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faith in tandem with reason That's a contradiction. faith.. is necessary in the acquisition of all meaningful knowledge. I strongly disagree. Believe me, I'

by javert 16y ago

faith in tandem with reason That's a contradiction. faith.. is necessary in the acquisition of all meaningful knowledge. I strongly disagree. Believe me, I've looked into it.

cookiecaper 16y ago
It's not a contradiction, you don't understand. Faith is the serious belief that something can happen or is real. When a scientist embarks upon a hypothesis, he does so because he has faith that something valuable may come from experimenting on that hypothesis, which is a hope for value not yet seen. Faith is not just a belief or hope, but it is a set of works accomplished in the attitude of that hope, so the scientist, by faith, continues his experiments on a hypothesis. The same process occurs in the spiritual and religious realm with regard to faith. Religious people hear that certain information and/or manifestations are available to them, and they have faith sufficient to follow the path outlined. As they do so, they find their initial faith validated, and then they continue to have faith on the next point outlined in the scriptures, and find that faith validated, and so on. Faith is not knowledge; faith is a stopgap on the way to knowledge, and it's a principle necessary for healthy or reasonable conduct in all forms, which is part of why religion requires such an emphasis of faith. If a man obtains all knowledge, there is no more need for faith, because he knows everything of himself and has no need to believe something without a formal proof, as he has already received a formal proof of every true thing, which can only happen as that man has sufficient faith in true things to experiment and learn of their truth with help from God. He has no faith because he no more has a mere hope in things not seen; he now sees all things.
- javert 16y ago
  Faith consists of believing something without reference to reality, i.e., divorced of reason. A scientist engaging in an experiment is attempting to gain knowledge, and he may expect the experiment to go a certain way, based on what he knows. Someone engaging in faith says, "I believe this, just because I want to." There is no reference to knowledge, reason, or reality. It's putting an "I wish" over "It is." To engage in faith is to surrender your mind. To surrender your mind is the most basic kind of evil there is; it's anti-human life. If you are actually interested in thinking about this further, you'll probably find my cousin response (i.e. responding to another child of this comment's grandparent) highly relevant.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    Obviously, we disagree. Some may do that and call it faith, but people who are serious about faith do not believe without reference to reality or reason. Their faith is also predicated upon facts which they already know -- for instance, almost all people have an internal feeling that there is a God to be found out there. As such, based on their previous spiritual experiences, they will hear some information, believe that it is plausible and aligns with the things they already know, and act upon it, until their faith becomes knowledge on the topic, either affirming the original faith or negating it (learning something is true or learning something is not true). In religious circles, one that believes things merely because they "want to" is not considered faithful, but ignorant at best. God has given reason to man and He expects man to use it. You may feel personally that a belief in any spiritual realm or being is unreasonable, but almost all people, historically, and to a somewhat lesser extent, contemporarily, disagree with you. You're demonizing faith as an entire principle because some bad dudes have couched their badness in religion. It is common to attempt to shroud filthiness in virtue; most people find spiritual matters somewhat confusing but also consider spiritual teachers most noble, and that makes religion and false piety an excellent cover for corruption. However, not every religious person is bad just because some "religious" teachers exploit and denigrate and abuse the trust of their perishoners ("false priests", as they are called). Your attack on "faith" as a concept is silly; faith is often used in reference to religious circles because there seems to be some contention among modern persons whether it is worth having any faith in spiritual information at all, and they therefore assume their faith in scientists or physical teachers is not faith, but "reason", or something like that. Faith is a belief in a thing that has not been proven and a set of actions that seek to discover the reality of that belief one way or another. Anything that is eventually proven is proven because of the faith of its provers -- someone has to believe that an idea may have some merit in order to test it and discover if it is real or not. Religious faith is necessary among all men because spiritual proofs are communicated "spirit to spirit", and as yet, man does not know how to transfer these or write a mathematical proof of spiritual truths learned personally. This, however, does not mean that faith is not necessary in non-religious fields. A small degree of faith is necessary to believe even things that have obvious and blatant proofs available. The "anti-faith" thing is a silly and petty demonization and misappropriation, promoted by those that hate religion, and I don't really see the point in it, other than an attempt to make those that believe in religion and exercise faith in not just temporal, but also spiritual, matters appear "unreasonable" or stupid. And that's just not the case.
anon_for_this_1 16y ago
I agree with cookiecaper. I've never seen mars. I believe (blindly) that the books, pictures and lectures I've seen are real, and that other people's pronouncements (from NASA, etc) are real too, so I believe (ie have blind faith) that mars is real. I _assume_ (ie have faith) that I could do some research and become a little more sure. Heck, that goes for atoms, electricity, just about everything. All I KNOW (without getting existential, etc) are things I've personally experienced. Everything else is pure belief (and blindly at that) based on trusting the sources.
- javert 16y ago
  Please see my response to cookiecaper. You don't "blindly believe" the scientific facts/phenomena to which you refer. First, you have ample evidence to suggest that they exist. Second, they do not contradict anything else in reality that you are aware of. Third, you have reason to trust the process of cognition that led to those conclusions, i.e, the thought process and work of scientists that reference reality in their work and seek to prove things objectively. Faith---which in common use (properly so) is equivalent to "religious faith" unless otherwise specified---breaks all of those rules.
  - anon_for_this_1 16y ago
    I, personally, have no _evidence_ that the big bang really happened. I have heard people tell me it's so. I've read books claiming it's so. I have to have faith in these books and these people. That's the essence of my argument -- very, very few of us have actual evidence. What we have is the words of others. In other words, there are only a small handful of people that have built a device that can measure background microwave radiation and devices to measure red-shift, etc. Those few people know what they have observed and can interpret that information. Everything else that is built on those observations (many more theories, etc) is based on a belief in those original few peoples' work. And we, the masses, then have to believe those secondary interpretations. Heck, I haven't even gotten the information from the data interpreters, but rather from other writers who have interpretted it further and written text books, blog posts, etc. So yeah, it's pretty close to blind faith since I'm so many steps away from the truth, and don't have the ability (currently, with my existing education) to truely know it anyway even if I could speak directly to one of those scientists that built the space probe. I'd STILL have to trust him when he showed me the raw data.

by javert 16y ago

faith in tandem with reason That's a contradiction. faith.. is necessary in the acquisition of all meaningful knowledge. I strongly disagree. Believe me, I've looked into it.

cookiecaper 16y ago

It's not a contradiction, you don't understand. Faith is the serious belief that something can happen or is real. When a scientist embarks upon a hypothesis, he does so because he has faith that something valuable may come from experimenting on that hypothesis, which is a hope for value not yet seen. Faith is not just a belief or hope, but it is a set of works accomplished in the attitude of that hope, so the scientist, by faith, continues his experiments on a hypothesis. The same process occurs in the spiritual and religious realm with regard to faith. Religious people hear that certain information and/or manifestations are available to them, and they have faith sufficient to follow the path outlined. As they do so, they find their initial faith validated, and then they continue to have faith on the next point outlined in the scriptures, and find that faith validated, and so on. Faith is not knowledge; faith is a stopgap on the way to knowledge, and it's a principle necessary for healthy or reasonable conduct in all forms, which is part of why religion requires such an emphasis of faith. If a man obtains all knowledge, there is no more need for faith, because he knows everything of himself and has no need to believe something without a formal proof, as he has already received a formal proof of every true thing, which can only happen as that man has sufficient faith in true things to experiment and learn of their truth with help from God. He has no faith because he no more has a mere hope in things not seen; he now sees all things.

javert 16y ago
Faith consists of believing something without reference to reality, i.e., divorced of reason. A scientist engaging in an experiment is attempting to gain knowledge, and he may expect the experiment to go a certain way, based on what he knows. Someone engaging in faith says, "I believe this, just because I want to." There is no reference to knowledge, reason, or reality. It's putting an "I wish" over "It is." To engage in faith is to surrender your mind. To surrender your mind is the most basic kind of evil there is; it's anti-human life. If you are actually interested in thinking about this further, you'll probably find my cousin response (i.e. responding to another child of this comment's grandparent) highly relevant.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Obviously, we disagree. Some may do that and call it faith, but people who are serious about faith do not believe without reference to reality or reason. Their faith is also predicated upon facts which they already know -- for instance, almost all people have an internal feeling that there is a God to be found out there. As such, based on their previous spiritual experiences, they will hear some information, believe that it is plausible and aligns with the things they already know, and act upon it, until their faith becomes knowledge on the topic, either affirming the original faith or negating it (learning something is true or learning something is not true). In religious circles, one that believes things merely because they "want to" is not considered faithful, but ignorant at best. God has given reason to man and He expects man to use it. You may feel personally that a belief in any spiritual realm or being is unreasonable, but almost all people, historically, and to a somewhat lesser extent, contemporarily, disagree with you. You're demonizing faith as an entire principle because some bad dudes have couched their badness in religion. It is common to attempt to shroud filthiness in virtue; most people find spiritual matters somewhat confusing but also consider spiritual teachers most noble, and that makes religion and false piety an excellent cover for corruption. However, not every religious person is bad just because some "religious" teachers exploit and denigrate and abuse the trust of their perishoners ("false priests", as they are called). Your attack on "faith" as a concept is silly; faith is often used in reference to religious circles because there seems to be some contention among modern persons whether it is worth having any faith in spiritual information at all, and they therefore assume their faith in scientists or physical teachers is not faith, but "reason", or something like that. Faith is a belief in a thing that has not been proven and a set of actions that seek to discover the reality of that belief one way or another. Anything that is eventually proven is proven because of the faith of its provers -- someone has to believe that an idea may have some merit in order to test it and discover if it is real or not. Religious faith is necessary among all men because spiritual proofs are communicated "spirit to spirit", and as yet, man does not know how to transfer these or write a mathematical proof of spiritual truths learned personally. This, however, does not mean that faith is not necessary in non-religious fields. A small degree of faith is necessary to believe even things that have obvious and blatant proofs available. The "anti-faith" thing is a silly and petty demonization and misappropriation, promoted by those that hate religion, and I don't really see the point in it, other than an attempt to make those that believe in religion and exercise faith in not just temporal, but also spiritual, matters appear "unreasonable" or stupid. And that's just not the case.

anon_for_this_1 16y ago

I agree with cookiecaper. I've never seen mars. I believe (blindly) that the books, pictures and lectures I've seen are real, and that other people's pronouncements (from NASA, etc) are real too, so I believe (ie have blind faith) that mars is real. I _assume_ (ie have faith) that I could do some research and become a little more sure. Heck, that goes for atoms, electricity, just about everything. All I KNOW (without getting existential, etc) are things I've personally experienced. Everything else is pure belief (and blindly at that) based on trusting the sources.

javert 16y ago
Please see my response to cookiecaper. You don't "blindly believe" the scientific facts/phenomena to which you refer. First, you have ample evidence to suggest that they exist. Second, they do not contradict anything else in reality that you are aware of. Third, you have reason to trust the process of cognition that led to those conclusions, i.e, the thought process and work of scientists that reference reality in their work and seek to prove things objectively. Faith---which in common use (properly so) is equivalent to "religious faith" unless otherwise specified---breaks all of those rules.
- anon_for_this_1 16y ago
  I, personally, have no _evidence_ that the big bang really happened. I have heard people tell me it's so. I've read books claiming it's so. I have to have faith in these books and these people. That's the essence of my argument -- very, very few of us have actual evidence. What we have is the words of others. In other words, there are only a small handful of people that have built a device that can measure background microwave radiation and devices to measure red-shift, etc. Those few people know what they have observed and can interpret that information. Everything else that is built on those observations (many more theories, etc) is based on a belief in those original few peoples' work. And we, the masses, then have to believe those secondary interpretations. Heck, I haven't even gotten the information from the data interpreters, but rather from other writers who have interpretted it further and written text books, blog posts, etc. So yeah, it's pretty close to blind faith since I'm so many steps away from the truth, and don't have the ability (currently, with my existing education) to truely know it anyway even if I could speak directly to one of those scientists that built the space probe. I'd STILL have to trust him when he showed me the raw data.