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Originally Posted by smoothmoniker
Yep. I think that's the crux of my point. Faith adds action to conclusions arrived at by induction. It is acting as something is true, on the basis of incomplete (but reasonable) evidence for it being true.
On that definition, I think two things emerge:
1) We all engage in mundane acts of faith with regularity (sitting in a chair without checking the strength of the legs), and
2) Religious faith is not a different kind of faith than that which is engaged in by people at large, every day.
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Your present example of faith is so semantically skewed that faith and probability and induction could all be the same word.
Your example of the chair isn't faith. A chair is designed to catch your ass and suspend it above the floor. It's not faith to sit in a chair without looking.
You see a chair, and if there are no obvious flaws in it, and you sit down expecting it to do its job based on your experience with past chairs and your understanding of the concept of a chair.
That's a probability assessment on your part.
While I don't disagree with you on your second part, that doesn't make those people's behavior rational or reasonable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by smoothmoniker
I think there are two aspects to religious faith that differentiate it from mundane acts of faith. First, religious people accept as evidence a wider range of data than religious skeptics. A religious person may accept their own internal state of spiritual awareness as confirming evidence, which is not a kind of evidence that a religious skeptic has access to, or has any good reason to allow into the conversation.
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Internal revelatory events aren't testable. They can't even be compared against those of another person. While that may be acceptable as evidence for personal use it has no merit outside of that person's skin.
Quote:
Originally Posted by smoothmoniker
Second, the actions undertaken by religious people (acting as if their conclusions are true) are generally more sweeping, more radical, and more controversial than the mundane actions of faith undertaken by everyone. If I believe my chair can support my weight, and I sit down in my chair, my action is a very mundane act of faith, and nobody takes much notice of it. If I believe that God is real and that he/she hates materialism, and I sell everything I own to live a life of simplicity and service, that's a conspicuous act of faith.
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As a personal issue, I don't give a tinker's damn what people do in regards to the voices that drive their lives so long as they only blow themselves up. That's why I have such a problem with the weight given to religion when people use it to judge other or act against others. You, generally speaking, don't get to use the rules of your invisible sky daddy to act against me, judge all you want, but act against me and it will be bad.
And you keep going back to the chair/faith issue. Again, that's not faith, that's probability, it's the same model as expecting the sun to rise tomorrow. It's a probabilistic model. The sun has risen reliably since recorded time, a proper chair has caught people's asses since chairs were properly made.
Quote:
Originally Posted by smoothmoniker
It's completely irrational if I believe that my present life, and the pleasures I enjoy in it, are the sum total of my existence.
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No, it's not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by smoothmoniker
It only becomes rational if I am acting in faith (based on a chain of inductively supported conclusions) that there is a greater purpose to life, and that my present state of pleasure is less meaningful than that greater purpose.
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That's just silly. The only reason you believe anything religious is because you were taught so or really want to.
Quote:
Originally Posted by smoothmoniker
Long answer to a short statement, but yes, UT, I would say that faith and induction are very similar in how they process evidence and conclusions, with the difference being that faith is acting upon those conclusions as if they were true, rather than simply holding them in escrow until better evidence comes along.
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Don't confuse the mechanism of induction as it is used internally in respect with a religion as opposed with induction in relation to the evidence for the existence of deity.