(February 8, 2010 at 7:04 am)starbucks Wrote: Isn't that what faith is? To place trust and confidence in a person based on some form of evidence that the person is competent? But still, we can't know with absolute certainty that they won't mess up. We need only enough evidence to win our trust.
Religious Faith is entirely different to trusting consensus amongst experts.
Scientific consensus is the most commonly held opinion amongst the scientists in the field of study, these are people who know far more about an area than someone outside their professional field could hope to, so listening to their conclusions on the subject gives you, not certainty, but an idea of what the experts consider the most likely explanation given the current body of knowledge. The information that goes into informing these conclusions is always being added to and as such the conclusions themselves are prone to change when the evidence favors an opposing position.
Religious faith persuades you to believe in a proposition without evidence, it requires you surrender to an idea and accept it, or form your own ideas and then have faith in them, despite the fact that you have absolutely no way of knowing if your beliefs are true. It's an irrational position that doesn't really seem to care about the validity of it's claims in the slightest.
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