Is 'faith' really a 'great cop-out'?

[leo-rcc]

Faith, like anything else can be misapplied or misunderstood but faith per se is perhaps a necessary part of understanding (or not understanding) the fuller picture.

Sorry I did not catch your first name,

Well although I am glad you agree with my post, I am sorry to say I do not agree with yours. Faith will by its nature push you in a certain mindset and will frame evidence in a subjective way. Now it is very hard to examine evidence pro or contra a god or gods when your mindset is already that you believe one exists. Particularly if you believe that it is your version of god being examined.

The trouble is in the fact that the human brain is very eager to connect cause and correlation, so we are by our very own nature predestined to believe things without evidence.

What I do is try to look at evidence and see if there are natural causes to explain claims, as opposed to assume the causes are supernatural. And usually no matter how far fetched the natural solution may seem, it is still a million times simpeler than getting a supernatural deity in the equation because then you need to explain the supernatural deity.

What I will not do is presuppose that when I don't understand it and no one has a reasonable or naturalistic explanation that "god did it". Because all that does is make the equation more complex and explain nothing. I don't know to me is a much more valid answer, at least the most honest one.

[CoxRox]

Hi Leo, your last post gives much food for thought and again I find myself agreeing with a lot of what you say. Faith can be dangerous but so can politics, religions, power. I still say there is a place for it at times.

When I consider the idea that the universe, or things in the universe like dna, gives the impression that it was designed, I am considering the natural ‘evidence’ which seems to imply intelligence behind the coded information in dna for example. I haven’t had to employ faith to reach this conclusion, but rather by weighing up the natural (not supernatural) information available (we can go into this in greater detail if you wish). I’m aware my reasoning abilities may be biased or dodgy in some way and am open to correction if necessary.

I would have to employ faith to start believing this intelligence is actually the God of the Bible or any of the other 'gods', including your flying spaghetti monster and that may be a leap too far for me.

[Tiberius]

The universe only gives the impression it's designed because that is how human minds work. We look for patterns in everything; it's the basis for our societies.

DNA is far from designed though. It isn't even very complex at all. Consider the English alphabet; it contains 26 letters (27 if you include spaces) and even more if you list all the punctuation etc. That is very complex! DNA on the other hand, is made up of 4 "letters" A,C,G,T and is simply a sequence of pairs. It is what defines us as human, although one single mutation in that code doesn't make much of a difference at all. You could mutate who sections of code and still end up with a human, because the length of it is so large (Human genome is about 700MB of text). Hardly a good "design" when you think about it, because so many mutations can can have negative results (and they indeed do).

[Edwardo Piet]

Faith, like anything else can be misapplied or misunderstood but faith per se is perhaps a necessary part of understanding (or not understanding) the fuller picture.

Sorry I did not catch your first name,

Well although I am glad you agree with my post, I am sorry to say I do not agree with yours. Faith will by its nature push you in a certain mindset and will frame evidence in a subjective way. Now it is very hard to examine evidence pro or contra a god or gods when your mindset is already that you believe one exists. Particularly if you believe that it is your version of god being examined.

The trouble is in the fact that the human brain is very eager to connect cause and correlation, so we are by our very own nature predestined to believe things without evidence.

What I do is try to look at evidence and see if there are natural causes to explain claims, as opposed to assume the causes are supernatural. And usually no matter how far fetched the natural solution may seem, it is still a million times simpeler than getting a supernatural deity in the equation because then you need to explain the supernatural deity.

What I will not do is presuppose that when I don't understand it and no one has a reasonable or naturalistic explanation that "god did it". Because all that does is make the equation more complex and explain nothing. I don't know to me is a much more valid answer, at least the most honest one.

I very strongly agree. I guess I'd only substitute, "a million times simpler" for, "trillions and trilloins of times simpler", to say the least perhaps. I don't know whether you can overemphasis this based on what we *understand. Perhaps I'm wrong. I dunno. Maybe I am. But with my current understanding I actually think millions of times simpler is an understatement. Perhaps I'm wrong. Or even very wrong, I dunno, correct me if you (or anyone else) think(s) I'm wrong.

I ask this as I just noticed a quote of Richard Dawkins. I would love to be able to proove things for myself e.g E=mc2. (I am rubbish at even basic maths and know that I can't fathom equations like this but I have faith that others understand and know the workings of them.) I don't think faith need always be negative as Dawkins asserts. Yes, it can mean you have blindly accepted something without trying to understand it, (which would make you a fool) but it can also be because you are not capable of understanding the whole picture but you understand and 'see' how other related stuff works.

Well, I'd basically say that once faith isn't blind, isn't irrational, isn't a cop-out etc, then it is no longer faith. If faith isn't blind I think that's just belief not faith.
*=changed 'know' to 'understand'

[CoxRox]

Going back to the String Theory for a brief minute, the guys who are working on this are not basing their 'theory' (in this case not quite the scientific kind) on a tested model, but rather they have other evidence (or clues) that supports the idea of string theory, so their faith in it is not blind or irrational, but a result of other things which lend it credence. When I look at the coded information in dna, this to me, is a clue (the clue is verifiable) that an intelligence is 'behind' this coded information. I cannot 'experience' or 'meet' (I'm struggling to find the right word) this intelligence but I suspect it is there, maybe in the same way the 'strings' may be there.

I think 'faith' can mean different things to people.

Coming to your point Adrian about the dna, would you agree that the 'four letters' in dna comprise a coded language? Because if you do, then would you agree that language, or coded information only comes from a mind? Sure there are patterns in the universe, symmetrical patterns caused by the forces of nature, but a pattern is not the same as language. Language carries a message which needs to be understood or decoded. You need intelligence to decode language. I can make the claim: 'Messages, languages and coded information never,ever come from anything else besides a mind'. Can you provide a single example of a message that did not come from a mind? If you can then I will reconsider my position on dna.

One last thought; the fact that dna is simple does not hamper it from conveying the information. It seems to do a wonderful job (the code can get corrupted of course) of producing say us for example. Maybe 'simple' is best in this case.

Regards Catherine

[leo-rcc]

Hi Catherine,

I had a (rather lengthy) reply ready and while doing some fact checking I closed the wrong tab in Firefox deleting my reply.

I will try to recreate what I wanted to say:

I think 'faith' can mean different things to people.

Faith basically means that trust something to be true based you observe and have experienced, rather than solid evidence. Faith is a belief in the trustworthiness of an idea or concept.

The workings of faith, trust, experience, is to make you to be able to make snap second decisions without having to weigh the pro's and con's first. This is an excellent survival technique, because you don't want to examine all the facts when there are some leaves rustling in the bushes. Your first belief is "there is a predator there, get out of here" and that will help you survive.

Though that technique works well when in a bind, it works a lot less when you apply these tactics on more philosophical issues about life, the universe, and everything (to quote my favorite atheist). There the predator in the bushes can be pretty much everything you can imagine, and as humans are prone to do so anyway, that's what they did. So the early man came up with the concept of gods to account for things they didn't understand. And even though these men were not stupid, they just didn't have the luxury of evidence to falsify their explanation.

And even today we don't hold all the answers, we do know now that the probability of gods are very small. People have believed in Zeus for longer than Christianity exists, but as time went along the claims made there became less and less plausible in light of new evidence. Christianity is still clinging on to some things in the bible, but even the church has had to concede based on evidence they did not have in the Bronze and Iron age that some things in the bible are wrong, and the art of apologetics sprung from that. Christianity is trying very hard to conform their god into a god of the gaps. Where science has no answer, that is where god comes into play. As time progressed, the Christian god became less and less a person, and more and more a untangable object with powers more obscure that the version before that so Christians could shoehorn that god in again. And I am not even mentioning Islam in that regard because they are even worse and more stubborn as Christianity.

Consider this: You are an atheist in 99.99999999999% of all religions in the world, yet you put faith in that one god. What solid basis do you have for that, apart from "faith" or "well it is comforting to know it doesn't end when I die" when there is no evidence to support it?

Coming to your point Adrian about the dna, would you agree that the 'four letters' in dna comprise a coded language?

No, it is what we see as a code, since our minds are presupposed to see patterns. We use the recurring patterns as a code because it makes it easier for us to catalog. just like Zebra stripes the patterns change, it does not mean it is a code.

DNA consists of two long strands of simple units called nucleotides, with backbones made of sugars and phosphate groups joined by ester bonds, that form together and build up the chromosomes in every living creature, animal and plant form alike.

If you want a nice indepth explanation of DNA and its replication, I would refer you to Youtube and look up DonExodus2 ( http://www.youtube.com/user/donexodus2 ) a very good biologist and even a Christian though I will not hold that against him.

Going back to the String Theory for a brief minute, the guys who are working on this are not basing their 'theory' (in this case not quite the scientific kind) on a tested model, but rather they have other evidence (or clues) that supports the idea of string theory, so their faith in it is not blind or irrational, but a result of other things which lend it credence.

Right, I have looked at the wiki for String theory and it gave me a splitting headache (which is not that strange considering I still have nightmares from getting my head around time dilation which I still don't get).

String theory is a part of a science field called Theoretical Physics. To tell you the truth I hate that field with a passion, though I do freely admit it has its merits. The thing is, to me it is more a part in the science of Math than it is a part of Physics. It is a field where you do have the luxury to postulate "what if" and work with abstract mathematical models with 26 dimensions and are totally and utterly counter intuitive (which is the part I hate about it).

The thing is however, even though it works with hypotheses, these hypotheses derive from various actual physical models and theories, and speculating from there. What they will not do however, is is put faith on what the outcome of these hypotheses will be. Scientists can work on hypotheses for years, only to find that what they have been working on for so long turns out to be false. But that is okay, because from those mistakes you learn that this is not the correct avenue of approach and you do it another way. Faith is kept out of the process as much as possible. And the way to do that is through the scientific method. Peer review, publications, testing from independent sources.

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I liked my first version better.

[allan175]

Coming to your point Adrian about the dna, would you agree that the 'four letters' in dna comprise a coded language? Because if you do, then would you agree that language, or coded information only comes from a mind? Sure there are patterns in the universe, symmetrical patterns caused by the forces of nature, but a pattern is not the same as language. Language carries a message which needs to be understood or decoded. You need intelligence to decode language. I can make the claim: 'Messages, languages and coded information never,ever come from anything else besides a mind'. Can you provide a single example of a message that did not come from a mind? If you can then I will reconsider my position on dna.

Then are you saying an egg/sperm combination is "intelligent" since once they combine they "decode" the DNA message and produce an organism?

[Edwardo Piet]

I think 'faith' can mean different things to people.

I agree, faith does mean different things to different people, for a start, some people either don't see it as irrational, or they think that it doesn't matter if its considered irrational because its not really irrational its just a different kind of being rational. Its God's logic or whatever. I however do not consider 'faith' rational at all..

[CoxRox]

Allan, all cells contain information. I wouldn't call the cells intelligent but rather the information they contain suggests intelligence.

Evidence Versus Faith and Leo - I will concede that allowing for things based on faith puts one in a weak position. I will try to stick to areas that don't rely on faith.

Leo, your response needs more careful consideration. I shall come back to you. I've got to get the sweets ready for the trick or treaters. Bye for now.........

[Edwardo Piet]

Evidence Versus Faith and Leo - I will concede that allowing for things based on faith puts one in a weak position. I will try to stick to areas that don't rely on faith.

Well in my opinion, thats the right choice.