Abortion not allowed

[Esquilax]

He's talking about guarantees though. There is no guarantee that the chair will hold him. That's where faith comes in. We have faith in the chair, based on the fact that they usually don't let us down. It's a shock when they do, with often funny consequences.

That's the problem with what he's saying though: we're fully aware, I would think, that we don't have a guarantee that the chair will hold us. But the way Carm is talking is entirely binary, as though with either have total certainty that the chair will hold us, or we have no evidence that the chair will hold anything at all. He says he "has no facts that show the chair will hold hold him." But of course he does, they just aren't sure shot, magic bullet concrete objective truths.

If he really is talking about guarantees then he's working from an absurd false dichotomy, at the end of the day.

[FatAndFaithless]

Absolute certainty is a red herring anyway, there isn't much of anything I think we could honestly say we're 100% absolutely certain about without exception. The conflation that some theists make is between "faith" and "confidence based on data and prior results". If we're still sticking to the chair analogy, Carm has sat in many chairs before and they haven't broken, he knows pretty much (I'd assume) what a chair looks like, he might have even seen someone sit in that specific chair before. All of these contribute to the belief that the chair will hold him (if it matches the previous specifications) or that the chair won't hold him (if the chair does not adequately meet the prior specifications). Even if he is wrong about his conclusion, it sure as hell isn't a belief on "faith".

[C4RM5]

I don't have any facts any where saying that my chair will hold me.

Have you never encountered gravity before? Never seen a weight put atop a surface? You're essentially asserting that you've never been around physics before.

Have you never seen a chair break because some one sat on it?

[fr0d0]

That's the problem with what he's saying though: we're fully aware, I would think, that we don't have a guarantee that the chair will hold us. But the way Carm is talking is entirely binary, as though with either have total certainty that the chair will hold us, or we have no evidence that the chair will hold anything at all. He says he "has no facts that show the chair will hold hold him." But of course he does, they just aren't sure shot, magic bullet concrete objective truths.

If he really is talking about guarantees then he's working from an absurd false dichotomy, at the end of the day.

Faith in a chair is faith nonetheless. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate how faith works. In that it succeeds.

[FatAndFaithless]

Frodo, is faith simply "That of which we are not 100% epistemologically certain"?

[Esquilax]

Have you never encountered gravity before? Never seen a weight put atop a surface? You're essentially asserting that you've never been around physics before.

Have you never seen a chair break because some one sat on it?

Sure, and generally I'm able to inspect a chair that won't support my weight and see that it's unstable, too. Because that's identifiable based on my knowledge of structure, weight mechanics and physics.

Do you not have any of those things?

Faith in a chair is faith nonetheless. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate how faith works. In that it succeeds.

I guess. I'd just be happier without the equivocation between faith based on reasonable expectations, and faith based on absolutely nothing. It's the false dichotomy I object to; if you want to define faith as a lack of certainty then... whatever. I just want people to not pretend that this makes every kind of faith exactly equal.

[Minimalist]

There is no guarantee that the chair will hold him. That's where faith comes in.

Horseshit, frods. The accumulated evidence of a lifetime tells him that a chair will or will not hold him. It has nothing to do with fucking 'faith.'

I do not have 'faith' that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. It has done so everyday of my life and, if it suddenly rose in the west it would be big news.

[Tonus]

So wait... faith is based on "everyone sees that this happens, so they trust that it will continue to happen"? Because that works for chairs and the sun, but not so much for gods that hide in metaphysical closets and human hearts.

[FatAndFaithless]

Not to mention the fact that all this "faith" Frodo claims we have in the chair can easily be falsified by evidence (such as the chair breaking). Not so much with untestable, unfalsifiable claims about a God.

[DramaQueen]

Muslims have faith that the sun will rise from the west someday.