compared2what? wrote:When accepting a statement as true, there are two basic methods. The first is reason. It is when the known evidence points to the statement being true, and when the truth of the statement doesn't contradict other knowledge. The second is faith. It is when one accepts a statement as true without evidence for it, or in the face of evidence against it.
There's a lot of confusion about what exactly faith is. Many people confuse belief with faith. It's said that if you believe something, you must be taking it on faith. This is a denial of the fundamental distinction between reason and faith. It pretends that evidence for or against an idea is irrelevant.
The result of using faith consistently is the complete inability to think. Without any criteria for accepting a statement as true, every random idea, whether true or false, would be just as likely to be accepted. Contradictions would exist. No higher level abstractions could be made. Faith nullifies the mind. To the degree ideas are taken on faith, the process of thinking is subverted.
Are there any ideas we take on faith? As a friend once asked, if we've never been to Afghanistan, how do we know it actually exists? Even if we were to meet people from Afghanistan, they could always be lying. This is taken to be an act of faith, since we have no direct evidence for the existence of Afghanistan.
This is mistaken, though. The evidence we have for accepting the existence of Afghanistan does exists. The evidence is based on the knowledge that other people have shared. First, there is universal acceptance of the fact that it exists. It is possible that everyone on the planet is lying, but there is no evidence for that claim. Also, there is reason to believe that if Afghanistan didn't exist, people from the bordering countries would say so. And since satellite imagery shows that there is land there, and the area around it is occupied, it is reasonable to assume that land is occupied as well. Furthermore, there is absolutely no known evidence that it doesn't exist. There is no known motive for the entire world to try to trick us. So in fact, the evidence we have suggest it does exist. Acceptance of it is an act of reason.
There's an important distinction here, though. When we accept the evidence from others, we must have reason to believe that they know the truth. In the case of Afghanistan, I mentioned bordering countries. But there are people who claim to have been there, or that lived there.
Other cases are fundamentally different. When someone claims to have supernatural knowledge, or the ability to gain knowledge in a way that you are unable to, their claims cannot be considered valid. If someone claims to be able to speak to their god, and tells you what god demands, you have no reason to accept it as true. In fact, it should be rejected. If he claims to have knowledge which you are incapable of achieving, his beliefs must be rejected. If one has to accept the knowledge of others, he must use reason in order to decide which others to listen to. Again, if there is no evidence or contrary evidence for accepting a person's beliefs, it is not an act of reason. It is an act of faith.
Faith is an act of mental destruction. If there is no evidence for a claim, then accepting it is irrational. It is more likely to be false then true (since there are more false ideas then true ones, being that their is only one reality). Building a structure of knowledge on such a flimsy foundation will leave it shaky and unstable. Eventually, even if confronted with evidence against it, one's mind will be so dependent on the belief that fear of one's world view collapsing will encourage one to reject the evidence. When this happens, one acts against reality. This is an act of destruction.
http://importanceofphilosophy.com/Irrational_Faith.html
Not only am I not buying this bogus faith vs reason split, I'm walking straight past the shop window - as I am completely amazed that someone with your intelligence has fallen for the oldest, most bogus trick in the Skeptics book. This black and white, binary valued world view is derived from the Greek attempts to establish absolute truth, rehashed by the Church in the Middle Ages to establish the... Absolute Truth - so that "Heresy" could be detected and eliminated - and then the mantle taken up by scientists , for whom reason has become the be all and end all, a world view where anything different is seen as a threat to orthodoxy and the 'generally accepted way of seeing things' and begets a midset like an Amway advert - "Hey 50 million flies cant be wrong - Lets Eat Shit!!".
It has produced an analytical bifurcated epistemology that cannot even see that that it all it is - a way of looking at the world , not THE WORLD. This is useless destructively arrogant SkeptiNazi approach which clothes itself inside the 'reasonable'. Not it isn't; forgive me if I know about what I speak. Even within the domain of logic, the very idea of there being far more that ONE logic is so foreign to most "Reason is God" folks that the concept just goes right past them, in a logical version of "Nope, there aint no such animal! " ; the progress that has been made using binary logic is great in printed circuit design and utterly useless in most things in which human beings either engage in or aspire to. This way of looking at the world could be called "Rock Logic" It seeks certainty, being right, being 100%, is concerned with making points and "winning" arguments like some form of intellectual gladiatorial combat.
What if this whole model of thinking was actually very outdated and did not tie-in with information on how the brain itself works as a self-organising information system?
