RE: Faith - Can it Go Too Far?
June 15, 2011 at 5:19 pm
(This post was last modified: June 15, 2011 at 5:43 pm by diffidus.)
(June 15, 2011 at 1:45 pm)Napoleon Wrote: Garrgh! I'm so sick of people telling me it takes faith to believe in science
Science is testable, and seen as the sun coming up everyday and the laws of physics/gravity can be tested, then it doesn't really take faith to accept these things as true or correct.
Can we test god? NAHHHHH....
See my point?
Sorry, Bad mood today
Diffidus:
You are certainly correct about God. But not correct about science. It may sound slightly bizarre, but I was making a real philosophical point, namely, that the law of cause and effect (that underlies much of science) has to be assumed. Suppose you have an apple and you drop it. You assume, reasonably, that this is due to gravity and that if you pick it up and drop it again - it will fall. However, your empirical observation about the apple can never be extended into the future - all empirical measurements are necessarily in the past. This shows that we infer the future events from measurements made in the past. Even worse, we can never prove that the future events follow from the past events and, hence, we must always hold them on faith. This point is not new, but a central proof given by the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Faith - Can it Go Too Far?
Diffidus:
Extending this notion a little.
Is there anybody out there who believes that Noah lived to the ripe old age of ~900 years.
Or that he and his kin (about 8 people) built a boat out of wood the size of an enormous football stadium.
Or that Noah then filled this with two of every species living on earth.
How could these 8 people feed such a multitude let alone clean up the waste.
To believe this story, again, makes me fearful - can it really be that faith causes such self delusion?
