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yeah, this trying to equate faith in a particular religion with the general understanding that i'm not going to suddenly lift off the ground and fly into space is pretty weak.

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when resort to simply stetting up a straw man and also simply dismissing an argument without any attempt to counter it or even taking the time to differentiate an illustration used as an example from the core of the argument, you come across, as smug, arrogant, ignorant, and incapable of critical thinking. please contribute something of substance to the conversation if you feel so strongly

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You're incorrect, I'm afraid.

The beliefs differ only in degree, not in kind.

Here's a good read on BlackGoldAg's position - by an empiricist. This is the most widely sourced philosophical paper of the 20th century.

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Here's the relevant portion against what you're saying:

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As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

Positing does not stop with macroscopic physical objects. Objects at the atomic level and beyond are posited to make the laws of macroscopic objects, and ultimately the laws of experience, simpler and more manageable; and we need not expect or demand full definition of atomic and subatomic entities in terms of macroscopic ones, any more than definition of macroscopic things in terms of sense data. Science is a continuation of common sense, and it continues the common-sense expedient of swelling ontology to simplify theory.

Physical objects, small and large, are not the only posits. Forces are another example; and indeed we are told nowadays that the boundary between energy and matter is obsolete. Moreover, the abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics -- ultimately classes and classes of classes and so on up -- are another posit in the same spirit. Epistemologically these are myths on the same footing with physical objects and gods, neither better nor worse except for differences in the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experiences.

The over-all algebra of rational and irrational numbers is underdetermined by the algebra of rational numbers, but is smoother and more convenient; and it includes the algebra of rational numbers as a jagged or gerrymandered part. Total science, mathematical and natural and human, is similarly but more extremely underdetermined by experience. The edge of the system must be kept squared with experience; the rest, with all its elaborate myths or fictions, has as its objective the simplicity of laws.

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Well you'd have to specify a specific religion to list all the faith components, but undoubtably there are more than simply "the laws of the universe tomorrow will be the same as the laws of the universe today"

This isn't about the superiority of one thing over the other. In fact, religion and science are an apples to oranges comparison. Religion is a philosophical worldview. Science is a method for describing the natural world. By default, a complete worldview will require more faith than an emperical method.

Atheism, agnosticism, theism, any religion--those are worldviews which require taking an unprovable stance on many different issues. Science isn't like that. It's just a process to investigate the natural world.

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No, it is not unsettling. Who am I, a man (much less one man with limited knowledge), to question God and his providence?

As to punishment, God is not the creator of evil nor does he make man sin. He is fully justified to punish man for their sins.

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A man that refuses to question authority is a slave.

Who created evil then? If not directly by God, was God unaware of how his actions as the creator of everything would unfold? Is there any doubt whatsoever that God expected man to sin? Or did he know his creation so poorly?

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Evil originates in the creature who wills it. God knows everything at once and the plan of redemption was ordained before the foundation of the world.

and yet anyone can turn on a light switch and see the light come on. if they wanted to build a circuit and small electric generator, they could. they could investigate it themselves and test the theories that we operate off of. one can't observe god answering a prayer and know that it was god answering the prayer and not an event that would have occurred anyway. you HAVE to take the person's word for it. you don't HAVE to take a scientist's word for it that moving a magnet through a coil of wire produces electrical current.

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And explain how a natural process which is micromanaged by the supernatural can be called natural. I would say lightning is a natural thing. If your position is that God decides where the lightning bolts go, it is not a natural process by your definitions.

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Not following. OED definitions:
natural: Of an emotion, reaction, event, etc.: naturally arising or resulting from, fully consonant with, or appropriate to the circumstances; predictable, understandable.

supernatural: Belonging to a realm or system that transcends nature; attributed to or thought to reveal some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

How does providence remove the distinction between natural and supernatural?

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yeah, this trying to equate faith in a particular religion with the general understanding that i'm not going to suddenly lift off the ground and fly into space is pretty weak.

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when resort to simply stetting up a straw man and also simply dismissing an argument without any attempt to counter it or even taking the time to differentiate an illustration used as an example from the core of the argument, you come across, as smug, arrogant, ignorant, and incapable of critical thinking. please contribute something of substance to the conversation if you feel so strongly

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that wasn't a straw man. i'm not saying that you think you're going to suddenly lift off into space at any moment. i'm using a ridiculous premise to show the real difference between the type of "faith" you're trying to equate.

i do have to say that this is the most intelligent sounding version of "science is a religion too!" that i've heard.

Empiricism is not science. It is a philosophical worldview that starts with certain beliefs about how knowadge can be acquired. IF you have those fundamental beliefs, then it may follow that scientific facts are truths. But again that's a philosophy. The scientific method works just as well whether you believe that or not.

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yeah, this trying to equate faith in a particular religion with the general understanding that i'm not going to suddenly lift off the ground and fly into space is pretty weak.

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when resort to simply stetting up a straw man and also simply dismissing an argument without any attempt to counter it or even taking the time to differentiate an illustration used as an example from the core of the argument, you come across, as smug, arrogant, ignorant, and incapable of critical thinking. please contribute something of substance to the conversation if you feel so strongly

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that wasn't a straw man. i'm not saying that you think you're going to suddenly lift off into space at any moment. i'm using a ridiculous premise to show the real difference between the type of "faith" you're trying to equate.

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perhaps straw man was not the entirely correct term. I see it as one though because my argument is not that faith in a particular religion is the same as a belief i won't float off the earth. my argument from the start of this was that faith, as defined by webster (strong belief or trust in someone or something), is in fact not only present but required in science. we can have the discussion of different levels of faith required, the presence or absence of empirical evidence associated with religious beliefs etc. if you would like. but the point remains that that is not the argument i was making. in fact, if you look back at my original argument, i made zero comparison to religion at all.

also this is the second discussion in this thread where you responded to my line of arguments by missing the point of the argument and not actually responding to it. so it is getting to the point that i am force to believe one of two things. either you are intentionally missing the points to make my arguments seem weaker in order to refute them, in which case you are being intellectually dishonest, or you are actually missing the points in which case you are just bad at reading comprehension and critical thinking. i'll let you determine which it is.

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Also, you should not have picked gravity as your example! Find me a physicist who claims to completely understand gravity and you'll find a liar.

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you got me there, i don't always choose the best examples in my illustrations. but it would still work if i equated it to the "faith" in our understanding of gravity in how we apply it in the models of basic statics and dynamics the illustration still works. and perhaps works better. we are placing a certain level of faith in a intensely complex concept the universe, in order to explain the trajectory of something as it flies through the air.

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You seem like you're advocating pure determinism. I'd really like to know how you reconcile that with free will, but that's for another time.

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I think pure determinism (in a scientific sense) is much more comfortable to me than randomness. And it seems much more logical. Randomness as an observed phenomena is very different than randomness as a fundamental driving principal. Making the case of "this is random within the scope of the mathematics or experiments being applied" is quite different from "this is truly random". Something which is truly random has equal influence from nothing as it does from everything. It's just as susceptible to what I ate for breakfast as it is to poking it with a metaphorical stick - and that susceptibility ranges from zero to infinite sensitivity. It's also not testable, because, as we all know, observing either changes it not at all or completely, or both.

Some of this becomes philosophical for me, because the notion of random behavior doesn't seem to square with a universe that proceeds in a deterministic fashion (that is, in time). The reason I said I don't think we can believe anything else is because I don't think our minds are capable of actually grasping randomness. There is a baked in assumption of some degree of determinism because even when we accept randomness, we accept it only within a fixed boundary (e.g., it may be one of a fixed number of quantum states, but nothing else, and only within this area. The particle may not become a daffodil - we're quite sure of this. It would shock our sensibilities, we and we say this very primly).

As far as how I "deal with that" - it's fine. I have to get religious because for me my philosophy is informed by my religion; at some point they merge. I believe in Cause because I believe in God. The identification of Christ as the Logos of the Father is Reason of the universe -- the underlying principle by which all things exist. In this regard, God is Math. Or, I guess, Math is God, describes God in a real way...as real as saying God is Love. Even if, more or less, the entirety of the universe is required to eliminate all influencing variables to finally solve the riddle of randomness, that's ok. If the whole universe's metaphorical random number generator was seeded at the beginning - that is, we have a pseudorandom function which is in the end still deterministic - that's fine. This is no different than saying God is Omniscient, because this omniscience of the underlying principle (i.e., knowledge of Himself) doesn't violate statistical agglomeration of probabilities for free will to exist practically for participants in reality.

The fact that a card shuffle is determined by the dealer in a Real Way based on any number of variables -- how hard he holds the cards against his thumb, what force he applies with his fingers, how he angles them, etc -- doesn't preclude it from being random to the observer, and it also doesn't violate the free will of the player.

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Empiricism is not science. It is a philosophical worldview that starts with certain beliefs about how knowadge can be acquired. IF you have those fundamental beliefs, then it may follow that scientific facts are truths. But again that's a philosophy. The scientific method works just as well whether you believe that or not.

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Empiricism is not science, no -- but science is based on empiricism. The entire scientific method requires empiricism as a means to test hypotheses.

Since I don't think you read the whole paper, here's the paragraphs preceding the portion I quoted.

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The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement -- especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?

For vividness I have been speaking in terms of varying distances from a sensory periphery. Let me try now to clarify this notion without metaphor. Certain statements, though about physical objects and not sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to sense experience -- and in a selective way: some statements to some experiences, others to others. Such statements, especially germane to particular experiences, I picture as near the periphery. But in this relation of "germaneness" I envisage nothing more than a loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of our choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience. For example, we can imagine recalcitrant experiences to which we would surely be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are brick houses on Elm Street, together with related statements on the same topic. We can imagine other recalcitrant experiences to which we would be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are no centaurs, along with kindred statements. A recalcitrant experience can, I have already urged, be accommodated by any of various alternative re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs. These statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper empirical reference than highly theoretical statements of physics or logic or ontology. The latter statements may be thought of as relatively centrally located within the total network, meaning merely that little preferential connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself.

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But we don't have faith in it. If we had "absolute confidence" in any theory, we would not feel the need to test it. It is only by repeated evidential support that a theory becomes a capital T Theory, and even then, we do not have true "absolute confidence" in it. At no point would our perfect scientist ever have faith. Can you point out where you believe the faith enters the situation, and what the scientist has absolute confidence in?

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Pretty sure I started a thread where Sapper said he was "100% sure" a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.

I like to describe Quine as "it's all turtles models, all the way down". And, add to that -- All Models Are False; Some Are Useful.

Science is wrong because it's limited to our perception of reality, which itself is fundamentally underdetermined. That doesn't mean it's not useful, even eminently.

Science has degrees of trust. I know that if I have questions about electromagnetism I can easily find the research and work done to improve my trust. Or I can find a flaw and work to change what is assumed.

At the limits of knowledge, folks don't trust the explanations as much and there is significant work to prove or disprove their ideas. The same doesn't and can't happen in religion. Religious faith requires admission of ignorance and even a certain type of pride in that ignorance.

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Empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.[1] One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism and skepticism, empiricism emphasizes the role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or traditions;[2] empiricists may argue however that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sense experiences

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From our friends at Wikipedia. Modern science, which is based on controlled experimentation, comes to us from the Age of Enlightenment. Some early scientists were philosophical empiricists. However, it is incorrect to claim that the scientific method relies on a belief in philosophical empiricism.

Good. I agree with this. The beliefs are not different in kind, only in order of magnitude of affirming or recalcitrant experiences.

I didn't say the philosophical school of empiricism. I said empiricism, that is, based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.

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I didn't say the philosophical school of empiricism. I said empiricism, that is, based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.

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Again though, this boils down to the basic (and universally held in practice) belief that the laws of the universe remain constant.

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also this is the second discussion in this thread where you responded to my line of arguments by missing the point of the argument and not actually responding to it. so it is getting to the point that i am force to believe one of two things. either you are intentionally missing the points to make my arguments seem weaker in order to refute them, in which case you are being intellectually dishonest, or you are actually missing the points in which case you are just bad at reading comprehension and critical thinking. i'll let you determine which it is.

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i'll speak the way i like, and you speak the way you like. thanks. forgive me for trying to read between the lines to discern what your actual intent is. if you'd like to further discuss something you think i've missed, feel free to point it out. you like to come back and say "you'll notice i haven't said anything about this", but you haven't really come forward and said anything to the affirmative. it just seems like you're trying to put religion and science on the same (shaky) footing. i disagree that they are.

It seems more than a bit disenguinous to compare the problem of induction or our limited sensory capabilities to that of simple religious faith and personal emotional experiences.

If you can disprove Quine you'll probably have written the most influential paper of the 21st century. Best of luck.

I can't believe that evolution really explains much of anything because it takes far too much faith in empiricism. And empiricism (and it's little brother "laws of science") is based on circular logic... which isn't logical. The idea that randomness or chaos plays any "logical" part in evolution is also a complete fallacy. It's simply a fairy tale that those who don't want to be accountable to a god or God continually convince themselves so as to not lose sleep at night and/or be called a (scientific) heretic.

That's hardly necessary for the comparison to be bunk and you know it. If you accept or reject his criticism of kant you can still easily arrive at a distinction between the two things compared.


Quine did argue that philosophy and science share the same playground (curiously this all goes back to the limitations on understanding human thought as it relates to language, or the meaning of words and in that sense feels trivial practically speaking), but that is to say that philosophy should be held to scientific standards of clarity and evidence, not vice versa. Which as best I can tell is precisely the opposite intent of these comparisons, namely, to cast doubt on scientific knowledge and liken it to the tacitly acquiesced shaky ground on which religion stands.

Also, Stanford does great philosophy stuff if you haven't seen that I often peruse if you haven't used it before.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/#QuiPlaHis

I don't think so. It's important to understand where our ability to experience colors our reality and perception. Whether that's science or faith or the smell of a rose or how a sunbeam diffracts through a raindrop is wholly irrelevant.

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I don't think so. It's important to understand where our ability to experience colors our reality and perception. Whether that's science or faith or the smell of a rose or how a sunbeam diffracts through a raindrop is wholly irrelevant.

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I don't see anyway in which understanding our ability to experience colors our knowledge and the limitations therein are a comparable ignorance to the often nearly blind assertions of religious faith. Yes all ignorance falls within the subject of human knowledge but not all ignorance is of equal depth and severity.