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> For example, we have “faith” that the laws of nature are uniform across time and space even though we don’t have nearly enough evidence to confirm that belief

> For example, we have “faith” that the laws of nature are uniform across time and space even though we don’t have nearly enough evidence to confirm that belief (see the problem of induction). I stopped reading there because he doesn't understand that of which he speaks. This is actually a hotly debated topic among scientists in many fields, and it is definitely _not_ taken on faith. These sort of arguments from the faithful really annoy me. It feels like they're protesting too much by insisting that I'm making the same mistake that deep down they know they're making.

tines 6y ago
Yeah, I think the crux is the conflation of "assumption" with "faith". We assume the speed of light in a vacuum is uniform across all of space and that is how we can estimate how far away stars are in "light-years". But that doesn't make it faith; nobody is opposed to revising that assumption when better evidence comes in. Biblical faith is specifically "the evidence of things not seen", so it's fundamentally different than an assumption.
- walljm 6y ago
  I'm not sure that is true. "evidence of things not seen" is just poetic language for "faith is the thing that bridges the gap between what you are sure of and what you aren't". An assumption is an act of faith. Its a decision to accept something that you don't have proof of. The dictionary lists belief as a synonym for assumption. I think the mistake many people make, including Christians, is in believing that faith is something other than choosing to accept as true what you can't prove. There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually. Its just that in religious circles faith is a much discussed component.
  - tines 6y ago
    EDIT: There are too many places where "I think" should be placed in the following paragraphs, so just insert it wherever I make an assertion. I am exploring these things as well and I don't want to make it seem like I think I have all the answers. As it says, "we know in part, and we prophesy in part." I am a Christian and I'd love to talk about this stuff with you so I hope it reads friendly. Yes, I meant to confine my usage to biblical usage of the words specifically, and there are a host of assertions made about faith in the Bible that don't apply to everyday usage of the word "faith". For example, according to Romans, biblical faith "comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God", so the faith I'm referring to is belief in the word of God; by this definition, one can't have biblical faith in whatever one pleases. The word is not used in the more general sense of "assumption" in the New Testament (that I know of). (So when you read "Ye of little faith" or whatever, it's specifically talking about people who don't believe the word of God/Jesus, not just people who are not in the habit of making assumptions in general.) And I meant to use the word "believer" to refer to "one who has faith [in the biblical sense mentioned]". So what I meant to say earlier is that when the Bible says that a believer should have "faith" in something, the believer can be confident that there will either be no visible evidence for that thing, or that there will be evidence to the contrary. Take Peter, for example, whom Jesus bade to come to him out on the water by faith. At that point, Peter was not only ignorant of whether the water would support him, but rather knew for sure that it wouldn't; and he walked anyway. Abraham is another example, to whom God promised that he would have a son after both he and his wife were past childbearing age (not simply when they didn't have a child yet). And again Abraham, when God told him to offer his son as a sacrifice, reasoned that since God said his lineage would be through Isaac, but Isaac hadn't had children yet, God would simply raise him from the dead, which was impossible by normal human means, needless to say. More importantly, take the idea that believers are not only made righteous, but are made righteous by faith: since it is by faith, one should not be surprised to see evidence contrary to this claim, namely that one still sins. Paul wrote both "we wait for the hope of righteousness through faith" and "For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope, for why would a man hope for that which he sees?" All that is to say that in biblical vernacular, I think that faith differs from an assumption simply in that a believer is not looking for confirmation, and is perhaps even looking for dis-confirmation of the thing which he believes, whereas an assumption is open to revision upon the discovery of proof or disproof. In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible. > There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually. Agreed. But in Christian circles, I think it needs to be made clear that the bible makes a lot of assertions about faith that don't apply to the dictionary definition of the word.
    - walljm 6y ago
      I am a Christian also and I'm happy to discuss! :) Hopefully, we'll both walk away with a deeper understanding. It seems to me that the way you're trying to distinguish between "faith" and "belief" and "assumption" has more to do with what a person is "assuming", "believing" or putting their "faith" in, and not the meaning of those words in and of themselves. The example of Jesus and Peter is a good one. Peter needed to have faith. The reason for the need for faith was because the thing Jesus was asking of him wasn't normal and Peter didn't have explicit evidence of it. But Peter did have evidence that when it came to Jesus, physics weren't normal, and Jesus himself was walking on the water proving that Jesus had command of that ability. Peter wasn't blind at that moment, but he did have to assume (or believe) that if Jesus said he could walk on water, then Peter could walk on water also. There was extrapolation from evidence and relationship, but not full knowledge yet. And if Peter had sunk, his faith in Jesus would have suffered, and rightfully so if Jesus had let him down. But Jesus didn't let him down, and his faith in Jesus was shown to be justified. When the bible says that we are saved "by faith" it is describing the mechanical process in simple terms. We know that the person who does the saving is God the Father. We know that the reason the Father is justified in saving us is because of Jesus sacrifice. But salvation doesn't occur until we enter into the agreement the Father has offered mankind for salvation, and to do that we have to "believe" in the fundamentals of the agreement. You won't enter into a contract if you don't believe the contract exists, if you don't believe the one offering the contract exists, if you don't believe that the contract is possible, and so on. When you choose to accept God's offer of salvation you have to do so by faith, because there is not 100% definitive proof of all that before hand. You are, in other words, choosing to accept as true something you can't prove with 100% certainty. And though the degree of faith being exercised is different, that is exactly the same thing that happens in empirical science, where nothing is proved 100% but things are shown to be true to some degree of probability (usually very high, but never 100%). > In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible. In this I think we disagree. My faith in scripture isn't blind, nor do I believe that the Bible is teaching us to continue in spite of evidence to the contrary. I believe because I find the Bible, to the extent that I can verify it, to be true, and I continue to believe because nothing has shown it to be false. Nothing explains the world as accurately as scripture does, and all of my life has born out the truths of scripture. The bible presents a theory of the world that I find to be more compelling than any other theory of the world. And all the evidence that I have seen continues to support that theory in my view. So I continue to believe. But if the Bible is shown to be false, then it is folly to persist in its teachings. Even Paul said, "...if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die." (1 Cor 15:32). His point (if you look at the bigger context) is that if what Jesus is teaching isn't true, then we should take as much joy and pleasure in this life as we can, for there is little point in all the suffering Jesus calls us to otherwise. --- The thing I was trying to convey in my first post (perhaps a bit to abruptly) is that the idea that faith in scripture is somehow more than the simple definition leads to a misunderstanding of what God is trying to tell us in the Bible. When we inject more "meaning" than is there it complicates things that were meant to be simple. Thanks for engaging with me on this!
monktastic1 6y ago
You're familiar with Hume's Problem of Induction? I like how Stephen Law puts it here: > It’s a good test of whether someone has actually understood Hume’s argument that they acknowledge its conclusion is fantastic (many students new to philosophy misinterpret Hume: they think his conclusion is merely that we cannot be certain what will happen tomorrow.) ... [But] if Hume is right, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is as unjustified as the belief that a million mile wide bowl of tulips will appear over the horizon instead. We suppose the second belief is insane. But if Hume is correct, the first belief is actually no more rational. ... [T]he onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume's argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so). Contrary to the other response to your comment, no amount of evidence should ever increase one's confidence, in a strictly rational sense. It is, in that sense, a matter of faith. Similarly, Sean Carroll on radical skepticism: > There is no way to distinguish between [metaphysical] scenarios by collecting new data. > What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities. > Radical skepticism is less useful to us; it gives us no way to go through life. All of our purported knowledge [...] might very well be tricks being played on us. But what then? We cannot actually act on such a belief [...]. Whereas, if we take the world roughly at face value, we have a way of moving forward. There are things we want to do, questions we want to answer, and strategies for making them happen. We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.
- tines 6y ago
  I think this is a different line of reasoning from the one everyone else is on. Hume seems to be saying that there's no such thing as evidence at all, there's just a sequence of unrelated events. But faith (in the Christian sense, at least) is believing something apart from, or in spite of, evidence, whereas reason is believing something because of evidence. Point being, both of them require that the concept of evidence has some value. So saying that there is no evidence for _anything_ does not support faith (again, in the Christian sense); it undermines them both. It's like that quote from the movie The Incredibles: "When everyone's super, no one will be."
zzbzq 6y ago
I don't think it's hotly debated. It's frivolously debated. Occasionally someone acknowledges that certain formulae or constants might actually be variable, but ultimately move on to assume they are fixed. But even in those hypothetical scenarios it's assumed that the laws of nature would evolve by some meta-laws. I've never seen it considered that there are no laws at all, despite the fact that this seems to me the most likely case. The existence of laws is supposed as a prerequisite for the method of science. I think calling it faith is apt because the idea that the universe works by "laws" is, at its inception, a religious idea! Newton after all saw science as a religious endeavor.
- simonh 6y ago
  We don't assume that there are consistent principles that lead to reliable results at all, rather we theorise that there might be and then test to see if this supposition can be demonstrated practically. So far this has turned out pretty well for us, to put it mildly. We don't need to base that on faith, because as I'm sure you are aware so far it has turned out to be consistently true in practice. That's what testability is all about, the elimination of the need for faith. If things that at first seem static turn out to change in the universe under changing conditions, that simply isn't a problem for science. Just look at the theory of relativity which superseded Newton's 'static' laws of motion and gravitation. As for laws of nature originating with religion, the concept was first explicitly articulated in Europe in pagan Rome, but not in any religious context. It certainly didn't come from Christianity with it's volatile, opinionated and highly active and interventionist deity.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Yeah it's the same with the erroneous substitution of the scientific definition of a "theory" with its dictionary definition. Really sloppy and lazy.
- simonh 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's not sloppy or lazy at all, I think he knows exactly what he's doing. That's the problem.

tines 6y ago

Yeah, I think the crux is the conflation of "assumption" with "faith". We assume the speed of light in a vacuum is uniform across all of space and that is how we can estimate how far away stars are in "light-years". But that doesn't make it faith; nobody is opposed to revising that assumption when better evidence comes in. Biblical faith is specifically "the evidence of things not seen", so it's fundamentally different than an assumption.

walljm 6y ago
I'm not sure that is true. "evidence of things not seen" is just poetic language for "faith is the thing that bridges the gap between what you are sure of and what you aren't". An assumption is an act of faith. Its a decision to accept something that you don't have proof of. The dictionary lists belief as a synonym for assumption. I think the mistake many people make, including Christians, is in believing that faith is something other than choosing to accept as true what you can't prove. There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually. Its just that in religious circles faith is a much discussed component.
- tines 6y ago
  EDIT: There are too many places where "I think" should be placed in the following paragraphs, so just insert it wherever I make an assertion. I am exploring these things as well and I don't want to make it seem like I think I have all the answers. As it says, "we know in part, and we prophesy in part." I am a Christian and I'd love to talk about this stuff with you so I hope it reads friendly. Yes, I meant to confine my usage to biblical usage of the words specifically, and there are a host of assertions made about faith in the Bible that don't apply to everyday usage of the word "faith". For example, according to Romans, biblical faith "comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God", so the faith I'm referring to is belief in the word of God; by this definition, one can't have biblical faith in whatever one pleases. The word is not used in the more general sense of "assumption" in the New Testament (that I know of). (So when you read "Ye of little faith" or whatever, it's specifically talking about people who don't believe the word of God/Jesus, not just people who are not in the habit of making assumptions in general.) And I meant to use the word "believer" to refer to "one who has faith [in the biblical sense mentioned]". So what I meant to say earlier is that when the Bible says that a believer should have "faith" in something, the believer can be confident that there will either be no visible evidence for that thing, or that there will be evidence to the contrary. Take Peter, for example, whom Jesus bade to come to him out on the water by faith. At that point, Peter was not only ignorant of whether the water would support him, but rather knew for sure that it wouldn't; and he walked anyway. Abraham is another example, to whom God promised that he would have a son after both he and his wife were past childbearing age (not simply when they didn't have a child yet). And again Abraham, when God told him to offer his son as a sacrifice, reasoned that since God said his lineage would be through Isaac, but Isaac hadn't had children yet, God would simply raise him from the dead, which was impossible by normal human means, needless to say. More importantly, take the idea that believers are not only made righteous, but are made righteous by faith: since it is by faith, one should not be surprised to see evidence contrary to this claim, namely that one still sins. Paul wrote both "we wait for the hope of righteousness through faith" and "For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope, for why would a man hope for that which he sees?" All that is to say that in biblical vernacular, I think that faith differs from an assumption simply in that a believer is not looking for confirmation, and is perhaps even looking for dis-confirmation of the thing which he believes, whereas an assumption is open to revision upon the discovery of proof or disproof. In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible. > There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually. Agreed. But in Christian circles, I think it needs to be made clear that the bible makes a lot of assertions about faith that don't apply to the dictionary definition of the word.
  - walljm 6y ago
    I am a Christian also and I'm happy to discuss! :) Hopefully, we'll both walk away with a deeper understanding. It seems to me that the way you're trying to distinguish between "faith" and "belief" and "assumption" has more to do with what a person is "assuming", "believing" or putting their "faith" in, and not the meaning of those words in and of themselves. The example of Jesus and Peter is a good one. Peter needed to have faith. The reason for the need for faith was because the thing Jesus was asking of him wasn't normal and Peter didn't have explicit evidence of it. But Peter did have evidence that when it came to Jesus, physics weren't normal, and Jesus himself was walking on the water proving that Jesus had command of that ability. Peter wasn't blind at that moment, but he did have to assume (or believe) that if Jesus said he could walk on water, then Peter could walk on water also. There was extrapolation from evidence and relationship, but not full knowledge yet. And if Peter had sunk, his faith in Jesus would have suffered, and rightfully so if Jesus had let him down. But Jesus didn't let him down, and his faith in Jesus was shown to be justified. When the bible says that we are saved "by faith" it is describing the mechanical process in simple terms. We know that the person who does the saving is God the Father. We know that the reason the Father is justified in saving us is because of Jesus sacrifice. But salvation doesn't occur until we enter into the agreement the Father has offered mankind for salvation, and to do that we have to "believe" in the fundamentals of the agreement. You won't enter into a contract if you don't believe the contract exists, if you don't believe the one offering the contract exists, if you don't believe that the contract is possible, and so on. When you choose to accept God's offer of salvation you have to do so by faith, because there is not 100% definitive proof of all that before hand. You are, in other words, choosing to accept as true something you can't prove with 100% certainty. And though the degree of faith being exercised is different, that is exactly the same thing that happens in empirical science, where nothing is proved 100% but things are shown to be true to some degree of probability (usually very high, but never 100%). > In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible. In this I think we disagree. My faith in scripture isn't blind, nor do I believe that the Bible is teaching us to continue in spite of evidence to the contrary. I believe because I find the Bible, to the extent that I can verify it, to be true, and I continue to believe because nothing has shown it to be false. Nothing explains the world as accurately as scripture does, and all of my life has born out the truths of scripture. The bible presents a theory of the world that I find to be more compelling than any other theory of the world. And all the evidence that I have seen continues to support that theory in my view. So I continue to believe. But if the Bible is shown to be false, then it is folly to persist in its teachings. Even Paul said, "...if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die." (1 Cor 15:32). His point (if you look at the bigger context) is that if what Jesus is teaching isn't true, then we should take as much joy and pleasure in this life as we can, for there is little point in all the suffering Jesus calls us to otherwise. --- The thing I was trying to convey in my first post (perhaps a bit to abruptly) is that the idea that faith in scripture is somehow more than the simple definition leads to a misunderstanding of what God is trying to tell us in the Bible. When we inject more "meaning" than is there it complicates things that were meant to be simple. Thanks for engaging with me on this!

monktastic1 6y ago

You're familiar with Hume's Problem of Induction? I like how Stephen Law puts it here: > It’s a good test of whether someone has actually understood Hume’s argument that they acknowledge its conclusion is fantastic (many students new to philosophy misinterpret Hume: they think his conclusion is merely that we cannot be certain what will happen tomorrow.) ... [But] if Hume is right, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is as unjustified as the belief that a million mile wide bowl of tulips will appear over the horizon instead. We suppose the second belief is insane. But if Hume is correct, the first belief is actually no more rational. ... [T]he onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume's argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so). Contrary to the other response to your comment, no amount of evidence should ever increase one's confidence, in a strictly rational sense. It is, in that sense, a matter of faith. Similarly, Sean Carroll on radical skepticism: > There is no way to distinguish between [metaphysical] scenarios by collecting new data. > What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities. > Radical skepticism is less useful to us; it gives us no way to go through life. All of our purported knowledge [...] might very well be tricks being played on us. But what then? We cannot actually act on such a belief [...]. Whereas, if we take the world roughly at face value, we have a way of moving forward. There are things we want to do, questions we want to answer, and strategies for making them happen. We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.

tines 6y ago
I think this is a different line of reasoning from the one everyone else is on. Hume seems to be saying that there's no such thing as evidence at all, there's just a sequence of unrelated events. But faith (in the Christian sense, at least) is believing something apart from, or in spite of, evidence, whereas reason is believing something because of evidence. Point being, both of them require that the concept of evidence has some value. So saying that there is no evidence for _anything_ does not support faith (again, in the Christian sense); it undermines them both. It's like that quote from the movie The Incredibles: "When everyone's super, no one will be."

zzbzq 6y ago

I don't think it's hotly debated. It's frivolously debated. Occasionally someone acknowledges that certain formulae or constants might actually be variable, but ultimately move on to assume they are fixed. But even in those hypothetical scenarios it's assumed that the laws of nature would evolve by some meta-laws. I've never seen it considered that there are no laws at all, despite the fact that this seems to me the most likely case. The existence of laws is supposed as a prerequisite for the method of science. I think calling it faith is apt because the idea that the universe works by "laws" is, at its inception, a religious idea! Newton after all saw science as a religious endeavor.

simonh 6y ago
We don't assume that there are consistent principles that lead to reliable results at all, rather we theorise that there might be and then test to see if this supposition can be demonstrated practically. So far this has turned out pretty well for us, to put it mildly. We don't need to base that on faith, because as I'm sure you are aware so far it has turned out to be consistently true in practice. That's what testability is all about, the elimination of the need for faith. If things that at first seem static turn out to change in the universe under changing conditions, that simply isn't a problem for science. Just look at the theory of relativity which superseded Newton's 'static' laws of motion and gravitation. As for laws of nature originating with religion, the concept was first explicitly articulated in Europe in pagan Rome, but not in any religious context. It certainly didn't come from Christianity with it's volatile, opinionated and highly active and interventionist deity.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

Yeah it's the same with the erroneous substitution of the scientific definition of a "theory" with its dictionary definition. Really sloppy and lazy.

simonh 6y ago
I'm pretty sure it's not sloppy or lazy at all, I think he knows exactly what he's doing. That's the problem.