Faith

[Interbane]

Frank: "Do you change the way you exist, allowing your imaginary self to be, poverty stricken and arrested living a life of pain, rape and mental anguish? Remember just because you found out this reality is not real does not mean that you know what the real reality is."Who says reality is not real? I'd be my life that it is real, and that is the biggest gamble you can take. My problem is that I'm unable to prove it's real, so I continue to explore the problem, hoping in vain to find something that proves it, even if only to myself.

[Interbane]

Frank: "Not in every case, how about Big foot, Nessie, UFOs, ghosts."Sheesh, call me a fool. I completely overlooked these beliefs. Call the Weekly World News for faiths not supported by reality! Well, then again, reality is a concept that is defined by individuals for the most part. Some crack addict in Montana might believe in Bigfoot, may have seen him, and may also have talked to him... and those all may be hallucinations. But yes, that is semantics, and your point is that a reasonable reality does not support such things, and I agree. I'm currently reading "Demon Haunted World" by Carl Sagan, so I shouldn't have been so ready to argue an opposing viewpoint to 'faiths not supported by reality'. Either way, to play the antagonist is to further discussion.Frank: "So I would say it is not my perception of reality that is different but my lack of acceptance of things outside it."Ahh, but your perception of reality must be different, if you consider the fact that intelligent people also accept God. Do you think that an intelligent theistic person's reality does not lead to the existence of a God? As you examine and interpret all facets of what you see to be reality, so do they. But their conclusions differ from yours... why? Would an intelligent person(consider an alternate you for example) readily dismiss evidence against a God without thoroughly examining the matter and coming to a conclusion within their own mind? Don't get me wrong here, I have the same beliefs as you, but the 96% or more of people who believe in God must have a certain number who are extremely intelligent, able to debate against every argument you put forth. I personally haven't met any except Madarchitect, but that's not to say that there aren't others. If you were to have a debate with the Pope, I think you'd be humbled by his wisdom and perspective.Frank: "You will continue to detect that negativity, not because of the word itself but because of the way it gets twisted around in theistic arguments. But you are correct faith is a part of life, I prefer the word belief. "I hold that same negativity, but I won't continue to decieve myself if the concept appears to be otherwise. You say that you prefer the word 'belief', but what foundation does that preference have? Do you prefer it because the conclusions you arrive at are based on reason? Not all conclusions can be based on reason alone, some must also have a touch of faith. Not all beliefs can be based on reason alone, some must also have a tough of faith. So to use the word 'belief' exclusively is to ignore where that belief comes from.[Interbane: No faith is good until it is critically examined to the point where I'm comfortable accepting it.]Frank: "I am going out on a limb here and assuming you are referring to the self existence question again."Not at all. What proof do you have that evolution is correct? You do not have proof, you have evidence, and no matter how overwhelming that evidence is, it is most certainly not proof. To belief in evolution completely, you must also have faith. Frank: "These researchers spend their time trying to prove the existence of a god that they already believe in."Just to play the part of the antagonist...What makes you any different from them? Once they're arrived at their answer to the God question, they try to make the means fit the end. But so do you. You, after have arriving at an answer to the God question, have an answer, and make everything else fit that answer.Frank: "I have come across very few mentally honest theists, Mad being among them."I hope you realize the opportunity you have in debating with Mad then. For an intellectual to have an opposite belief, yet not being a victim of self deception... I pick his brain as vigorously as I can.

[Frank 013]

[Interbane: You say that you prefer the word 'belief', but what foundation does that preference have?]Simple, theists have not yet twisted the word around to make atheists seem hypocritical.[Interbane: you have evidence, and no matter how overwhelming that evidence is, it is most certainly not proof. To belief in evolution completely, you must also have faith.]Yep, the verdict is out on every subject as new information comes forth, I believe/have faith that the theory of evolution may still evolve as new information is discovered, I would accept a God if solid evidence was discovered.[Interbane: What makes you any different from them?]I looked at the evidence before coming to a conclusion.[Interbane: Once they're arrived at their answer to the God question, they try to make the means fit the end. But so do you.]No, I don't, like I said I looked at the evidence before making a decision on the matter, and that decision is still open to new evidence, if the evidence leaned in the favor of a god I would have accepted it, the evidence does not point to anything of the sort. [Interbane: I hope you realize the opportunity you have in debating with Mad then. For an intellectual to have an opposite belief, yet not being a victim of self deception... I pick his brain as vigorously as I can.]Oh yes, Mad and I have discussed this topic extensively, I have a lot of respect for his opinion, but he still admits there is no earthly evidence of a god. He does make you think though.Later

[MadArchitect]

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this thread. It's been outpacing me. I'll try to keep all of this as brief as possible.Niall001: Mad is right. Sheer poetry.Interbane: In progressing knowledge, the reasoning that is build upon a foundation grows from it's conception, whatever that may be. If the foundation is faith, it doesn't need to be strong enough to support the ending conclusion, or the entire idea. It merely needs to grow in strength with the knowledge, which it can't do unless the knowledge grows first. That may be so. I see it as a series, perhaps unconscious, of accretions or changes made to the foundation, ie. changes of faith, mostly imperceptible. In that sense, the strength of the foundation is still crucial, but you're right in pointing out that it's a dynamic process, not a static one. When you talk of all possible faiths, can you give me an example of how some may differ from others? When I say "all possible faiths", I'm using a kind of logical hyperbole. We can't really consider all possible faiths, but we can usually look at a range of explicit faiths such that it's possible to imagine them extended indefinitely in a given direction. To take an example from the current non-fiction reading, a person's faith vis-a-vis intrinsic morality can have serious consequences on the types of elaborated ethical system that are available to the reason. If the discussion currently taking place there is an apt reflection, putting your faith in the impossibility of an intrinsic good closes off nearly all ethical systems. If your faith is in an intrinsic good, then the kind of intrinsic goods that you're willing to admit will likewise result in different ranges of logical elaboration. What's interesting about ethical debates of this kind, from my point of view, is that so many of the people arguing for different ethical foundations take is as a given that they will arrive at the same ethical conclusions. That seems counter-intuitive to me, and I don't see any particular reason why we should expect an atheist ethics, like that suggested by Weilenberg, to arrive at an ethical system that in any way resembles that of modern Western ethics, with their religious basis.Do you think you could list one of those premises? Probably not. One characteristic of truly simple faiths -- I think we brought this up in another thread -- is that they're incredibly difficult to express. That's part of the reason that we're able to assert their irreducibility. I could certainly name a premise that I could use to support my belief in the validity of Darwinian evolution -- let's say, belief in the consistent operation of physical law -- but that belief is likely itself founded on tenants of faith that are more basic and only vaguely articulated in my own head.Soundness doesn't refer to it's verisimilitude however. That's been had in the intervening time between that statement and today with the corroboration of a world of scientists. I could give a hoot about soundness, but the inability to prove the entire theory wrong over all this time makes me raise an eyebrow. I probably shouldn't; that seems to me like a subtle variation on the argument from authority. Should the inability to definitively disprove the existence of God raise your eyebrow as well?Beyond that, you have to bear in mind that the whole edifice of modern biological theory is founded on the paradigm established by Darwin. Part of the strength of evolutionary theory is that it has provided a criteria for the organizaiton of the biological sciences, which means that most of the research performed in biology since the widespread acceptance of evolutionary theory has, in large part, geared itself towards substantiating that theory. There have been very few attempts in the scientific establishment to provide serious challenges to evolutionary theory. (Cf. Thomas S. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)Do you think it's possible for there to be a 'trinity' of premises based on logic that are interrelated and support each other so well, that they may very well be irreducible, without leading to circularity? No, I doubt it; the problem isn't that logic leads to circularity, rather than logic itself provides no content, only a kind of grammar that is useful in describing the relationships between principles that are provided from without.Besides, there is actually a point to thinking about this. It is a process, and though there may be no answer, the path of learning teaches you many things. How is there no answer to this? I thought I had given a pretty solid answer. Just because some people don't like the answer doesn't mean that I've failed to offer one.As for the point of this question, it has practical consequences if you're willing to follow the train of reasoning forward rather than dwelling on the chasm over which the whole thing hangs. The only alternative is to assume that we already know everything that's worth knowing.Frank 013: My studies take me into more practical areas, I do see the value of imagination and theoretical extrapolation, but I use these methods with a more practical conclusion in mind. The whole point is that the answers a person has to these supposedly more "esoteric" questions will determine in large part how they deal with the more "practical" studies to which they may apply themselves. If you need any evidence that these lines of reasoning have practical consequences, you need only look at the impact of Descartes, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and so on.I am searching for the truth of my reality, (just as you seem to be) but I am looking for better ways to exist in it, not spending time trying to determine weather or not I should bother with it at all... besides I like it here. As far as I can tell, you're the only person in this discussion who has any real affinity for the question of whether or not we ought to believe in reality. The rest of us are talking about the nature of belief, not in order to determine whether or not there is a reality, but rather to determine what the nature our mental access to reality implies about our culture and behavior.I prefer "I think therefore I am." There... question answered. Only because Descartes decided to stop there.Some forms of faith are supported by our reality others are not. Well, there's the problem isn't it. Not very many people are seriously doubting that they live in a reality. The question is, how do we know what that reality is? Until we answer that question, we're not really capable of adducing, through logic or otherwise, what forms of faith are supported by reality. And it looks to me, as I've argued throughout this thread, that before you can judge whatever form of faith you have in question, you have to take something else of faith. That's just the nature of logic.Interbane: Personally, I think they're all full of shit, and I could explain every miracle or vision that they think they've had. It should be noted that very few theists claim to have experienced a vision or a miracle. That may sometimes serve as the basis for a theistic faith, but it's far from being normative in most individual theists.No faith is good until it is critically examined to the point where I'm comfortable accepting it. That can be done with what we have in the past called "complex faith". Once you critically examine simple faith, though, it ceases to be simple faith. At that point, it becomes a low-level conclusion in a logical formula that itself has a more basic faith. In that sense, there is no way to judge the validity of any given faith save by reference to another article of faith -- that is to say, there is no way to critically examine a premise except to assert another premise as having more basic logical priority.Frank 013: Not in every case, how about Big foot, Nessie, UFOs, ghosts. A great many people believe in these things but I have not seen any convincing evidence for any of them. Superstition plays an interesting role in societies. I won't go into the details in this thread -- that would take us pretty far from the subject at hand -- but I would say that a society that managed to eliminate superstition would only end up creating more by virtue of the vacuum. I think superstition ends up being a kind of protest against suffocation by absolute reason.It is clear, at least to me, that many of the people who believe in this stuff (gods included) believe because they want to, not because of any tangible evidence. Haven't we all basically admitted in this thread to believing in reality because we want to, not because we have any irreducible proof for it?I have noticed, as I am sure you have, that many of these theists do their research with the prior assumption of a god, not a neutral or opposing stand point. The same is almost invariably true of scientific research -- at almost always takes place within a given paradigm which determines the type of questions that will be asked and the range of answers that may be attributable to proper method.Now having said both those things, I will qualify by saying that I do not think that the sort of research performed by theists is equivalent to that performed by scientist. I just don't agree with your particular critique of the two. Nor do I really agree with the agenda that drives most theistically-oriented "scientific research". It's all predicated on the misperception that theistic belief should be amenable to the same criteria as that of scientific belief.Interbane: Ahh, but your perception of reality must be different, if you consider the fact that intelligent people also accept God. Our perceptions of reality are likely different simply by virtue of our points of reference being situated differently. The idea that Reason can situate all perspectives from the same, abstract point of reference is one of those Enlightenment ideals that looks very appealing until you really give it the once over.You say that you prefer the word 'belief', but what foundation does that preference have? The question of the foundation for the preference doesn't really interest me. If we want to be pessimistic, we can say that Frank's preference is for the ambiguity of the term -- so long as he only offers the word "belief", those hearing him have no strong ground for decided that his belief is rooted in faith rather than reason.You do not have proof, you have evidence, and no matter how overwhelming that evidence is, it is most certainly not proof. More to the point, what counts as evidence is a matter determined by faith. That we call a fossil record evidence of evolution is logical only to the extent that it progresses from some set of principles that we take as given, that we have decided not to question.

[Frank 013]

[Mad: what counts as evidence is a matter determined by faith.]I have been having a hard time wrapping my head around what you meant by this until just now. While you were referring to what people accept after the fact, I kept thinking you were going back to the question of what exists at all. I see faith as what we want, hope, and experienced to be true of the world. Sometimes we can provide supporting evidence, sometimes we can't. I think Mad is right on the money here, what a person has faith in, filters what facts they might allow into their reality. Later

[Crime Hippie]

hello

[MadArchitect]

Hi, Cream Hippie.If you guys get a chance, you might want to check out the first chapter of A.O. Lovejoy's "The Great Chain of Being". The rest of the book may be of little interest to you, but the first chapter is related to what we're talking about here. Lovejoy is talking about the discipline of the "history of ideas", and I think his comments on that subject are germaine to what we've been saying about faith and reason. In particular, it reminded me of something that I had suggested in another thread -- that faith is always motivated. Anyway, the chapter is short, but full of ideas, and the book was pretty influential during the last century so you ought to be able to find the book at a decently stocked library.More on this later.

[Interbane]

MA: "Should the inability to definitively disprove the existence of God raise your eyebrow as well?"That's a good point, but I think that in the same way that the strength of a foundation of faith and whatever it supports is dynamic, so is the inability to disprove a theory, and the content of what the theory explains. Or the evidence for what the theory explains. I've seen no supporting evidence for the existence of God. Though in both cases that evidence is also build on foundations of faith. I'm not in the mindset to explore this further, my mind is a bit distracted with business. What do you think?MA: "most of the research performed in biology since the widespread acceptance of evolutionary theory has, in large part, geared itself towards substantiating that theory."The research may be geared toward the theory, but whether it is meant to substantiate or falsify remains another story I think. I'm sure there are religious scientists all throughout the history of the testing of the theory that have done research aimed at falsifying the theory. Either way, you bring up something I'd like to explore there, why is most biological research undertaken under the umbrella of evolutionary theory? Is there biological research that can be undertaken that is independant of the theory of evolution?MA: "No, I doubt it; the problem isn't that logic leads to circularity, rather than logic itself provides no content, only a kind of grammar that is useful in describing the relationships between principles that are provided from without."Ahh, point taken. Logic is useless without data to manipulate, in a sense. Data can't appear out of thin air.MA: "How is there no answer to this? I thought I had given a pretty solid answer."I guess I made that response with absolutes in mind. Searching for an absolute answer in this area leaves you with no answer. Most people have the misunderstanding that there is an absolute answer, and that we merely need to find it. Either way, I guess my response was wrong. The problem is more likely that it's difficult to see how the answer helps us in everyday life. It's an answer without application. Not that I agree, but I understand the disposition. I want to understand things as well as they can be understood, that includes... well, everything. A fruitless goal, but a goal all the same. I can't arrive at answers that I'm comfortable with until I search my way right back to the most basic foundation of knowledge, then build forward from there. So to me, the answer isn't useless, it's a foundation for everything else.MA: "Once you critically examine simple faith, though, it ceases to be simple faith. At that point, it becomes a low-level conclusion in a logical formula that itself has a more basic faith."Let me play with this idea for the sake of clarity. I have faith in my senses. Is that a simple faith? If I were to examine it using logic, I must also have faith that logic is a useful tool for such examination. Hmm, so much for playing, I'm stuck here. My mind isn't working, I'll have to return. I've been so stressed out lately I can barely think.

[MadArchitect]

Interbane: That's a good point, but I think that in the same way that the strength of a foundation of faith and whatever it supports is dynamic, so is the inability to disprove a theory, and the content of what the theory explains.... What do you think?I think that, short of theophany, there is no way to either prove or disprove the existence of god, and that there is insufficient evidence to lead to any rational conclusion on the question or whether the existence of such a god is likely or unlikely.The research may be geared toward the theory, but whether it is meant to substantiate or falsify remains another story I think. I'm sure there are religious scientists all throughout the history of the testing of the theory that have done research aimed at falsifying the theory.You're correct on the second statement, but what happens is that -- as soon as the paradigm is embraced by the majority of institutionally accredited scientists -- those working in direct opposition to the paradigm are excluded from the class of legitimate professionals. Can you name a single practicing scientist in the last fifty to a hundred years who has both opposed the theory of evolution and been recognized as a legitimate scientist by the mainstream scientific community? The period of testing for falsification comes prior to the acceptance of a theory as a paradigm -- after that, most of the experiments are, pace Karl Popper, geared towards the indirect verification of that theory.Either way, you bring up something I'd like to explore there, why is most biological research undertaken under the umbrella of evolutionary theory? Is there biological research that can be undertaken that is independant of the theory of evolution?The short answer to the first question is, because evolution is so capable as an umbrella. That is, there are very few questions in biology that cannot be addressed by the theory. That's due as much to the nature of the question that Darwin asked as it is to the answer he gave, but the fact that his answer was so thoroughly embrace accounts for the failure of challenges to the main argument of that theory. That explains the early stages of the theories development into the paradigm of biological research, but after that initial period of embrace, the story changes along the lines that T.S. Kuhn has described -- that is, the challenges to the theory tend to dwindle away and research changes direction in order to elaborate on the theory. As for the second question, it's probably possible to conduct recognizably scientific biological research without an explicit connection to Darwinian evolution, but whether or not said research will be accepted by the whole community of biological scientists depends on whether it can a) be drawn into the evolutionary scheme, or b) gain wide acceptance as paradigm to displace Darwinian evolution.Logic is useless without data to manipulate, in a sense. Data can't appear out of thin air.Correct. You can think of it in grammatical terms, since logic is essentially a kind of grammar. It's all fine and well to have words like "in" or "the", but they're useless without a battery of nouns to which they apply. Logic has no nouns -- they have to come from elsewhere.The problem is more likely that it's difficult to see how the answer helps us in everyday life. It's an answer without application.I think it's applicable in at least two ways. The first is, that knowing the limitations of logic allows us to apply it better. The second is, that knowing that no argument is perfectly logical, or that no argument is more correct than the premises that support it, allows us to avoid the error of taken our answers as absolutes.A fruitless goal, but a goal all the same.Not fruitless. Just because a tree fails to yield the fruit from the Tree of Eden doesn't mean that it isn't producing some fruit.I have faith in my senses. Is that a simple faith?It probably was at first. Then someone asked how you knew you could trust your senses -- or someone asked something that provoked that question in you -- or, more likely, your senses tricked you once. After that, you found ways to maintain faith in your senses. At the very least, you found arguments that lead you to maintain the validity of your senses, and those arguments were founded on premises that were, to you, irreducible.The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the irreducibility of a premise is equivalent to the inability to ask the question of how it is reduced. The trick here is that, if you were able to ask that question, then you could no longer trust that premise -- you'd have to argue it back to another irreducible premise. Both are necessary for different purposes, but our age seems to have mixed up the circumstances in which each is needed.

[Interbane]

MA: "I think that, short of theophany, there is no way to either prove or disprove the existence of god, and that there is insufficient evidence to lead to any rational conclusion on the question or whether the existence of such a god is likely or unlikely."It is the soundness of evolution that spurred this line of discussion. The strength of evolution shouldn't be seen as coming from it's soundness, but rather from the attempts to falsify it. When proposed, it was sound, and today it still may be a sound theory, but the inability to falsify it is held in higher regard than the soundness of the theory after the theory has existed for so long. The inability to falsify the question of God versus the inability to falsify the theory of evolution are different, since the falsification process relies on the content. Their contents are much different for one, and falsification doesn't really apply to a belief in God for another.MA: "as soon as the paradigm is embraced by the majority of institutionally accredited scientists -- those working in direct opposition to the paradigm are excluded from the class of legitimate professionals."I can't name any scientists, I've never looked into the matter. But can you prove that no such person exists? The classification of scientists as such may be oversimplifying things a bit. I'm sure there are scientists who have researched down avenues whose particular experments could easily have led to an observation that does not fit with the theory. The legitimacy of scientists also makes me worried a bit. It shouldn't be the legitimacy of scientists in question, but the legitimacy of their observations. A scientist who is considered a 'castaway' with an observation that goes against evoution may be seen as illegitimate, but if his observation is given enough attention, be it through religious channels or otherwise, then that observation would most likely be looked into. It may be looked into with the attempt to discredit it, but if it can be discredited, then the point is moot. Given the discrediting observations are had honestly and are thoroughly reached. It seems that there is sufficient pragmatism in the scientific community to at least honestly look into observations which go against the popular paradigm. Me: "I have faith in my senses. Is that a simple faith?"MA: "It probably was at first. Then someone asked how you knew you could trust your senses -- or someone asked something that provoked that question in you -- or, more likely, your senses tricked you once. After that, you found ways to maintain faith in your senses. At the very least, you found arguments that lead you to maintain the validity of your senses, and those arguments were founded on premises that were, to you, irreducible.The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the irreducibility of a premise is equivalent to the inability to ask the question of how it is reduced. The trick here is that, if you were able to ask that question, then you could no longer trust that premise -- you'd have to argue it back to another irreducible premise. Both are necessary for different purposes, but our age seems to have mixed up the circumstances in which each is needed."For the context of the reply, I copied both paragraphs of yours. Back to faith. I'd like to look into this, and attempt to find a more basic premise than faith in my senses. Or rather, to attept to define a more basic faith, and perhaps to continue reducing it. An experiment if you will. How can a faith in my senses be justified? Perhaps by reasoning that if I didn't have faith in my senses that I wouldn't have the necessary confidence in reality to live life to it's fullest. Then would the virtue of living life to it's fullest be supportive of faith in my senses? Perhaps that reasoning isn't sound enough. I must have faith that there is an objective reality... there must be something real for my senses to percieve, before I'm able to place faith in their perception. Can faith in an objective reality be further reduced? Maybe it is faith in the virtue of living life to it's fullest that supports a faith in objective reality. Criticize this train of thought if you will, but help me explore it a bit, even if you find no merit in it.