Everyone "believes" uncounted millions of things, billions of things. Making up a nonsensical definition for what belief entails is only going to make you sound foolish and self serving. Atheists are mo more rational than theists. They just believe different things. Crazy, nonsensical definitions of belief don't make it in the real world. If an atheist believes his wife when she tells him she loves him, he's just as guilty of "faith" as any theist. He's just not honest enough to admit to it
What a pile of crap! Do you even think before you write?
What does believing someones word have to do with a believe system about the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe?
Of course there are people that will approach even these words by their spouse with scientific and brutal analysis. I know such people. This is where I draw the line for myself though. I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to that.
Also, I am willing to revert my theory about my wifes love, should I be confronted with evidence to the contrary. Religious people and ideologist will not do that.
Everyone "believes" uncounted millions of things, billions of things. Making up a nonsensical definition for what belief entails is only going to make you sound foolish and self serving. Atheists are mo more rational than theists. They just believe different things. Crazy, nonsensical definitions of belief don't make it in the real world. If an atheist believes his wife when she tells him she loves him, he's just as guilty of "faith" as any theist. He's just not honest enough to admit to it
What a pile of crap! Do you even think before you write?
What does believing someones word have to do with a believe system about the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe?
Of course there are people that will approach even these words by their spouse with scientific and brutal analysis. I know such people. This is where I draw the line for myself though. I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to that.
Also, I am willing to revert my theory about my wifes love, should I be confronted with evidence to the contrary. Religious people and ideologist will not do that.
Skip, I promise you, you have in mind a mere caricature of religious people. They re-evaluate their beliefs at least as often as irreligious people. Some people, religious or not, seldom do this and others do it daily. You're making up a situation in your mind about what you think people are like, and life is just not like that.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
GIThruster wrote:
Skip, I promise you, you have in mind a mere caricature of religious people. They re-evaluate their beliefs at least as often as irreligious people. Some people, religious or not, seldom do this and others do it daily. You're making up a situation in your mind about what you think people are like, and life is just not like that.
well, no problem with religious people, as long as they dont try to impose religious teaching in public schools, nor teach creationism as "science" or a 6000 yr old universe.
"People" is a general population sample. It follows trends. Individuals don't follow trends, they reason. Religion is not a rational reasoning system, but faith-based. It's only the subset of atheists that pretend certainty in the absence of deity, fail to re-evaluate their beliefs. Atheists is a terrible blanket statement.
The relationship between faith and reason is very complex. It's not enough to say "religion is faith-based." Religious people focus fantastic attention to their beliefs with reason. For instance, within Christianity, an enormous body of natural philosophy exists surrounding Christian issues that never makes reference to supposed Christian revelation as authority for belief, but rather reasons out the reasons for faith. Typical subjects would be the Christmas story, the Easter Story, the Problem of Evil. . .
The Christmas story--is Christ who he claimed to be? The rational argument is that Christ cannot be just a "good moral teacher" becase he also claimed to be the creator of the heavens and the Earth. Such a man is either who he claims to be, or a very bad man. In Latin, the argument is called "God or a Bad Man".) In modern times, the argument has been extended to include the possibility he was nuts, and so gives the argument--Liar, Lunatic or Lord. Completely rational argument supporting historic Christian doctrine that is ample proof, religious people do actually reason.
The Easter story--there's an empty tomb. The Christians say it's empty because Christ rose from the dead. There's a fantastic amount of worthy scholarship writing on this issue. As i recall, there was a pair of books I came across 30 years ago by a guy named Josh MacDowell, something like "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" and "More Evidence" that looks at the details of the Easter story and analyses them very rationally. Supposedly, MacDowell was an atheist until he decided to refute the Christians with the evidence of the empty tomb, and was thus converted.
The problem of evil--"if god is all good and all powerful, why is there evil?" This argument goes back to the second century AD and has had many extremely well thought out answers given. Answers to this historic philosophical question are called "Theodicies" (no relation to theocracy) and they're good, solid arguments made in the finest tradition of Christian philosophers.
Just saying, it's not fair to dispense with Christian belief or any other religious belief, based upon some hand-waving that it's faith, rather than fact based. The story is not nearly so simple, and until you've waded through tens of thousands of pages, you really don't have a grasp at just how reasonable, and rational, religious belief really is.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
You said "Religion is not a rational reasoning system. . ." I just gave you three instances where this is not true. It is often a rational, reasoning process as in these examples. How many instances would you like? I'm trained as a philosopher. I can go on for hours. I thought three examples was pretty concise. So what is it you're asking for?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
You actually didn't show anything.
All the three instances you showed are not proving anything because they require you to believe (or have faith) in the exhistance of Christ or God (or the flying spaghetti monster) before even you can start to discuss those arguments.
Betruger was very clear. Give evidence that religion is not faith based if you have any.
I don't have any. Religion is faith based. I didn't say otherwise. I said that it is a mistake to think the issue is so simple and I said why it is not so simple. I can make the same argument the other way around. It is most certainly NOT TRUE, that science avoids this same sort of faith.
When you were in high school, your biology teacher told you that chaos and time can account for life. She said that a bunch of amino acids thrown up on some hot rocks would turn into proteins through polypeptide bonding, and those proteins turned into cells, and eventually into life. You need a fantastic amount of faith to believe such a story. Your faith may be in chaos, but it is faith nonetheless, and it is faith in spite of the obvious. Life does not spontaneously generate. Your bio teach didn't tell you some things. She didn't tell you that in non-living mechanisms, amino acids are always created in racemic pairs--stereo isomers, levro-rotary and dextro-rotary, and that only living systems have a way to sort them out. Those chains of tens of thousands of amino acids are all levro-rotary. How did that happen?
Faith. If you believe that story, you have a LOT more faith than the average theist.
So really, the relationship between faith and reason really IS much more complex than can be dealt with through casual hand waving.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
GIThruster wrote:It is most certainly NOT TRUE, that science avoids this same sort of faith.
When you were in high school, your biology teacher told you that chaos and time can account for life. She said that a bunch of amino acids thrown up on some hot rocks would turn into proteins through polypeptide bonding, and those proteins turned into cells, and eventually into life. You need a fantastic amount of faith to believe such a story.
This 'debate' is in my perception a very mediocre one. If you cannot comprehend the difference then there is little that can be done to aid you. The above is a testable hypothesis based on observations of those mechanisms, not a belief system.
I have edited 'belief' for 'religious belief' in my last post, so as to help you understand it a bit better. I am not sure anyone else misunderstood that, but let's keep it straight.
Y'know, you can have the mediocre meta-physical debate about whether I believe I am sitting in front of a computer typing an explanation [fruitlessly], maybe I am not at all. Maybe it is just a belief that I am alive at all. This is a trivial 1st grade philosophy debating point and cannot, in any remote way, be compared with positing a hypothesis of historic processes based on known, tested and observed mechanisms in the today.
Skip, I promise you, you have in mind a mere caricature of religious people.
Ah really? You think that I dont personally know religious people?
Do you think that religion has in no way ever come across my own life?
Heck, I even went to a fracking catholic school with priests as teachers, so dont treat me like I dont know what I am talking about.
Thruster you're hand waving an equivocation of "the relationship between faith and reason [is complex]" and "science requires faith to some degree".
1- Those two arguments are distinct, separate.
2- You seem to be arguing that "to some degree" is significantly larger than the faith required by religious thought, which definitely ain't right. The next argument I'd make here is the same as found in Chris' last post above.