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(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.
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.
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.
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.
(February 13, 2010 at 11:26 am)Welsh cake Wrote: Tack can you acknowledge my point that was just made previously please? Let's try to keep our discussion a little more coherent as we've now leapt from one subject to yet another.
Anyway you're generalising a bit, I don't discount your perceived reality merely on the grounds that your subjective worldview isn't the same as reality, neither dismiss it as irrelevant simply because no one else can be justified by your personal experiences. It's because said religious beliefs are abstract in the sense that they're completely incompatible within our shared reality is why I discount them and where the actual 'difference' between us lies.
1- I agree that mathmatics, psychology, etc are all models, workings and concepts that are mental constructs based on tangible shared reality contributing to society. God, for me, is an intangible shared reality concept that contributes to society. You said incompatible within our shared reality above.. that I'm assuming refers to atheists, not me, because it's not incompatable at all from my perspective. You simply have no evidence to qualify the spiritual. My equation doesn't preclude you from knowing, you're using incomplete data for your assesment in my opinion.
2-I'm not talking about cataclysmic events. I'm talking about practical application of faith in the present , through decision, achieving a specified outcome. You have faith that the chair you sitting in won't fall apart, that your computer won't crash, etc. You don't consciously analyze every single minutae of decision you do every day. You don't consciously evidence every single assertion. Your subconscious does that for you predominantly. Your conscious mind trusts that your subconscious has weighed and measured every decision. You'd be suprised if your chair just collapsed, you might say.. "that's no suprise I'm a fat ass" Or you might say, "what a coincidence" ,etc. None of the reaction matters in this context. You made you decision based on the fact that 99% of the time the chair won't break, because it hasn't yet and most likely won't. Not that it couldn't, of course it could! Just because something is evidenced and tested in tangible reality proves nothing of truth. Science uses many axioms which are mental constructs.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
