The Bible...trust in Faith or trust in Fact? (page 4)

Shining One

Hey KidA,
You keep asserting you are a 'research scientist'. Your posts and reasoning sound just as comman as the rest here. BTW, that's an observation of the evidence at hand. LOL
Jgnat,
I am not going to follow you around so don't worry. I am just curious about your seeming inability to take a stand beyond the lukewarm.
Rex

LittleToe

ShiningOne:Talking of cheap shots - your reply to BigDog's terse comment was disingenuous.

Is your inability to articulate yourself properly causing you to become a pedantic little runt? Can't you let it go, when someone obviously doesn't want to debate with you?

Answer me this - is disbelief in the process of evolution based on fact or faith?

jgnat

Well, at least Kid-A makes perfect sense. I'd rate his reading comprehension at a 10 out of 10.

kid-A

"Hey KidA, You keep asserting you are a 'research scientist'. Your posts and reasoning sound just as comman as the rest here."

Well uncle rex, that does happen to be my career. Why would my comments be any less "COMMAN" (sic) than any of the other posters on this thread? I respect my fellow posters and dont need to resort to arrogant snarky insults like you. The only person on this thread with a god complex is you my dear fellow ! LOL.

LittleToe

I've finally twigged what it is about folks like ShiningOne, RevMalk, JCAnon, etc. that grates on me. It's the whole cultish-style "certainty" that they have the only right intepretation.

IMHO the reason this flies in the face of reality is because the world is wired up with an uncertainty-principle. Faith is required in so many things because so little is absolutely certain.

Let's be honest - if everything in life were as straightforward as the JWs told us, the world would be a boring place and "God" whould be anthropomorphised as a robot.

Maybe some folks like the idea of a predictable world and "God", but I for one am far too Sagittarian for that

Big Dog

Rex,

I guess I was just trying to say that faith, any faith I might have at least is just something I have that I don't attribute any specific reason for, sort of like unconditional love, no reason for it, it just is. I don't think it bolsters my faith to try and use scientific methods to try and prove any of it.

By the same token the total abscence of scientific proof of a God etc. doesn't impact my faith at all. If I want to know how my computer works I rely on the scientific method which it is well suited for, if I want to ponder the nature of God I wouldn't use the scientific method, it just doesn't work.

That's all I was trying to say, faith is like love, you can't quantify it, or measure it, or produce it in a lab, it just is.

BD

Big Dog

Little Toe, Amen.

LittleToe

Careful, BD, you'll shatter his legalistic paradigm...

kid-A

Jgnat and Little Toe are both living proof that faith, reason and fairness can co-exist.

Narkissos

Tetrapod,

From an objective standpoint I do agree with everything you wrote. I found the following particularly enlightening:

we do not really have faith in the data, but just faith in our ability to interpret it. which is different. we know that the probability of molecular structure breaking down in a brand new car and it dissolving on the freeway, for instance, is astronomically low. that is simply just not reality. it's secure probability, not faith.

I think our difference of perspective rests in the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. Remember, I limited my comment to "my relationship as a speaking subject ("I") to everything (starting with my own "body")".

The objective, technical approach has to work with statistics and probability. In public health issues any responsible government will choose the "lesser evil" on those bases. If a vaccination policy statistically saves thousands of people at the risk of harming a few dozens, you just have to enforce it. But the individual may have a different assessment (admittedly misgiven in most cases) -- to him/her the marginal event (in the statistical sense) becomes central and s/he has to deal with it by some "leap of faith".

According to Grotius' principle on international law we must indeed manage the world etsi deus non daretur ("as if God didn't exist" -- that was quite revolutionary in the 17th century). When you fly on Iran Air the stewards greet you with the Coranic phrase bismi'llah er-rachman er-rachim ("in the name of God merciful and compassionate") which often raises a smile, including among Iranian passengers. But I am fairly confident that mysticism plays no role in the technical checking of the plane (Iran Air is one of the safest companies in the world). Where religion (or spirituality, or mysticism) may help is in how you individually relate to the world of statistics and probability. As jgnat put it, as individual subjects we haven't the "luxury" to dispense with some kind of "faith" -- and I am pretty sure that this applies to the atheist subject too.

Perhaps no one has expressed the protest of subjectivity in a statistical world so well as Sören Kierkegaard. His rather conservative religious views hardly survived him, but his stress on the subject became a major issue in 20th-century philosophy. Existentialism may be outfashioned but I think his central point remains, and we had better deal with it rather than leave it to the most obscurantist religionists.

The Bible...trust in Faith or trust in Fact?

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