Science, Religion, and the Surrounding Confusion.

[Phage0070]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

So what's the problem? Are you incapable of determining where faith vs proof should be applied?

The problem is that there is no way to determine a situation where faith *should* be applied, ostensibly because there isn't one.

Faith-based people and proof-based people start out thinking in similar methods. They observe the present (lets say we are looking at a bird), and both attempt to determine the reason for its existance.

A faith-based person concludes that God made it, while a proof-based person attempts to deduce a chain of events which would bring about such an end result. The proof-based person requires that this chain of events have clear causation between them, while the faith-based person requires no evidence.

At this point the problem with the faith-based approach becomes painfully clear. If proof is not required to conclude God is responsible for the bird, it is equally valid to conclude that the bird was brought into being by a cinder block. A faith-based approach is in essence the decision that answers do not matter, and fantasy is as equally valid as reality.


What astonishes me the most is that society functions as well as it does with large swaths of the population choosing to be selectively bat-shit crazy.