Your lack of understanding is obvious to everyone reading this thread. Except for you. According to your precious induction, you’re incorrect. How ironic.
I never claimed to be rational, ergo I have no responsibility to live up to your standards of rationality. Do you see how you keep making the same mistakes in mischaracterising my position? That’s like me saying ‘you never claimed to be yellow, but I arbitrarily say that you have to be yellow for your argument to be worth anything and because you aren’t, by my judgement, yellow, your arguments must be worth nothing’.
So you didn’t get the logical problem with scientific progress (the tacit teleology from which all other problems with science derive)? Okay. Fine. Nevermind.
I’ve no reason to believe that you’d understand it even if I did give it to you in plain English.
This wasn’t an attack on scientific method. Again, you mischaracterise my position.
I never said that I was too good for you. You keep reading into my tone an egocentrism that isn’t there. Again, this is your problem and your mischaracterisation. You were also the one who abused your moderating privileges, not me.
What’s the difference? If we are just mammals, just flesh and blood, just beings who live, react, mutate a bit, fuck and then die, then what value has intelligence, or rationality?
Right. And neither is science anything like SIATD strawmans it to be. Scientists don’t go around professing atheism based on induction. However, the fear of a conclusion of atheism based on induction is often seen as a threat to theism by theists. Such fear is groundless – science is not logically capable of that induction, nor does it claim that it is.
I agree. I wouldn’t know whether or not SIATD is straw-manning the concept, but I don’t think that science can either affirm or deny God’s existence, nor do I think theists should ‘fear’ science or anything silly like that. I’m just interested where Matt gets his definition of ‘faith’ from.
Faith, by very defintion, is without logical proof or material evidence. It is not based on knowledge. Note that someone who has had God ‘reveal’ him/herself to them does not have faith, they know, that’s not faith. As pointed out in Constantine
Hence it is blind acceptance of a set of ideas, as there is nothing to base it on but fitting into a some sort of social or cultural context, or being psychotic.
However, I do admit there have been other attempts to define and articulate the meaning of faith, e.g. in terms of awareness of the divine. But, alas, those without faith have never felt it, and those who have lost faith obviously don’t think it was a link to the divine in the end after all.
Without logical proof or material evidence, I quite agree. But I don’t think it follows from that that faith is ‘blind acceptance’. No serious religious person thinks that.
I’m not sure if you can assert that belief in God is not ‘knowledge’. If we take knowledge to mean JTB, your argument that faith is not justified, according to your definition, would only work if the only route to knowledge was through logical proof or material evidence. Which seems to be Classical Foundationalism.
Do you take classical foundationalism to be your position, Matt? CF as defined as:
“A proposition p is rational if and only if p is self-evident, evident to the senses or incorrigible or if p can be inferred from a set of propositions that are self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible.” - from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
