RE: Adrian and I disagree on faith.
February 13, 2010 at 8:33 am
(This post was last modified: February 13, 2010 at 8:35 am by Welsh cake.)
(February 11, 2010 at 10:03 pm)tackattack Wrote: 1- So mathmatics, philosophy, psychology can't contribute to society, or are they considered real? Why stop there?These are all models, workings and concepts that are mental constructs based on reality, so they can indeed contribute to society.
tackattack Wrote:2- I agree with your definition of faith, however I'm sure you put more trust in reality a lot more than you give yourself credit for, if not consciously, subconsciously.An erroneous assertion; I already said that I don't put absolute trust or "faith" in anything. Science does a good job of explaining phenomena, but I don't put any 'trust' in it. Take my lifespan for example, while I can be optimistic that if I look after my body and avoid taking unnecessary risks then maybe, I'll live to be 90, but I won't have any confidence in that prospect whatsoever.
"Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)"
(February 12, 2010 at 12:35 pm)tavarish Wrote: In our lifetime at least, it is a very practical certainty, not an absolute one. There is always the unforseen event, the factor that is by definition unaccountable that can cause a catastrophic change or demolition to the entire system. This is where faith comes in.What exactly do you mean? While I agree on many points you made, destructive and/or disruptive events are often occurring in our universe. If you're claiming the periodicity of mass extinctions that occur for given any possible catastrophic future change to our orbit and rotation of the sun, we rely on hypothesis using information available to us to predict said outcomes, not faith.
You have faith that a destructive or disruptive event WON'T happen. Since you don't have evidence for the unforseen element, you can rely on faith to reinforce your assessment of what is demonstrably certain.
You don't have faith that the sun will come up. It demonstrates the furthest degree of physical certainty we can have in this lifetime on this Earth. You have faith that something WON'T occur to impede this event, since faith is an assertion when no evidence is present.
We don't need faith for hypothetical unforeseen elements, in the past the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event happened and a similar collision may happen again, we don't know for certain, but you'd be in error to assume having faith in that it won't happen again will somehow make it so, that's not just wishful thinking, its basically Special pleading.
For any object large enough to dramatically alter earth's rotation the gravitational disturbances or anomalies caused by the rogue planet/brown dwarf/star tearing through our solar system would be detected *long before* it passed and/or collided. Science doesn't just stop working when suddenly there is new information available. You can't have faith in countless uncertainties and claim it's a sensible thing to do, since we know speculating the "What Ifs" is about the most unproductive thing you can do.