In message <BB6102FDE2BE0F489C1C6171D8C9B7D20B2338F7@MAILSRV-1>, Richard
Barker <[log in to unmask]> writes

>I have a huge problem with this 'faith' concept.  Let's be honest, things do
>have to be proved, there has to be some kind of evidence.  The faith word is
>banded about to give creditability to things that haven't been proven and
>based on normal reasoning can't be true.  To believe in something without
>proof is basically surrendering to ignorance and brainwashing.

>In my opinion everyone should be an Agnostic in the sense that, yes there
>might be a God or a blue flying elephant, but as the existence of either of
>these beings has never been established you have to take the position that
>neither exist.  There might be a time in the future where the relevant proof
>does exist.

>Faith is saying, that I don't care that there is no proof I am just going to
>blindly believe it anyway.  That is lunacy.
>-------------

>Belief in God is (supposed to be) strictly faith. Belief in science is
>(supposed to be) strictly evidence.

(Roy confirms Wirt's conjectures about what he studied at uni).

And yes, Philosophy of Science was my major interest. I'd come up the
science stream in high school (Grammar School, for those who understand
how the UK education system worked, until successive governments and
political correctness ruined it).

And straddling both that and Metaphysics, and even possibly Ontology,
was this question of faith versus science.

Actually, it's only a 'versus' if people confuse the two, or try to
apply the methods and principles of the one to the other.

Historically, it has been attempts to apply the precepts of faith to
science that have been the issue. Religions have always been more
nervous about the results that science produces than they need to have
been. (And possibly more nervous than they ought to have been - but
that's opinion).

Religion got tangled up with science when it wanted to cling to precepts
- like the sun goes round the earth, instead of vice versa - which it
felt were Deity-ordained.

Nowadays, it's very clear to us what scientific method is, and how it
discovers truths, and what sort of truths it discovers. But it was not
always so. There used to be several competing methods of determining
truth, including religious revelation, and it took a while to work out
which ones got used when.

One early one was appeal to a high, though not necessarily, religious,
authority.

For instance, Aristotle classified all the animals, plants etc.; when,
later, they found a frog that did not fit into his classification, they
concluded that the frog was wrong.

(A good mental stretching exercise is to try to get yourself into that
mindset for a while. When you can accept Aristotle over the frog, it's
easy to see how people can accept a deity over anything else at all).

But the point is that even scientific method had to compete, initially,
with other potential 'truth-discovering' methods. And today, even, in
some areas, it still does.

Religion has, mostly, learned to stay off science's patch; and even
Creationism makes a nod in science's direction by using selected parts
of the scientific method. But the keyword here is 'selected'; starting
from a 'revealed truth', rather than dispassionate observation, and
allowing nothing to contradict that revealed truth, rather disqualifies
it.

But nowadays, religion knows how to accept that the earth goes round the
sun without that fact tearing the foundations of faith apart.

And this is how it should be. Properly handled, religion and science are
orthogonal to one another - kind of at logical right angles, and able to
say nothing about each other's sphere of operation.

Science will never prove or disprove any truly religious belief; it
simply doesn't operate on them.

For Darwin, evolution didn't disprove the existence of God in any way at
all; it was a revelation about the way that He worked, perhaps, which
contradicted some descriptions in Genesis. Which would certainly cause
problems for fundamentalists who thought every word of the Bible was
literally true, but not for those who allowed some flexibility here.
However, Darwin knew that his work would cause controversy, as it seemed
to be treading on the ground of religion; but as we have seen, it was
religion that was treading on the ground of science here, and had to
learn, once more, to back away from that area, and that such a back off
did not in any way diminish their deity.

So are there any rules about religion/faith? Possibly not, if there
really is a deity; after all, He could have brought us all into
existence just a microsecond ago, with all our memories, etc., being
created at that moment too. And we'd never know. What would that say
about science? And what would science say about it? That the rules it
found were the rules for the universe it *seemed* to us we were in...

However, perhaps we, as mere humans, impose some rules on
religion/faith, as a result of our limitations. A religion should be
logically consistent, for example, just like a mathematics or a science.
When we hit 'both a and not-a', our little hard-wired brains explode.

Here's an example of such a paradox:

'If God is omnipotent, can He make a stone so heavy that He can't lift
it?'

Of course, this says more about what we can mean by 'omnipotent' than it
does about God...

Re faith; as I understand it, religion (or the Judaeo-Christian religion
at least) holds that we are Earth to be tested for our fitness for
Heaven or Hell in the afterlife. This wouldn't work if we could
objectively *know* if there was a God or not; if we knew that, it would
be pretty dumb of us not to behave accordingly.

So we can't know, and we mustn't know, and we must choose on faith
alone. Perhaps not blindly - we can think about these things, after all
- but it's not lunacy. It's how things are.

Actually, the lunatic position is Agnosticism; this is choosing not to
decide, and/or waiting for the proof that will never come. Hey, you are
certainly dipping out on eternal bliss, if you adopt this view; and if
you are lucky(!) you will just blink out of existence when you die.
While if you are unlucky, you will burn in the fires of Hell forever.

Given that choice, you may well want to put in some thought, and plump
either for belief (and there is a wide range of religions to choose
from, something that has always troubled me, given that most or all
believe in only one Creator) or for Atheism. You get the same choices as
Agnosticism, true, but as you roast, you have the small satisfaction of
knowing that you are there because you were actively wrong, rather than
just letting it go by default.


--
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris

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