US... the day is coming, please

[classicman]

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

The last one is faith and there is no rational reason to buy anything supernatural, to date. Having faith in them is neither good or bad, it does nothing because there is nothing there to answer your faith that we know of and no evidence that it does anything at all. No one has been healed or helped in any way. Waste of energy.

You are being very closed minded rk - all these examples came from wiki just to refute one very limiting definition of faith. Thats all nothing more.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

And I maintain that in the forms I have been describing, faith does not hurt anyone else, would not affect my policy decisions if I were an elected official, and is not, as queequeger initially asserted, a "bad thing."

Would it not affect your policy decisions because you realize that the way you picked a framework is too arbitrary to apply to anything outside your own opinion, or because the framework you picked is in itself too limited to apply to any policy decision you might need to make?

If it is the former, then the form of faith you describe would score low on my "faithiness" scale at the end of #129.

If it is the latter, then someone else could have exacly the same level and style of faith, but pick a more harmful framework, which requires that policy decisions be made in its model. The decision process leaves you opens to harm.

Faith is a decision process. It is only not a "bad thing" when certainty is more important than correctness. Unfortunately, when certainty is important, it is usually equally important to be correct, as the alternative is just another way to say "lying to yourself". While there are situations where that could be justified, a better solution is usually to remove the need for certainty. Some questions just don't need an answer.

[piercehawkeye45]

Ibram's answer is very interesting. It leads me to ponder what is the definition of faith. Does it include assumptions based on previous factual evidence or would that fall under a different word?

Edit- This is rabbit trail post (is that what you call it when you just trail off to nowhere) so bare with me.

Since we assume physics is deterministic and the universal laws do not change, we can say that if I drop a ball of a third story we window, it will not only land, but land in one specific spot. We would say we have faith in universal laws but we have faith in them because every past experience says we have universal laws.

When it comes to faith in a god, we are saying that a god exists without that previous evidence. I won't go into much further.


I think the biggest difference is the first one is basically stereotyping and the other is true faith. If I walk down the street, why do I assume I will not be robbed? I don't because I have walked down that exact street, passed the same people, and have never been robbed so I can stereotype the area as a place I won't get robbed and the people as people I won't get robbed by. This goes with new experiences as well. If I see a person I have never seen before, why do I have faith that they will not rob me even though I have no previous information on that person. I have faith hat he will not rob me because I have walked passed people that resemble him in culture, race, hair color, species, etc, that have not robbed me so I stereotype that he will not rob me. It works the opposite way too. If I have previous experience of being robbed by people that wear red jumpsuits, I will be much more cautious around people with red jumpsuits in the future.

Now, if something I have no previous information about or nothing to relate it too, then we would get into real faith. If a misty 3-dimensional blob randomly appeared in my bedroom, having no previous information to relate it to, any prediction or assumption I make would be based on true faith.

I know that isn't the actual definition, but that is the way I see it. If we deal with that, true faith would inheritly irrational because we have nothing rational to compare it too. Basically a shot in the dark, but I don't know how bad I would consider true faith.

But saying that, I don't know if I would consider believing in a supernatural power true faith since we come to the conclusion of a supernatural being from evidence on Earth. So I guess believing in a supernatural power wouldn't necessarily be irrational since we are basing that off "evidence", but that is only if one accepts the equal possibility of every other scenarios that has the same amount of evidence.

Then we have irrationality of stereotyping. This one is really hard to say, probably depends on how far you stray from the stereotype and how much the new event matches the stereotype. It is of course rational to assume that if you jump up, gravity will pull you back down. But I would call it irrational if you once got robbed by a man that wore a hat and now you assume every man that wears a hat is going to rob you so avoid everyone that wears hats.

blah, this probably makes no sense.

[Aliantha]

Interesting post Pierce. I don't have anything to add, but I think you've done well...and just wanted to tell you.

[piercehawkeye45]

Thank you Aliantha, I thought about this some more so here we go again, same warnings apply.

Now the rationality or irrationality of believing in a god. Well, the belief of a god is just a conclusion. We have certain amount of evidence and therefore we say a god must or may exist. Basically, we say that the supernatural takes over when we cannot explain the natural world, universal laws, creation of energy, etc.

Now, how to relate this to fate. After thinking about this, I would say that belief in a god is just stereotyping the unknown, but in a different form than in my previous post. Lets say we have an infinite amount of possibilities for the answers of the universe, the evidence we have about the world limits down the possibilities, then we are dealing with scenarios, creation of energy for example, that we have no evidence to support and therefore, have to assume that every possibility has the same probability of happening. I wouldn't call this true faith though since we can still stereotype.

Now since we have come to edge of previous evidence, we have a number of possibilities that have equal probability. As I said earlier, saying one is more likely than the other should be considered irrational. So technically saying there must be a god or that god is more likely than a scientific explanation is irrational.

But, even though we have come to the edge of knowledge we can still stereotype, which the rationality is debatable.


For an easier example to imagine, lets say you are walking down a street by yourself and you feel a sharp pain in the back of your head that feels like a punch. You did not see what caused the pain.

You turn around and see a single person in view, who is walking in punching distance behind you. With our current information, we can not say with certain what happened. Our first assumption is that the person punched you, but there technically equal possibility that I magically teleported behind you, hit you, and teleport back without you seeing me, that a supernatural power hit you, or that your nerves randomly went off. But even though each possibility has the same probability of happening, we assume that the person hit you because we have never experienced teleporting, a supernatural power, or random nerve spasms, but we have experienced physical punching, so we assume the person punched you.

Even though this is different than the stereotyping I mentioned in my previous post, I think these are very similar because they are both stereotyping that is based on previous experiences, just one is a prediction and one is a conclusion.


The belief in a god is the same way and therefore would have the same rationality/irrationality factor as before. But the problem is that we can assign a universal rational or irrational factor because we each have different experiences.

Personally, being a non-hard atheist, I have concluded that I do not have a belief in god because every bit of evidence I have seen in this world points to natural solutions, therefore, the questions we can not answer will most likely have a natural solution as opposed to a supernatural solution. I do not see any irrationality in this.

But other people may have other experiences. Lets say that person 1 told person 2 that a god exists. In person 2's perspective, person 1 has always been right so person 2 will naturally assume that person 1 is right again and will believe in a god. I really do not see much irrationality in this except my negative experiences of having blind trust in someone, but that, once again, is personal.

I do not want to go much farther than this because individual experiences have such different effects on people I know I will be completely wrong by making an assumption.

[Happy Monkey]

Heh, coincidentally, a post on this topic just showed up on Pharyngula.

[queequeger]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

Let me say it as clearly as I can: Faith DOES NOT EQUAL a magic man in the sky. It certainly can and does for some people, but for many others, it doesn't. You have taken a single, oversimplified, particularly dogmatic and particularly rare interpretation of Christianity, and defined it as all "faith." It is not.

That's such a cop out. You say it's "not that simple," but what is it then? Having "faith" that your wife won't cheat is unrelated to a faith in god, because it's still based on available information. If you mean to imply there are religions without a god, this is true of some religions, but it's still irrationality; these religions still believe in a force or balance that is unexplainable and simply "there." And what's worse is they presume to know what the force wants or does. A faceless form that created everything is just as ridiculous as a magic man. And for the record, cf, what version of Christianity (or Islam or Judaism) DOESN'T say that god created the universe? It's not a "particularly dogmatic version of christianity," it is every mainstream version of religion.

Belief that there is ANYTHING we won't eventually understand (barring destruction of mankind), meaning paranormal or supernatural, is irrational. We've repeatedly explained the unexplainable, and we'll do it again.

So if I missed some description of the word "faith" that does not include "believing in something without enough evidence," let me know. Also, fill me in on my presumptions that people of faith believe that god created the universe.

[monster]

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

Was reading the title of the thread too hard for you baby?

Are you coming on to me, rkz?

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by queequeger

Also, fill me in on my presumptions that people of faith believe that god created the universe.

"God created the universe" is a far cry from this:

Originally Posted by queequeger

a magical man in the sky who created everything "just because," and that in order to test our resolve he has placed mountains of evidence contradicting his descriptions,

Vast numbers of Christians and Jews do not take the story of creation literally. And of the ones who do, very few believe God deliberately placed contradictory evidence for us to find, they instead believe humans have failed to correctly interpret the evidence. Meanwhile, I'm not sure there are any believers at all who would say the motivation for anything their god does would be "just because."

Originally Posted by queequeger

So if I missed some description of the word "faith" that does not include "believing in something without enough evidence," let me know.

No, now you have the correct definition. It's quite different than the stereotyped, mocking contempt seen in the previous quote.