A thought on "faith."
To begin, "faith" is defined here as "religious belief." It is unfortunate that the English language places no semantic distinction between "acceptance without absolute proof" and "religious belief," giving both the umbrella term faith, but the fact remains that they are very disparate notions. "Acceptance without absolute proof," as of special relativity, remains capable of prediction and deduction, and is inherently doubtful in hopes of finding something to describe more fully the spectrum of gravitational and acceleratory phenomena. Religious faith needs no such capability, and exists at odds (!) with observable reality in many instances. Evolution, for example.
A brief aside: Evolution is not "just a theory." That's a semantic game and exploits the general public's misunderstanding of the significance of "theory" in scientific discourse. A "theory" is not a guess, but rather a very highly tested and concurrently examined mode of description which has yet to fail to agree with any observed evidence. A "theory" in scientific discourse is not, on the other hand, a wild guess with no anchoring to reality. Evolutionary theory predicts development paths which have been confirmed repeatedly by fossil discoveries, continue to be affirmed by current research, and in fact evolutionary theory is directly observable to correlate with reality insofar as species differ under selection criteria.
Back to the main course: Faith and Reason are at odds. Faith, as an epistemic mode, is utterly useless; that is, faith has no predictave nor deductive capability, only declarative, and insofar as faith applies to the material world faith resembles at best a sort of innocent cognitive dissonance. At worst, magical thinking.
Most faithful will agree that Faith and Science don't overlap, right? Because Science deals with "worldly knowledge" while Faith deals with "supernatural knowledge" (literally, that knowledge which does not correspond to nature). However, my contention is that the knowledge gained is entirely subjective and fits no meaning of "knowledge" at all. How is it that you can call disparate "knowings" as a whole knowledge? What is consistantly learned by those with faith that can be thus defined as otherworldly knowledge? The entire subject is so, well, subjective. That is, faiths disagree. Individuals in a faith often disagree, and the disagreements can be quite defined.
Is faith entirely personal to the point that every individual is the authority of his or her faith? If so, doesn't it more and more resemble cognitive dissonance in all ways, not just where it disagrees with observable reality?
A brief aside: Evolution is not "just a theory." That's a semantic game and exploits the general public's misunderstanding of the significance of "theory" in scientific discourse. A "theory" is not a guess, but rather a very highly tested and concurrently examined mode of description which has yet to fail to agree with any observed evidence. A "theory" in scientific discourse is not, on the other hand, a wild guess with no anchoring to reality. Evolutionary theory predicts development paths which have been confirmed repeatedly by fossil discoveries, continue to be affirmed by current research, and in fact evolutionary theory is directly observable to correlate with reality insofar as species differ under selection criteria.
Back to the main course: Faith and Reason are at odds. Faith, as an epistemic mode, is utterly useless; that is, faith has no predictave nor deductive capability, only declarative, and insofar as faith applies to the material world faith resembles at best a sort of innocent cognitive dissonance. At worst, magical thinking.
Most faithful will agree that Faith and Science don't overlap, right? Because Science deals with "worldly knowledge" while Faith deals with "supernatural knowledge" (literally, that knowledge which does not correspond to nature). However, my contention is that the knowledge gained is entirely subjective and fits no meaning of "knowledge" at all. How is it that you can call disparate "knowings" as a whole knowledge? What is consistantly learned by those with faith that can be thus defined as otherworldly knowledge? The entire subject is so, well, subjective. That is, faiths disagree. Individuals in a faith often disagree, and the disagreements can be quite defined.
Is faith entirely personal to the point that every individual is the authority of his or her faith? If so, doesn't it more and more resemble cognitive dissonance in all ways, not just where it disagrees with observable reality?