scientists demonstrate the faulty nature of human perception or are you asking how our senses provide us with a false sense of reality?
Scientifically it is very easy to demostrate limits of human perception. The old parlor trick of making an object disappear involves a knowledge that the optic nerve creates a blind spot. A blind spot that the mind is all too willing to fill in with false data. Why the mind does this is , for the most part, conjectural.
But you do concede that perception is not always reality?
If I observe that someone has knocked over a lamp and busted it, and I conclude that a pink unicorn from Mars was responsible, that is not a conclusion produced by observation. I observed an effect, and hypothesized a cause, but my hypothesis is not rationally supportable by my observation.
Precisely the opposite. It may turn out some day that there really are pink unicorns living on Mars (I might also get hit on the head by a golf ball from a passing plane), but assertions of their existence now, given our knowledge of the planet, are an arrogant imposition. The only claim supported by the evidence is that such do not exist. Likewise, if it ever turns out that there is some sort of Higher Being responsible for Creation, true knowledge of him will only come from the patient pursuit of knowledge through science, not from the wild speculations of mystics. In the meantime, the evidence says there is no such being.
Definition of reason:
rea·son [ree-zuhn]
–noun
1. a basis or cause, as for some belief, action, fact, event, etc.: the reason for declaring war.
2. a statement presented in justification or explanation of a belief or action.
3. the mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences.
Definition of faith:
faith [feyth]
–noun
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another’s ability.
2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
Seems to me, the difference between reason and faith is what the basis for belief is. Faith is not based on proof, but reason doesn’t have to have proof either. Reason relys on faith that the conclusion drawn is correct, otherwise, it’s observation, not reason.
The ancients saw the sun rise and set, and reasoned that the sun revolves around the earth. Until better tools were available to disprove this not unreasonable belief, that conclusion was accepted by faith.
I look at the earth, in all it’s wonder, and cannot reasonably conclude that it is the result of some cosmic explosion. It is like saying a beautiful, leather-bound, gold leafed, unabridged dictionary was produced by an explosion at a printing press. It had to be the result of intent and plan. I arrive at that conclusion by reason, even though I have no proof, and you may disagree with my reasoning. I have faith that my conclusion is correct, and produced by reasoning, just as those that believe in the big bang does.
We undid matter. It may not have been spontaneous, but we made those atomic particles that had formed such a dependably whole human being come undone, and we did it by smashing other matter in close proximity. The only thing that isn’t in Ric’s example is spontaneity.
It would have been unreasonable to assume that it was possible for you to be directly below the blast of a nuclear weapon, and for all of your atoms to suddenly depart their formerly close proximity, scattering you into a puff of nothingness if you were an average resident of Hiroshima in July 1945. How minuscule could that percentage of chance possibly be?
How many people believed it impossible by all reason and logic? How many of them were wrong?
Alternate forms of perception? Why that’s almost mystical.
Can’t argue with that, because it’s a point of faith.
Is there anything that will ever remain unknowable?
Is a religion of one still religion?
My point is that the only way you can know that the senses sometimes appear to give you false information is through the evidence provided by your senses.
You put a stick in the water and it appears bent. You can feel of the stick, and know that it is not really bent. You pull it back out of the water, and see that it isn’t bent. Your eyes didn’t lie, they told you something about the nature of reality: the effect of water on the transmission of light particles. If you drew the conclusion that the stick was really bent, the error was with your reasoning, not with your senses.
The senses cannot err. Error is only possible when there is choice, and the senses do not choose. They simply react to stimuli. The stimuli might be a condition of the brain that produces a hallucination, but it is still a facet of reality, and our senses are giving us knowledge of it. Error only happens when we draw wrong conclusions from the sensory data. We only know that things are not always as they first appear, because our senses are a reliable source of information.
So are you saying that the senses define the limits of perception?
Not really. Science is concerned with the natural. Not the supernatural ‘higher beings’
Sorry, but the greatest painting was done during the period of the Enlightenment.
Well. That is very debatable.
Now, if there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, then shouldn’t there also be unknown knowns? These would be things you know, but don’t know you know.
Someone should write a Critique of Pure Rumsfeld.
Uh, you realize that the definition of reason that you’ve highlighted is the sense in which one offers a justification, however spurious, for an action? It has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. To wit:
“What was your reason for shooting those children?”
“I don’t like Mondays.”
That is not Reason. It is a reason, and a damned poor one, but it is not Reason.
Definition #3 in your dictionary quote is more in line with what we’re talking about, but it is poorly stated. Michael’s formulation is better: “Reason is the human faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the data provided by our senses.”
And lack of an external cause, which together were the reasons why I rejected it as a possibility. Don’t let that stop you from having fun though.
And here we are at the wall. If you’re going to just assert that all my points are simply articles of faith, then we’re never going to get…
TW: beyond
Me: the wall. (Thanks for the assist.)
TW: No problem.
Not all of you assertions are a point of faith, just the cited one. Why? Because it was an assertion that is objectively unproveable.
Here’s my two cents,
Faith is the acceptance of the limitations of humanity. Reason, being inherently comparative, has absolute limits on what it can address. All reason is effectively a best fit approximation of what truly is. We may choose to ascribe various mechanistic explanations for this limitation but we also must concede that any best-fit approximations will leave gaps. These gaps weaken our sense of understanding of, and confidence in, our existence. Faith is that which fills the gaps and still lets us procede in some organized manner. It may, or may not be ‘religious’ (to me it’s only religion when you seek converts) but it is faith none the less.
That it happened doesn’t mean they were wrong not to believe it was going to happen. Now you are back in the realm of my golf ball example. Do you were a helmet every day to guard against falling golf balls? Wouldn’t you consider someone irrational if he did?
When the aliens from planet Xorkon in the 16th dimension materialize above Mt Everest, and blast the Earth into a gazillion pieces, are you, for the brief moment of life you have left, going to think of what an idiot you were for not believing that homeless guy with the piss-stained pants, and the breath that smelled like aftershave, when he clearly warned you that our destruction was imminent?
C’mon Pablo. This line of reasoning isn’t worthy of you. You’re grasping at straws here. There are about a gazillion of these spurious “possibilities” that you ignore every day, and you know as well as I do that it’s not a matter of faith. There has to be positive evidence for a thing before you can give it rational consideration. Blowing a dollar on a lottery ticket is one thing, but if you start buying on credit because you have faith that you’re going to win, you’ve got a problem.
Ardsgaine, you are doing a wonderful job. I admire your patience.
Many of you are claiming that faith is valid or necessary because there are things reason cannot explain. Granted, there may be things reason cannot explain now. But certainly we can explain a vast number of phenomena today that were completely inexplicable just a few hundred years ago. The historical record shows that reason is explaining ever more of the universe as time goes by. Thus, the mere existence of unexplained phenomena in the present is not proof that that they are forever beyond the power of reason.
Semantics really.
Substitute ‘faith’ with ‘irrational belief’ and you’ll get no argument.
Faith, in the contexts of our discussion, is not irrational belief, it is belief that transcends reason.
Can anyone argue that reason has no limits? Is that even reasonable? Einstein, when confronted with quantum physics said ‘God does not play dice.’ This was not offered as proof of God, nor as a refutation of quantum theory, just an assertion that there must be more to the story.
Reason, being inherently comparative, has absolute limits on what it can address. All reason is effectively a best fit approximation of what truly is. We may choose to ascribe various mechanistic explanations for this limitation but we also must concede that any best-fit approximations will leave gaps.
If reason is inherently limited and necessarily leaves “gaps”, what are the gaps in your statement above? Which parts of it may we assume must be false or incomplete due to reason’s inherent limits?
Agreed, but so far I haven’t heard anyone say otherwise. Most of the Christian arguments have clearly acknowledged that the application of reason has been a significant part of Christianity. What was initially called for was any critiques of faith.
Isn’t your argument really, an expression of faith in the future powers of reason? It’s ok. I have faith in reason also, but I also have faith in things greater than reason alone.
That isn’t the question. Personally, I’d say that if wearing the helmet soothes his nerves and makes his life more comfortable than it’s perfectly rational for him to wear it. But the question here is; can you prove his belief wrong? If you cannot, then believing that he’s wrong requires faith, which may be faith in your own powers of reason and perception. But it is still faith.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Declaring that you can reason against the existence of (for lack of a better term) God is an act of hubris. Have you ever considered that your lack of faith in an higher power could be a failure of perception on your part?
Well, I should have added that if such a being exists, he has to exist within and as part of the natural order, not outside it, otherwise no knowledge of him is even possible. Of course, that is precisely what the religionists don’t want: a god with limits and a definable nature. Why? Because God is where they put their unfulfillable wishes. As long as he has no limits, maybe the impossible is possible.
Talk about lines of reasoning that are beneath someone. Why don’t you show the true power of reason by refuting the offered argument.
Oh yes, it is. And in these cases, it’s a matter of faith in myself and my powers of reason and perception, as well as my ability to do a risk/benefit analysis. It also involves my knowledge that life can change on a dime, in ways you’d have no reason to predict. You see, faith is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, a great amount of good has come from people of faith. Some have that faith in themselves. Others have faith in something larger. The truly special ones usually have both.
Your Monday example was definition #1, I highlighted #2, explaination of your belief.
I also gave an example for the explaination you liked, by Michael.
I don’t understand this at all:
Rational consideration, as good a definition of reason as any, is not created by positive evidence of a thing, it is in response to a question raised by conflicting or absent sensory perception.
You see that stick bend, and you reason that the reflective properties of the water create an illusion.
While experimentation can give proof that your reasoning was correct, there are other questions for which no experiment has been devised. That doesn’t stop curious humans from trying to reason out the answers however, and nothing will change the fact that no matter how well reasoned, if you don’t have proof, the answers can only be accepted by faith.
For me it is a little different. I have significant doubts about my powers of reason and perception. Ardsgaine says the senses don’t lie, and for the most part that is a reasonable belief, but the human mind has a well proven track record for fouling us up with nasty things like mental filters, limited perception, and emotional reactions. Consider that your ears hear every conversation in the room but you can’t listen to everyone at once, or that nervous signals from the eyes reach the amygdala long before they reach the visual cortex, meaning that you ‘feel’ the vision long before you ‘see’ it.
This doesn’t mean I don’t try to employ my senses, perceptions, and reasoning, to their fullest, but it also accept their limitations and understand that at best I am operating on a very limited slice of true reality.
That Jay and Silent Bob, what a hoot. I never gey tired of that movie.
What was it that Martin Luther said? “What your heart holds most dear, let that be your god.”
I’m gonna watch ‘Pirates of the Carribean” now.
I’m probably going to regret this observation, but since when do actus and Ardsgaine essentially argue the same flat, dimensionless, irrational position against transcendance?
First actus, clearly way out of his league here, evokes those lovely little sparkly unicorns in order to condemn those s/he apparently thinks see them in religious faith:
Capital S, actus? Ever heard of a Grand Unifying Theory? Sorry, that’s grand unifying theory to you. You might refer to it as science’s Holy Grail. Or holy grail.
It’s the commonly-found intellectual nature of secular science-ists to create a profound misunderstanding, denial, or concealing of the philosophical pursuits of origin and unifying mechanics, as if they didn’t exist. Out of pure faith, hope, expectation, and therefore arrogance, many of these minds assume a conclusion that has yet to be proved—that pursuant to the world being found to be round and not flat and all sorts of other age of enlightenment revelations, one day accident will likewise prove to be the basis of all existence and that a lack of transcendance or alternate existence will then be proved.
This will then justify all manner of absolute statements as to the entire nature of reality prior to the actual event: The Church was wrong once, it’ll be wrong again. You just watch.
This madness creeps into all sorts of debate about the parallel nature of pursuing origins either of the physical realm or of the soul. Scientific correctness is no less offensive than political correctness, yet the postmodern dogma drips from the page, unrecognized for what it clearly is. If this isn’t the most baseless faith in the unknown, I surely do not what ever could be.
Ardsgaine, of all people, falls into the same trap:
Talk about inverting causality. This is simply sorry emotionalism: Conforming the u/Unknown by fitting it in and around the open-ended wishes of those who so pride themselves on essentially claiming that their limits of proofs and perceptions not only politically define said limits, but too what will come in every possible sphere. “Don’t go there because I haven’t gone there myself. My feel of the probable lay of the land there is already Proof. I believe in Science.”
Physics invents, describes, and refines models. It describes events, interactions, probabilities, and processes. It cannot tell you why one abstract particle attracts another, just that it does. It cannot tell you why atoms remain intact and other than abstractly, what one is. This is distinctly different than Newtonian reality, where any number of analogous occurances can be completely described in terms that fit mental patterns, models, and even expectations.
Unless you can explain the why and not just the probability or the what, you’re simply mistaken. Gravity, for example, is a described, predicted, modeled, measured “what”. Why it works—why quantum processes invariably work the way they do—requires faith that it just does. There’s no explanation.
Particles only exist. Strings only exist. Seems to me that what they are is abstract probability—mental tools with which to support Newtonian reality. Why they are looks like pure mystery. What caused them must eventually, obviously “leak” outside of the realm of their very existence. Or if not theirs, whatever they’re based upon, and so on and so on.
What’s the scientific view on “natural”, actus? Is it natural to simply accept that something is and not question how it came to be or why? Are those questions prohibited?
Then why do those questions exist?
That would make a nice mantra. It’s got a nice ring to it, and it’s completely meaningless.
Is absence of evidence evidence of presence then? If we were talking about the existence of a new species of animal in a remote location of the Eath, or something along those lines, then you might use that argument to insist that people temporarily suspend judgment and wait for the evidence to accumulate. But are you agnostic about the existence of two-headed tigers in Borneo? Pink elephants in the Congo? Or have you decided that the absence of evidence for either of those things sort of rules them out? Let’s not be hasty. I thought I saw a chartreuse unicorn in my backyard yesterday.
This is always my favorite part of the dicussion, the part where the people asserting the existence of a Divine Ruler of the Universe Who Is Beyond the Feeble Comprehension of Man accuse me of hubris.
You are equivocating on the word “faith”. Go back to Lee’s definitions for Faith, and look at the first and second. Faith in the sense of having faith in one’s ability is simply confidence. It can be rationally grounded in experience, or not. It’s not the same thing as faith in the sense of belief without evidence.
Anyhoo, my wife is waiting on me to rejoin her in front of the telly, so I’ll have to forgo more conversation tonight. You guys have fun.
No. You simply do not know. That may not please you, but it is not meaningless. It is a rationally observable fact. There are holes in your fact set, and the only way you can get past them is through faith.
Yet you, through your faith, somehow know different and better. That’s hubris, Ardsgaine. And I use the same argument with evangelicals. It’s enormously entertaining.
I think you are too pessimistic, the beliefs of left-wing intellectuals do not extend much beyond their little circles.
Mostly, the proles don’t believe anything. Oh, they believe in holidays in Ibiza, hot meals, fun and friendship, love. And they correctly, instinctually reject the beliefs of Groaniad editorialists.
But they just don’t feel a need for religion to teach their children correct manners and ‘no work, no bread’, or philosophy to find purpose and contentment. Sometimes, I think that is a good thing.
On issues like Iraq and the environment, their ethics, instincts and judgments are sound.
The people are, generally, good through and through.
I think you worry too much.
Then be happy in your faith, and to hell with the opinions of others.
No. Faith is a firm belief in something you can’t prove empirically. There are a million ways to get there, and we all engage in it every day. Even you.
Occam’s razor sends me there. That and my fact set. Thank God.
Divine Ruler of the Universe Who Is Beyond the Feeble Comprehension of Man accuse me of hubris.
Which if we define he/she /it in human terms, limits he/she/it, and it is therefore not god. The uncaused first cause.The more we look into the beginnings of our universe the more amazing and improboble they appear.
It ain’t fer nothin’ that the jews refused to name him.
Ardsgaine
You cite Ayn Rand, yet even her “values as befitting man qua man” has, at its core, a faith (or assumption) that man is “special”.
That’s equating unexplained phenomena with religious faith, which are two different animals. Explaining the mechanics of a phenomenon disproves God only to those without imagination.
Look, it’s easy. Most of the time, we believe something simply because we choose to. Some people believe in God because they are ignorant, it’s true. Some believe because they are superstitous. Others believe because they are romantics or traditionalists–or visionaries. Still others believe because it fulfills their desire for transcendence and satisfies their soul’s longing for a certain intellectual and moral beauty. Take your pick.
The point is that religion isn’t the opiate of the masses as the ignorant suggest. Neither is it the preserve of the hopelessly dim. Asserting this is like maintaining that, oh, David Hasselhoff, represents the craft of acting while at the same time ignoring the other 90% of actors out there who are much better than he is–and ignoring geniuses like Streep and Gielgud.
If one of us is suffering under an illusion, I’d prefer it be me because I think reductionism–even if absolutely accurate–is emotionally sterile and morally hollow.
Commenter 1: Faith is the act of suspending reason, of accepting the truth of a proposition or assertion in the absence of, or even in contradiction of, any evidence, proof or logic.
Commenter 2: That’s one impressive piece of hooey.
Rather, faith is the supreme act of reconciling global reason and evidence, of accepting the essential truth of what appears to be at first blush a proposition or assertion but what actually precedes, envelops, and transcends materialism, and to naturally do so in full view of logic.
Commenter 3 (me): I agree with Commenter 1.
Doubt is the essence of faith.
The existence of God cannot be disproved, but neither can it be proved. And I, for one, would not want it to be. God would not be God if God’s existence could be demonstrably proved.
It is tomorrow. I’m back. Have you had time to think about it Michael?
The absence of evidence for the existence of pink unicorns on Mars does not constitute a hole in my fact set. The number of things for whose existence we have no evidence can be propagated into infinity, but those are only holes if the things really do exist. That’s precisely what is in unproven, though, so to call them holes is to beg the question! You don’t get to call my fact set holey (haha) until you show me some evidence that there really are missing facts.
I’m sorry, Darleen, I’m not following. Which essay of hers are you referring to. Can you give me a quote?
I want to thank you all for the stimulating discussion. I wish I could have been a better participant today, but you certainly justify my faith that if I choose to expose myself in this way you will make it worthwhile.
Lazar, I certainly hear what you are saying, and I don’t intend to proselytize at all. I am merely expressing my frustration at those who would tell me that my consciousness is inferior. That’s as far as this extends, for me. I certainly don’t believe that my consciousness is privileged. Perhaps I am merely needier than those who can dispense with the idea of God. Still, my daimon tells me that I cannot not speak my experience.
I’m sorry, but you can’t put Michael Jordan’s confidence in his basketball playing ability into the same epistemic category with a religionist’s faith in the existence of god. The former has a rational basis, the latter is explicitly (and usually unapologetically) non-rational. If you want to preserve to faith all non-rational belief, then don’t use the word when what you mean is reasonable confidence.
In the Judeo-Christian faith, we have free will to disbelieve, argue, whatever.
In the Islamic faith, we are slaves to Allah.
There’s the difference, equivocators.
always59. Yes. Always.
I don’t hang out here in order to insult the various authors on this blog. I’m here to read what you guys have to say, which I most often find interesting, even when I don’t agree 100%. Obviously, when it comes to god, we are on opposite sides. We all agree on the dire need to fight the war and win (except Actus and a few occasional trolls), and that at least makes us allies in the greater conflict. If I hammer the Faith vs Reason issue hard, it is because I believe it has an important implication for that conflict: Faith is a feature of every human culture, and has been for millenia. What makes the West unique, and so very important to the future of mankind, is the tradition of Reason that we inherited from the Greeks. If we win the war, but lose that, then we will have fought for nothing.
OK Ardsgaine, you explain infinity to me.
It doesn’t exist as an actuality. It is a mathematical concept that refers to a potentiality within our open-ended numbering system: for whatever number I come up with, I can always add one more unit or decimal place. That allows me to create numbers that are as large as I need, or as small as I need. There is no number, infinity, though, and there is no quantity that has been shrunk to infinity. To exist is to be finite.
So your universe is finite. Can you explain to me what bounds it?
You mean what is on the outside of it? The universe is everything that exists. There is no outside.
If you’re asking me to explain what the universe is like at some outer bound, I don’t have a clue. That’s a question for science. We’ll find out if/when we get there. In the meantime, it doesn’t have any implications for life on Earth, so I don’t consider it a pressing question.