I love a good thread on religion and faith. What do you believe?
I am not a person of faith. I don’t believe in faith; I believe in evidence. This extends to many aspects of my view points on a variety of subjects, and is especially true when dealing with something as important and fascinating as the question of God, human existence and religious faith.
The reason I don’t believe in faith is because if a person has faith in something invisible, they can have faith in anything. I could have faith that a pink unicorn created the world and controls my thoughts and it would be just as logical as faith in anything else invisible. No, no, faith does not satisfy me. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Does God exist? I don’t know. IF God exists, in what form is he? It’s possible that a force created the Universe but doesn’t interfere with human affairs. This would make sense to me. Given how the Universe is set up, I have an awfully hard time with believing in the Christian God.
As a human, it’s impossible for me to know if a God exists or not. Religion, with its supposed answers does not satisfy me either. Religion has been exposed as being wrong on subjects such as evolution and creationism. Science can explain some things, but it cannot explain origin.
As a human, I am almost completely ignorant. How can I trust my senses? How can I trust my thought processes? I know that I exist, temporarily. I know that for biliions of years I did not exist but that now I do. In knowing that I am ignorant, I know that I don’t know the answer to the important philisophical and religious questions.
I was raised Catholic. If I had to put a label on my current belief system, it would be agnostic. It’s impossible for me to know the answers to questions such as the existence of God, the existence of the soul and human immorality given my humanity. I just don’t know the answers. No one does.I accept this.
I don’t believe in gods, but I will say that everyone has faith.
The simplest reason I can say that is because neuroscience clearly shows us that the implicit preconscious processing of our brain does not transfer information in direct reference as our conscious cognition does, but instead relays the impulse of attention to a given assessment by the preconscious to our conscious awareness if needed.
Meaning, people avoid death every day by what is in the common tongue name, “intuition”, which neurologically is a process that involves (in part) lower prefrontal cortex processing that passes a primary direct command for an emotional impulse of the implicit observations to the conscious awareness to raise the alarm.
The most dramatic study in science that I am aware of so far was of a Formula One driver.
To be clear, the driver could not see the accident ahead, nor had any knowledge of it at the time.
To the driver’s conscious awareness, he was stopping on faith-based fear.
In this case, it happened to save his life.
Conscious awareness is far too slow to keep pace with the speed of life.
If we rested solely on non-faith thought, then we would be dead a very long time ago.
A far simpler example of faith is related to preconscious motor sense observed in throwing a basketball.
The assessment of the trajectory of the throw is not consciously calculated.
It routes through the posterior parietal cortex and supplementary motor area to coordinate the calculations.
These calculations are not overt.
The process of premotor calculations rests rather heavily on motor memory. This preconscious assessment is in turn trusted (an act of faith) by the conscious awareness of our executive processing of the primary motor cortex.
This is why many professional basketball players can immediately stoop their head in frustration well before the ball even reaches the net.
They know that the ball leaving their hand felt wrong. They have no proof that it did.
They haven’t any evidence at all, in fact.
What they have is a sense from their premotor cortex in league with the primary motor cortex in conflict with the assessment of the throw micro-seconds afterwards, and arguably during, by the posterior parietal cortex which is relayed to their prefrontal cortex where they articulate the consciously executive thought of something like, “fuck!”