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SprewellSleeve



Registered: 03/15/09
Posts: 6,315
Loc: USA
Last seen: 1 day, 11 hours
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It's not faith
#14390204 - 05/02/11 05:59 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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if you use your eyes.
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4896744
Small Town Girl


Registered: 03/06/10
Posts: 5,128
Loc: United States
Last seen: 11 years, 8 months
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Quote:
SprewellSleeve said: if you use your eyes.
I don't think anyone has claimed you need "faith" to believe in your specific region of earth.
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Noteworthy
Sophyphile


Registered: 10/05/08
Posts: 5,599
Last seen: 11 years, 12 days
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Re: It's not faith [Re: 4896744]
#14392561 - 05/03/11 01:11 AM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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Actually, they have. Descartes popularised the fact that we don't know that we are seeing truth or illusion.
No one knows, but we have faith of the reality of the world we see. It is a basic faith that we think is allowable.
Not as drastic as the faith of things that we dont see directly.
For example, people don't just have faith of god from nothing. The faith stems from things they see with their eyes, but it includes various interpretations.
Before scientific understanding of the world, it was not a stretch of faith to think that the universe was being orchestrated by some divine power, because clearly, by looking with your eyes, you see all kinds of order all over the place. Without any way of understanding this order without inference to a designer or deity, it was considered silly to think that it all jsut happened without divine intervention.
Similarly, today we think it is silly to think that our sensation of the world just happens to occur without any actual world there to cause it.
But because of our scientific notions, we no longer invoke divine powers to explain the patterns we see in the world - we invoke explinations given to us by scientists and proliferated by modern technological culture.
Different faiths have different weights. It once was absurd to lack the faith that there were divine or spiritual powers at work.
It is now absurd to lack faith in the scientific world story.
But that is only because of what we have collectively learned. Who knows whether this faith will still be asburd in the future, after we may have learned more?
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Edited by Noteworthy (05/03/11 01:20 AM)
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Noteworthy
Sophyphile


Registered: 10/05/08
Posts: 5,599
Last seen: 11 years, 12 days
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Another more simple angle to consider is simply how we interpret things that we see with our eyes.
When we see a person acting in a certain way, we are using our eyes. We might see a parent scolding a child?
How do we interpret this as wrong or right? how do we determine whether or not the child deserved what they got or not?
We don't just use our eyes, we use our conceptual tools to fit what we see into a bigger picture. Our beliefs on parenting, our judgements of the parent and child, our observation of the interactions, all fit together to interpret the situation. But just using your EYES is not enough. You need to have faith in your interpretation too, because otherwise you will see an infinite variety of different interpretations.
Some people think we should withold judgement on this.
But the bottom line is that we all use various reasoning processes IN ADDITION to our sensory information, to form our picture of the world. Faith plays a role in everyone's reasoning processes, but some sorts of faith are more acceptable to some people than others.
Some people have faith in what a doctor tells them, because they are a doctor. Others see other motives.
Some people have faith in what a priest or guruu tells them, because they are a spiritual leader. Others see alterior motives in these men's words.
It is currently popular to lack faith in the church but not in science. However, both have alternative motives and both can be selling you their garbage. They just use different techniques to sell it to you. You might have a bunch of reasons for believing one and not the other. Other people might have a different oppinion.
Everyone uses their eyes and then combines faith with logic to produce an interpretation. Some faiths are bigger than others and some uses of logic are more rigorous than others, but the equasion is always the same -
senses+faith+logic=conclusion
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DisoRDeR
motional



Registered: 08/29/02
Posts: 1,158
Loc: nonsensistan
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Quote:
Noteworthy said:
senses+faith+logic=conclusion
What of a situation in which one believes they have applied logic, but the logic is flawed, incomplete, or incorporates unsubstantiated beliefs which go unrecognized?
I suppose I answered my own question by using the word 'belief' ... Does faith exist if one does not recognize it as such? Is faith the word we should use here?
Edited by DisoRDeR (05/03/11 09:09 AM)
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Noteworthy
Sophyphile


Registered: 10/05/08
Posts: 5,599
Last seen: 11 years, 12 days
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Re: It's not faith [Re: DisoRDeR]
#14399601 - 05/04/11 11:56 AM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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the senses, faith, and reasoning process are all subject to critizism. But the conclusions people make about the state of our world - they are all of the same structure.
Our senses are generally compressions of the actual data we recieve, so that we arent swamped by information. We always hold some faiths, without which our reasoning process cannot follow. We are not using our full logical resources, because if we did, then we would suddenly know everything there ever was to know about everything that could be known with our information.
Our unique mix of all the imperfect factors leads to our individual beliefs in the world.
The perfect minded entity would sense the whole world, have faith in nothing, and know everything there ever was to know in an instant.
On Faith
Every time you are open to multiple possibilities, you lack faith in one, but cannot act on a single possiblity, or take comfort from or utilise any possibility at all.
It is by committing to certain faiths, we allow our minds to focus on specific sets of possibilitiy, in order to find a correct path of thought or action. In order for a decision to be made, a some aspects of reality must be accepted (in order to be focussed on and dealt with by the decision making process)
For example, in order to take our world seriously and determine how to act upon it, we must first have faith/belief that it represents something real at all. Although many people have lessened their faith in religion over the years, there is a very strong trend of increasing faith in certain scientific theories, also known as 'scientific realism'.
This allows most people to think more clearly because it is draining to consider all the possibilities of the universe, possibilities of moral codes, possibilities of what we are. Social forces determine which memes of belief survive, and these memes are somehow beneficial for a society. By taking a scientific realist perspective, all of reality can be described by science and thus all we have to think about seriously are the things described by our science. Without taking this perspective, we can be overwhealmed by the sheer infinite unknown (and unknowable) possibilities of how the universe exists. Traditionally, religions have played this purpose. People believed in different systems of belief and were able to get on with their lives, without sitting, baffled by the possibilities of the universe. Nowadays, religions seem to all be shown to be corrupt and contradictory, and a new process for developing faiths developed - science. People have faith in scientific models that have been shown to describe the world most accurately. This is because it is the best knowledge we have. As we gain more accurate models, more knowledge is available to use, and so we have faith in the model, such to use it. But our current model will simply always be the most accurate model. No model has been complete, and we have no reason to think we will become complete (although we might). But using the most recent model is the best plan of action because it is the most informed plan of action. So it is always beneficial for people to believe in the best science of the day.
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