The Faith & Religion mega Thread

Originally Posted by enorbet You interpret the confidence that the scientifically minded have in Science as Faith simply because that's what you know. It's your frame of reference. You have little or no understanding of the scientific process just as I will never understand religious exhilaration.

I have a very deep understanding of the scientific process. Science and Faith are not mutually exclusive, they are complementary. Faith is not belief without evidence. Faith is belief with evidence - that is, evidence that is not in the realm of provability - otherwise, it would be fact, not faith. Such are many of the conclusions from scientific minds - they are necessarily based on assumptions and pre-conditions that must be taken on faith, as they are not able to be validated by the scientific process. So much of science is self-fullfilling prophecy - science suggests a theory, and then manipulates the pre-conditions such that the theory holds 'true'. This is necessarily so, as much as you wish to deny it, since science cannot consclusively prove the state or condition of things that occured in the distant past - it must make assumptions based on how things are in the present. And much of what happened in the distant past is the foundation for what science considers to be 'fact' now. Catch-22. For example, science assumes that the concentration of nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere has been relatively constant since the earth cooled. But that is an assumption based on 'faith', and it governs all further science that builds upon it. How can science know that no event before recorded history occured to alter the balance of nitrogen? How can it know if an event did occur?

Like I said, science, no matter how meticulous the methods, is built on a foundation of faith.

You wouldn't think atheism is gonna stop at "god?" Because it's called evolution (ticking,) goodbye "faith."

Originally Posted by jamison20000e You wouldn't think atheism is gonna stop at "god?" It's called evolution (ticking,) goodbye "faith."

If you're going to troll, at least do it right and make some sense.

Ping OregonJim -

While I agree that some people are able to embrace both Science and Faith it seems to require some manner of compartmentalization specially if one is at all strict about the rules of evidence. For example a book written of many chapters by many authors (many in different languages without vowels and requiring spoken context since they were so recently, at the time, in the transitional conversion to written language from strictly spoken language, some that is copied from long standing myths and stories from thousands of years prior, then compiled long after the alleged events and THEN edited and collated (some chapters thrown out altogether) hundreds of years later, and THEN translated at least 3 times to modern language, a thousand years later, does not constitute solid evidence.

Nowhere but in your post have I ever seen Faith as requiring any evidence and most often specifically belittling it's use ie: Jesus says to Thomas according to John "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." For centuries this passage and others have been used to ridicule and shame those who would question and require evidence. It is not so important in this case whether the book is good evidence for the validity of it's dogma but rather as evidence of the position of organized religion on the hierarchy of Faithfulness.

I truly don't mean to hurt your feelings and hopefully you will take the blunt truth and use it to grow, but your whole last post is a contradiction in terms. You are absolutely mistaken that Science is built on faith. One telling notion is that concept held by so many people of religion and faith or just unschooled in Science that one had to be present to know what occurred before you were born or before any humans were born. In your example of the "recipe" for air the relative concentrations are recorded in glaciers, some kinds of rocks, petrified amber, etc etc. Incidentally no reputable scientist claims that the concentration of Nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere has been constant whether expressed as a percentage or parts per million... quite the opposite.

You are decidedly NOT in possession of deep understanding of the scientific process or you would understand the progression from concept to Hypothesis to Theory and you clearly do not. It is absolutely absurd and not a little insulting to claim that data is in effect tweaked to fit a theory as some self-fulfilling prophecy. This completely disregards the rigors of peer review and that it never ends. No subject or person is sacred and untouchable.... EVER. Do you have an understanding of what Sigma Level refers to as it relates to data confidence? Do you understand that CERN LHC when scrutinizing the data for the Higgs Boson discovery, would not say publicly that it was true even at 90% certainty? or 95% ? or even 99%? It required 99.9999 % and not as some number tossed off the top of someone's head but by a log of billions of events carefully scrutinized for false positives, even in the abstract. In fact 99.9999 % actually falls short as it is a very rough, conservative estimate, not required by scientists but for laymen who don't comprehend Standard Deviation. The likely value is much higher since the probability that the data could have been caused by any other event, by mere chance in a Universe that did not have a Higgs, is less than 1 in 3.5 million.

There is no shame in overestimating one's skill level. It comes with the territory. There are four levels of skill

1) Unconsciously Incompetent - Unskilled and don't know it
2) Consciously Incompetent - Unskilled and know it
3) Consciously Competent - Through study and practice, skilled and know it
4) Unconsciously Competent - Through years of study and practice, skilled and unaware of it, taken for granted and free to create

In most areas of Science I am consciously incompetent. There are a few narrow areas where I rise above that but since I only had 2 semesters of Calculus in College and 2 semesters of Advanced Mathematics I lack the language of much of deep Science. I have a good grasp of Special Relativity and a decent grasp of General Relativity but I struggle with even the basics for example of Quantum Gravity. Lee Smolin helps but even his books require several readings for me to muddle through his simplified explanations with minimal Math. It took me nearly 4 years to get comfortable with just 3 of his books. Most people I know don't even know who he is yet they think they are scientific because they occasionally watch The Discovery Channel and have heard of Carl Sagan but never have read even one of his books or subscribe to anything even on the lower level of Scientific American. Some 99% of people cannot name one respected peer review periodical, so don't feel bad, you're in the majority.

Based on what you have written here, you, OregonJim, are a man of Faith who has some aspirations toward Logic. Do with that information as you will and again
Best Wishes

Originally Posted by OregonJim If you're going to troll, at least do it right and make some sense.

Should I have put a because\edited???

Or, are you just mad because quite literally faith means nothing (except a bloodier world with more gullible $ucker$!?. Metaph☢rical nuke dr☢p, the best kind! )

enorbet: I've got a simple question. Why do you sometimes decide to capitalize Science and Logic? They are not proper nouns representing deities. Looking back over your posts, there's a pattern to your use, but I haven't quite put my finger on it.
It's an observation and a question, not a criticism.

Originally Posted by enorbet Nowhere but in your post have I ever seen Faith as requiring any evidence and most often specifically belittling it's use ie: Jesus says to Thomas according to John "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." For centuries this passage and others have been used to ridicule and shame those who would question and require evidence.

You have adopted the atheist dogma here, and ignored the truth. That passage says no such thing.

Thomas was speaking with Jesus in person - thus he no longer needed faith, Jesus' presence before him was fact. What that passage is saying is that faith is when one believes the unproven, based on (strong) evidence, yet without being conclusive. The disciples had strong evidence - eyewitness accounts. It is not about blind faith, which is something Christianity does NOT teach in any capacity. That is a common atheist fallacy.

You may be confusing true Christianity with those who profess to be 'religious' - just like we have scientists and 'quack' scientists.

Originally Posted by enorbet You are absolutely mistaken that Science is built on faith. One telling notion is that concept held by so many people of religion and faith or just unschooled in Science that one had to be present to know what occurred before you were born or before any humans were born.

No. You have inferred a concept that I did not present. Surely there are many things that can be known with a high degree of confidence without being present to observe them, but certainly not ALL things. Thus, much of science must, by definition, be built on a foundation of faith.

Originally Posted by enorbet You are decidedly NOT in possession of deep understanding of the scientific process or you would understand the progression from concept to Hypothesis to Theory and you clearly do not. It is absolutely absurd and not a little insulting to claim that data is in effect tweaked to fit a theory as some self-fulfilling prophecy. This completely disregards the rigors of peer review and that it never ends. No subject or person is sacred and untouchable.... EVER.

I beg to differ with you. Certainly, *good* science follows strictly the methods you outlined (and yes, I am in possession of understanding). But much of *good* science takes earlier *bad* science as a foundation to build upon. And, despite your protests, there is still a not-insignifacant amount of *bad* science going on today. Focusing on the scientific methods of the present time, and ignoring the less meticulous scientific "methods" of the last century, and the century before that, and the century before that, borders on delusion. Yet all that prior work forms the foundation of science, along with the FAITH in what prececdes it.

Originally Posted by OregonJim Let's try to be accurate.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do, and I would dare to expect the same from you.

"Constrained to" and "part of" are not equivalent terms.

I never said they are, but I'd say that one follows from the other. Of course I cannot be sure about it.

You seem hell bent on redefining terms, rather than 'understanding the concept'.

Your "concept" is that nobody can have a first-hand experience of every fact. That seems obvious to me, therefore not really worth discussing, as I agree with you. However, you said other things as well. Regarding the use of terms, I only suggested that in order to have a useful discussion we should at least use them according to their established definitions, not my personal ones. I wasn't inventing any new definition, quite the opposite: I was trying to point to the most unambiguous ones, since we are talking about topics where accurate definitions do actually matter. But unfortunately you don't seem to care much about it, and you keep using the word "faith" completely out of context, as if science was another kind of not very honest religion.

Of course you can stretch meanings, beat the hell out of them, compare apples and oranges, but then don't expect that people will understand what you're saying, and most importantly don't blame them when they don't. Especially when your opinions about science are based on misconceptions and on personal feelings about something that cannot be shared at all. You might say that such feelings are evidence for you, and of course there must be something in your nervous processes that generates them, but unless the alleged evidence that causes your beliefs is available as collective evidence, we'll not be able to go that far with this discussion.

This is one of the problems with the English language. Too many words are 'operator-overloaded'. English is not an ideal language to express philosophical concepts. That's why so many of the great works are in Greek, including the New Testament.

If you knew a tiny bit of ancient Greek you would know that it can be even more "operator-overloaded" than English. The problem is not English, or any other language: the problem is how you use it. If you want to eliminate even more ambiguity from what you're saying, then you should use a formal language: that's exactly what science and rigorous philosophy do, and they do that for very good reasons.

It took me a while to dig back through this thread to find the context of your post, but I did find it.

Originally Posted by Philip Lacroix Your "concept" is that nobody can have a first-hand experience of every fact. That seems obvious to me, therefore not really worth discussing, as I agree with you.

But you are not the one to whom the concept was directed, so whether it is "really worth discussing", I think would be up to the person(s) who objected to it. You stepped in, apparently, to define (or redefine) terms. The way you defined those terms seemed to be in an argumentative fashion, as though you disagreed with the simple concept. Had you acknowledged your agreement earlier, it would have served to avoid confusion.

Originally Posted by Philip Lacroix However, you said other things as well. Regarding the use of terms, I only suggested that in order to have a useful discussion we should at least use them according to their established definitions, not my personal ones. I wasn't inventing any new definition, quite the opposite: I was trying to point to the most unambiguous ones, since we are talking about topics where accurate definitions do actually matter. But unfortunately you don't seem to care much about it, and you keep using the word "faith" completely out of context, as if science was another kind of not very honest religion.

I agree that accuracy of terms is important. Of course I care - but how can one use a single word "out of context"? By definition, there *is* no context. I used the word "faith" without context, in its simplest form, with no religious or scientific connotations. In this thread, I take the term "faith" to simply mean "to believe something to be true, given nothing more than evidence that cannot be proven". It does not follow that exercising faith is somehow dishonest, in religion or science. All I am saying is that both religion and science are dependent on faith at their most fundamental levels.

Originally Posted by Philip Lacroix If you knew a tiny bit of ancient Greek you would know that it can be even more "operator-overloaded" than English. The problem is not English, or any other language: the problem is how you use it. If you want to eliminate even more ambiguity from what you're saying, then you should use a formal language: that's exactly what science and rigorous philosophy do, and they do that for very good reasons.

I've had 8 1/2 years of study in ancient Greek - particulary the Doric and Koine dialects. You are out of your element here - it is most certainly not "operator-overloaded" like English. There is far, far more subtelty and precision than we'll ever see in English. Had we used Greek we would have been using the word 'pistis' for faith, which leans more toward 'belief', rather than 'pisteuo', which leans more toward reliance. The first is more passive, the second more active. There would be no need to 'define terms'. But that is a side point - I merely pointed it out as a reason for some of the difficulties in communicating higher concepts in English.

If we weren't all blind and deaf (LALALALALA) to other worlds maybe we wouldn't be living Caprica stile, damn dirty apes. Religions helped slow cannibalism but eventually such common sense overwhelms now let's end other other $tupidity!

Originally Posted by mostlyharmless enorbet: I've got a simple question. Why do you sometimes decide to capitalize Science and Logic? They are not proper nouns representing deities. Looking back over your posts, there's a pattern to your use, but I haven't quite put my finger on it. It's an observation and a question, not a criticism.

I suppose it is because I write completely off the cuff as I would speak and capitalization, italics, bold, etc are just means of emphasis. It isn't planned so if here's a pattern I am unaware of it.

Originally Posted by OregonJim You have adopted the atheist dogma here, and ignored the truth. That passage says no such thing. <snip> You may be confusing true Christianity with those who profess to be 'religious' - just like we have scientists and 'quack' scientists.

I think history proves that the bulk of organized religion took it exactly as that, an admonishment/demonishment of questioning, critical thought. It is easy to see by what standard quack scientists are separated from strict scientists but by what standard can we judge quack religious zealots?

Originally Posted by OregonJim No. You have inferred a concept that I did not present. Surely there are many things that can be known with a high degree of confidence without being present to observe them, but certainly not ALL things. Thus, much of science must, by definition, be built on a foundation of faith.

^Non Sequitur^

Originally Posted by OregonJim I beg to differ with you. Certainly, *good* science follows strictly the methods you outlined (and yes, I am in possession of understanding). But much of *good* science takes earlier *bad* science as a foundation to build upon. And, despite your protests, there is still a not-insignifacant amount of *bad* science going on today. Focusing on the scientific methods of the present time, and ignoring the less meticulous scientific "methods" of the last century, and the century before that, and the century before that, borders on delusion. Yet all that prior work forms the foundation of science, along with the FAITH in what prececdes it.

I've already mentioned Erastoshenes who, around 250 BCE calculated the Earth's circumference within 0.16% of today's measurements. Go through a list of famous scientists and mathematicians throughout time - Pythagoras, Thales, Galileo, Maxwell, Boyle, Avogadro, Kepler, Newton, Bohr, Fibonacci, Darwin, Leeuwenhoek, the Curies, Rutherford, Bacon, Lavoisier, Fermat, Copernicus, Faraday, Mendel, Mendeleev, Heisenberg, Einstein..... a few examples from a list of thousands.... which ones do you consider quacks, "less meticulous" or "based on faith"? I think that not only were they devoted to the meticulous, organized discovery of truth but that since peer review has not ended and never will their explorations have not ended and withstood centuries of deep scrutiny. It amazes me any have survived the leaps in technology and the ease of communicating all around the world. High School students have at their disposal instruments and techniques they would have given their lives for even if they could imagine such in their wildest fever dreams. If they were less than meticulous they would be disproved.

Example: The discovery of DNA alone could have demoted Darwin to a mere footnote in history at best. Instead it supported and expanded his theory on The Origin of Species in ways he hadn't even the faintest of clues. It is partly due to many years spent collecting and considering, even trying to disprove his conclusions for his wife's sake if not for his own reputation, that he was forced to stand fast because that's what the evidence said. Time has only borne him out due to his diligence and standards.

The absolute worst case of Faith and Prejudice combined with a willful deception in Science is probably Piltdown man, "discovered" in 1912. Despite the fact that a Brit made the "discovery" and that it pleased British egos at a time when the British Empire indeed never had the sun set on it, so set and setting were perfect for deception and self-delusion, not everyone bought it. It just took 40 years to prove it was a hoax. That rigorous Science never stopped scrutinizing for nearly a lifetime, certainly a career lifetime for most, should increase anyone's confidence that ultimately the Truth will out, that new "discoveries" will not be allowed to stand unchallenged. Where are similar challenges to dogma of Faith? and not being based on evidence, how would anyone falsify?

Originally Posted by enorbet ... around 250 BCE calculated the Earth's circumference within 0.16% of today's measurements. ...

Don't forget how logical WE are: https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/ better air drop some Wheaties.ww http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...+your+wheaties ...

Originally Posted by OregonJim There is far, far more subtelty and precision than we'll ever see in English. Had we used Greek we would have been using the word 'pistis' for faith, which leans more toward 'belief', rather than 'pisteuo', which leans more toward reliance. The first is more passive, the second more active. There would be no need to 'define terms'.

Point taken, thank you for clarifying. My comment was rather superficial: I was thinking about the very nuanced ways in which terms can be used, but of course the way in which they are used does help understanding the nuances. I realized that relating this to an "operator-overloaded" language wasn't appropriate.

In this thread, I take the term "faith" to simply mean "to believe something to be true, given nothing more than evidence that cannot be proven". It does not follow that exercising faith is somehow dishonest, in religion or science.

I do think that you presented science as if it was a "not very honest" process, and I'll try to show you my point. For instance, you say that science is a «self-fulfilling prophecy» as it «manipulates the pre-conditions such that the theory holds true», it «takes earlier *bad* science as a foundation to build upon», and it «must, by definition, be built on a foundation of faith».

I'll start from the latter point. I do understand what you mean with "faith", but please don't forget that the foundation of science lies on the observation and study of facts. Of course in order to build a theory from the available data you have to make some assumptions. However, this doesn't mean that just because of those assumptions science is "built on faith", especially when assumptions are justified by the available data (as in classical physics for example). Of course new data might show that the assumptions are wrong, or mere approximations of what they should be according to new deductions or observations (as in the theory of relativity). As said before in this thread, science is a work in progress, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else. I guess that we don't disagree here. Of course I'm biased toward science, hence I didn't like your use of the word "faith", for the simple reason that it might easily suggest that the foundations of religions and those of science are very similar, which of course is not.

Regarding what you say about "earlier bad science" taken as a foundation to build upon, I'm not sure what you mean. If a theory is proven to be wrong, then it is corrected or rejected. If assumptions are proven to be wrong, they are abandoned and replaced. If data are not complete, you take them for what they are, and you try to complete them, while learning something from them, making hypotheses, etc. If those hypotheses agree with what you already know, then you might start to take them seriously. However, if new data prove them wrong, then they are wrong. On the other hand, "old" science that proved to be right is still part of our body of knowledge, as it should. Could you point to some "bad" science upon which new science has been built?

You're talking about manipulation. But look at it from the other side: if you have new data that show that your assumptions are wrong, you must abandon your assumptions. This is not manipulation, which would be the opposite process: manipulating your data in order to prove that your assumptions are correct, or rejecting data in order to avoid to show that your assumptions are wrong. This process is actually similar to what religions have done in the past, which suggests to me (but of course I'm not sure) that your criticisms to science are influenced by some typical flaws of the religious thought: fragile foundations, manipulation of sources and blind faith. That being said, I'm perfectly comfortable with the uncertainty which is necessarily a part of the scientific process, and I hope that I helped you to understand my point.

Originally Posted by jamison20000e Don't forget how logical WE are: https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm

I liked this one:

"The whole point of the Copernican theory is to get rid of Jesus by saying there is no up and no down," declares Johnson. "The spinning ball thing just makes the whole Bible a big joke."