quote:I would certainly rather say that I don't know something than make something up just to look like I know something.
At its heart, that's what religion is. Something people have made up to give them knowledge they wouldn't otherwise have. Is this a value judgment? No, but anytime a person has created a religion, the desire for a divine source of knowledge has been a factor.
posted
Well, Leto II, I have worked as a tutor for a long time. It just doesn't work to make something up in answer to a student's question; they repeat what you have said in class, find out that you don't know what you were talking about, and then get really mad at you. I just figure that this extends into the rest of life, as well.
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quote:At its heart, that's what religion is. Something people have made up to give them knowledge they wouldn't otherwise have.
So you don't leave open the possibility that there is a God and that He has revealed various things over the course of history?
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quote:At its heart, that's what religion is. Something people have made up to give them knowledge they wouldn't otherwise have
Wow. Theologians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers of religion have worked and debated for years to come up with a good definition of what religion is "at it's heart," and you've managed to solve it, just like that.
posted
Cianwn - I think religion may be something of a special case. Due to the nature of religion, if someone just makes something up it is less readily obvious than if I make something up while I am tutoring history or anthropology. My own personal belief is that, in the case of religion, you have to look at what is out there and figure out what, if anything, resonates with you as an individual. And, I think it is important when dealing with religions not to have a knee-jerk reaction to something that doesn't resonate with your feelings by automatically saying, "Oh, you just made that up." That may be true, but it is very difficult to know for sure without a great deal of study and reflection. In fact, in many cases it is impossible to know for sure. I think it is just better to say, "Well, I don't think I agree with that." The wonderful thing about reasonable human beings is that they can agree to disagree. If I limited my friendships to people I completely agreed with, I wouldn't have any friends.
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posted
dkw - I took a psychology of religion class a couple of semesters ago. We took the first couple weeks of the semester trying to come up with a definition of religion, and the only conclusion we came to is that there is no definition that everyone can agree with.
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I believe (heh) that what you refer to is a problem with a scope much broader than strictly atheism, or even religion (which is what religious critics of various branches of science tend to level at their targets). Why i find this point relevent, is that by doing this, you are either decreeing -everything- (and i do mean everything) a faith, or you need to give up your position that atheism is a faith.
Since i think its unlikely that you'll decree practical faith on par with religious faith, i do hope you'll surrender the claim that Atheism is a faith.
posted
Pod, I never said I believed atheism is a faith. I said it might be considered one in light of the quote I posted. But I never said my personal position was that atheism is a faith. I have never thought that it was.
Rakeesh, whatever might or might not be "the truth" with regard to god etc, religion is a creation of mankind because at some point, someone sat down and thought about what beliefs are at the core of their system, what rules there are, what rituals they have. All of those things are a human response to whatever kind of "higher power" they believe in and what kind of inspiration they believe they possess.
posted
littlemissattitude, that was my point, although you put it a lot nicer than I did. I'm afraid I gave way to the overwhelming temptation to be sarcastic. Shame on me. Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote:Rakeesh, whatever might or might not be "the truth" with regard to god etc, religion is a creation of mankind because at some point, someone sat down and thought about what beliefs are at the core of their system, what rules there are, what rituals they have. All of those things are a human response to whatever kind of "higher power" they believe in and what kind of inspiration they believe they possess.
There is another possibility. You know what it is, Cianwn. And yet you don't even mention it, state as though it were fact YOUR opinion on religion, and seem oblivious to people's reasons for being reactionary.
Either you're doing this deliberately or you just haven't used a little empathy and considered, not just someone else's PoV, but how they would FEEL about your questions, and then think.
Because of the dichotic vision of religious belief that exists in the US i think there is a sort of question begging that goes on when theists (or former, but no-longer theists) discuss the existance of a supreme being.
What you asking is whether it is possible to grow up in this culture with out this dichotic view.
I say it depends on what you mean. ::Grins:: My thoughts on the subject are as such:
God's existance is irrelevent (and here's where Cianwn's non-asked question comes up). It's not that i believe in a god, nor is it the case that don't believe in a god either. The question then becomes what does atheism rely upon? The fact that i won't make the positive claim that there is a god?
If so, yes, i am an Atheist.
On the other hand, if atheism relies upon my willingness to make the claim that there is no god, then i am an Agnostic, because i will not make such a claim. This sort of Strong vs. Weak Atheism/Strong Agnosticism is a distinction that many theists do not draw, which is what inclines me to not use the label "atheist" when refering to myself (particularly since it often garners such interesting assumptions from theists).
So, using my definition of atheism, yes, i think it is very possible to grow up being a weak atheist/strong agnostic. Growing up being a contrary hard athiest, i think would be more difficult, but possible, however that would rest upon its own set of premisses that would need to be evaluated. But in that case, imo, it would be possible to reject the existance of a supreme deity on non-religious beliefs about the universe (again sidestepping Cianwn's claim that atheism is a faith).
[This message has been edited by Pod (edited January 26, 2003).]
posted
Rakeesh, you dispute that in order to produce an organized religion a *person* had to record somewhere the core beliefs, rituals, and rules? Even if that person believed his actions to be divinely inspired, they are still his actions. The only time I've heard a religion claim that a god waved its hand and by some miracle there appeared a written version of that religion's beliefs is when Moshe received the stone tablets with the basis of the Law on Mt. Sinai. I know that if I were an all-powerful deity, I would have done a little thinking beforehand and instead of employing human prophets to write something down, I'd just sit down a roomful of believers, wave my hand, and produce the final, perfect version of my religious text.
[This message has been edited by Cianwn (edited January 26, 2003).]
quote:On the other hand, if atheism relies upon my willingness to make the claim that there is no god, then i am an Agnostic, because i will not make such a claim.
Ted, that's exactly what atheism is. Yes, if you want to play the definition game, it can change from person to person. Ten different people will give you ten different definitions as to the particulars of what it means. This is why we, as communicating beings, choose definers as universally as possible to be able to discourse. The very nature of atheism is the absence of theism. "God" doesn't have to play into that, except that the Christian faith is the predominate one in the world, and the easiest theism to use as an example (why don't we see more threads questioning the veracity of buddhism?).
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posted
My personal experience with Atheists would lead me to believe that Atheism is as much an organized belief system as Christianity. "Christian" beliefs are extremely diverse, the only universally held tenents being IME, that there is a God and his son Jesus came to Earth as a man.
The Atheists that I've known have all believed these things: there is no supreme deity; the physical world is a product of mechanical, scientifically explainable events; the history/reputation and offspring a person creates is his ONLY legacy/afterlife.
To me, this sounds like a fairly organized and faith based set of beliefs.
Though I respect these beliefs, the one thing that prevents me from accepting them is the evidence of the physical world. I just can't accept that the many different lifeforms on Earth are the product of happy coincidences. It seems so much more logical that life as we know it is the product of intelligent design. And if there is a design, then there must be a designer.
The second reason why I can't accept Atheism (and I'm sure this is purley non-logical) is that I require someone to express my gratitude to. Again, I don't believe in coincidences, so when so many "right" things happen for no logical reason, I need to say "Thanks", and I say it to God.
John, your story of surviving your crash is a great example of a set of those happy "coincidences" that I just can't accept using an Atheists logic.
quote:Why i find this point relevent, is that by doing this, you are either decreeing -everything- (and i do mean everything) a faith, or you need to give up your position that atheism is a faith.
Since i think its unlikely that you'll decree practical faith on par with religious faith, i do hope you'll surrender the claim that Atheism is a faith.
Cianwn may not, but I would at least like to argue that everything is in fact a faith, and that religious faith is on par with practical faith. I think it's been philosophically proven, at least sufficiently for me to believe it, that we cannot be truly certain of anything and that many of things we take for granted are no so proven as we tend to think. Yet, I make hundreds of beliefs every day, ranging from believing in the weather forecasts to believing the things I read in my school textbooks. There's a gap there, between what I believe and what I have proven. That gap is faith - trusting in something unproven. My question is, what exactly is different about "religious faith" that would make it any different from this practical faith?
I think the difference has been invented over time to try and separate religion from everyday life, both by atheists who want to portray religion as something by definition mistake, and (probably more so) by theists who want an excuse to not challenge religion in the way all "practical faiths" are challenged by reason. But the truth is, I think, that the reason people trust their religion is not different than the reasons people trust other beliefs of theirs: Because everybody else believes it, because mommy told me it was true, because I "feel" it's true, because the Bible documents it, because it only makes sense, and so on. Yes, these things are not deductive proofs, but in practical life, nothing is deductively proven. I believe pizza is unhealthy largely because everybody else does. I believe it will snow today because the internet said so. Heck, a sizeable number of students at this school are confident enough that the basketball team will beat Duke this year that they'll be camping out for a week to see it - this belief is based on little more than high hopes.
This is not to say, of course, that all beliefs require an equal degree faith or that all beliefs are equally justified. Obviously, it takes less faith to believe that 1+1=2 than it does to believe in God. But they are both degrees of the same thing. There is not fundamentally different category called "religious faith" that is entitled to it's own rules.
And I think that if this is true then one thing very clearly follows: The religious cannot abandon their responsiblity to choose reasonable beliefs in the name of some special faith that God wants them to have.
posted
Well, Tres, just so your statement and my own don't get put into some causal equation of some sort, I would like to emphasize that I feel that atheism- were it contained in a vaccuum- has no core faith. The trick is when it is applied in s primarily theist world.
LadyDove, I wouldn't exactly call atheism as organized as modern theism. At least, I wouldn't venture that far. There are no "atheist" places to congregate (though coffee shops and college student centers come close), nor any that advertise specifically atheist ideals. There is quite a lot of secular orginization, but one need not be an atheist to be part of something secular.
There is a general dogma there, and there is a point where a decision based on faith from inconclusive evidence comes in, but I wouldn't call that "organized" in any fashion. It doesn't mean it may not eventually come to that, but I don't see it in the present day.
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It's quite easy to be a buddhist atheist, who doesn't believe most of what you have just contended.
Just because alot of the atheists you've encountered are material reductionsist, doesn't mean that they'are all that way.
And also, i personally hypothesized that self-organizational systems can probably give rise to amazing complexity in physical systems as well as biological ones.
Read Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science"
(and why not be grateful to the people around you?)
posted
1+1=2 takes zero faith to believe. Mathematics is a purely definitional theory, and faith does not enter into it at all. In mathematics, certain things are taken as true (though there is considerable debate over what needs to be taken as true), and then other things are extrapolated from them, always assuming that the other things are true. There is no faith that these things are true, merely the definition. When discussing mathematics, if someone says 1+1=3, they are wrong. No matter how much they believe otherwise. That is because mathematics has defined itself in such a way that 1+1=2.
However, if you take some empirical prediction as a minor example of a similar faith I'll most likely agree.
posted
Unless you're in outcome based education fugu. 1+1 CAN equal 3 if that makes you feel good about yourself.
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posted
1+1=2 does not prove nor disprove the validity of any religion, fugu. I don't see where you're going with such a statement, unless you're doing exactly what I said gets done in my first post, which was trying to prove religion as invalid or "wrong" by pointing out science.
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posted
No it can't, if you accept the definitions math uses. And if you don't accept those definitions, you're not doing math. Math is wholly definitional; faith does not apply.
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quote:Math is wholly definitional; faith does not apply.
Um, that's exactly why I said that using science to disprove religion is stupid, fugu. Expecting one to work by the other's rules is ridiculous.
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posted
Leto: I was responding to Tres's comment about 1+1=2 requiring faith. And the next one was referrring to Cianwn's response. Stupid forum posting order .
I don't think mathematics relates to faith at all (unless we want to talk about the bible saying pi is 3 )
posted
fugu, it's not just math, but all science, that doesn't relate to religion. If anything, sociology and/or anthropology would be the closest, but those are primarily just to observe, and not really to measure in any capacity that would prove anything along the lines of "rightness."
[This message has been edited by Leto II (edited January 26, 2003).]
posted
I was being sarcastic since we're in the era of political correctness and all. That whatever you want to believe is ok, no matter how outlandish it is, like 1+1 = 3 or that "ebonics" is a language, or that it's ok to legislate morality, etc.
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posted
Leto, John Haught has a book you might enjoy called Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation. He lays out four ways that science and religion can be seen to relate (or not) to each other. It’s not really a great book in terms of science or religion, but the system he has for classifying the ways people have tried to relate them is interesting.
quote:
Conflict – the conviction that science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable;
Contrast – the claim that there can be no genuine conflict since religion and science are each responding to radically different questions.
Contact – an approach that looks for dialogue, interaction, and possible “consonance” between science and religion, and especially for ways in which science shapes theological and religious understanding
Confirmation – a somewhat quieter, but extremely important perspective that highlights the ways in which, at a very deep level, religion supports and nourishes the scientific enterprise.
Pick it up at a library if you get a chance.
Edit: I also second whoever reccommended Polkinghorne (was that on this thread?) and, of course, Ian Barbour's Religion in an Age of Science (recently expanded as Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary issues) is a classic.
[/reference librarian]
[This message has been edited by dkw (edited January 26, 2003).]
posted
There are a large number of people who disagree with you, Leto. For instance, those who believe in a literal account of the bible.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily say that science relates to religion, but that in some small way it relates to faith; ie faith in a consistency of occurence in the universe, or even faith in there being a universe and not just a massive illusion.
posted
Well, I don't know about you, but I believe all life is really just a figment of bigfoot's imagination.
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posted
fugu, within those who believe creationist theory, there are at least three official groups of thought, and more than that when you get down to the particulars. However, the average (theist) Joe will say that they believe both creationism and "The Big Bang" (or something similar), yet will not be able to adequately resolve the two for empirical debate (believe me... I've tried). Yeah, you'll also get those who believe that Satan created dinosaur bones in the attempt to trick us silly humans, but that's hardly a scientific statement. If you want to debunk that statement with evidence to the contrary, then that's fine, but it doesn't invalidate religion in general, nor even that person's religion in specific.
You can argue particular points of doctrine with different techniques, but why is it when doctrine needs altering, religion is somehow invalidated? Can you give me a practical reason why this is so? (I warn you, this is a trick question, so be careful about your answer)
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posted
Bah forget altering doctrine, just toss the silly gods out on their arses in mortal form just like Ao did in the FR.
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posted
I personally believe in the complete harmony of science and religion. I've never really understood why the two should have to be mutually exclusive...
quote:Well, Tres, just so your statement and my own don't get put into some causal equation of some sort, I would like to emphasize that I feel that atheism- were it contained in a vaccuum- has no core faith. The trick is when it is applied in s primarily theist world.
In that case, Leto, it seems to me that the faith you're talking about is faith in your own powers of reason and judgment, which is certainly required in order to take on an opinion in defiance of the majority.
posted
I'm not arguing that science invalidates religion at all, merely that there are people who think that religion and science conflict (know what you mean about those who attempt to believe in mutual exclusives), and that science has some small degree of faith involved.
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posted
Don't you get an empty feeling somewhere after the 34th post, a kind of anxious feeling that somehow, in spite of good intentions, something is 'wrong' with the whole approach ? The sterile mechanics of information mixed with a sort of hyper-consciousness - everybody getting their arguements sort of right - sort of wrong - like a poor echo or something (a feeling that you have heard, read or misread these points before somewhere...)- a sort of rational 'white-noise' building up - but no music ? I sure do -
quote:In that case, Leto, it seems to me that the faith you're talking about is faith in your own powers of reason and judgment, which is certainly required in order to take on an opinion in defiance of the majority.
And faith in one's self that their judgement and reason is more accurate than the majority is different than the faith in something greater than one's self exactly how, Dest? Posts: 6907 | Registered: Nov 2001
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posted
Tresopax summed up exactly what I think is faith:
quote:There's a gap there, between what I believe and what I have proven. That gap is faith - trusting in something unproven.
And by that definition, even what POD reacts to is faith: he believes that it doesn't matter if God is there or not, he will still follow his own conscience. He has faith, under Tresopax's definition, that this is enough.
The problem, I think, is that faith has become a heresy in the secular worldview. To say that you bridged the gap with faith is to say you've abandoned reason. But that is not the case. Faith is not a substitute for reason, it is a necessary supplement, for without it we could not act.
posted
Why wouldn't the human conscience be enough? It's all we've got anyway. It's part of what leads us to believe or not believe as we choose.
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posted
"The point of Genesis is not to tell us how many days it took to create hte earth. The point is to show us Man's spiritual heritage and the results of our first parents' choices."
Geoff, the problem that I have with this is that I don't trust a person who gets something as important as the age of the Earth wrong to tell me about my spiritual heritage.
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"My personal experience with Atheists would lead me to believe that Atheism is as much an organized belief system as Christianity."
LadyDove, I disagree. Atheism is primarily distinguished by its LACK of tenets; despite one or two clubs, there are no "sects" of atheists, no regular meetings, no stated beliefs to which atheists must adhere. You can identify atheists BECAUSE they believe in the absence of a god; that's pretty much it. It would be like saying that the ONLY thing that makes a Christian a Christian is believing that a guy named Jesus Christ existed.
It's rather like saying that a fence with no paint on it is still a painted fence, because it has been painted with no paint. That's a bit too abstract and useless a definition for my liking.
(As a side note, I don't like using John's anecdotal survival as evidence of God's existence. My aunt died in a plane crash, and I'm not comfortable thinking that God somehow had it in for her.)
posted
"The problem, I think, is that faith has become a heresy in the secular worldview. To say that you bridged the gap with faith is to say you've abandoned reason."
posted
The thing is, it's not a zinger. It's literally correct. To say that you have faith in a belief despite a complete lack of evidence IS to abandon reason.
I suspect that most people do NOT have faith for this reason. Most people rationalize their faith, like LadyDove, or have experienced something that causes them to believe.
posted
In most areas of life, the application of faith is not regarded as a respectable way of reaching a conclusion...Because most of those areas are ones where people take the time to do research, find supporting details, and make a step-by-step construction toward their ultimate goal or decision. There are a few, like religion, that aren't subject to the same stringent guidelines, but usually, it is considered bad form to try to back up something with "because I have faith in it."
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quote:To say that you have faith in a belief despite a complete lack of evidence IS to abandon reason.
But IS there a complete lack of evidence? What qualifies as evidence, anyway? I would argue that faith is not abandoning reason, but rather making conclusions based on something beyond reason.
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posted
Jon Boy, ask yourself this, would you be willing to use the same kind of decision-making in an area outside of religion? As in the example I gave earlier, would you hire a stockbroker on faith that he does a good job, or would you want to hear from current and former customers about the results of his investing advice? The wise consumer would not go on faith unless he is prepared to lose his money.
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