Science, Religion, and the Surrounding Confusion.

[Phage0070]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Purely a matter of numbers and time. If enough people suffer the same delusion for long enough, it becomes a valid way of viewing the world.

@ Troubleshooter. I disagree slightly with your definition of faith. It is not belief without the need for explanation. It is belief without the need for proof. Religion is nothing if not an explanation of life.

Ahh, but they *don’t* suffer the same delusion, just the same type of delusion. If we could run double-blind trials and verify that the faith experiences you experience and we cannot detect are shared and consistent among others then you would have a point. Unfortunately that isn’t what we see; for some people it is clowns, others unicorns, and they only start to become somewhat consistent when you put those people in communication.

Besides, if we could provide solid statistical support to the idea of faith then it would cease to be faith by your definition. Those statistical studies would become proof.

Originally Posted by regular.joe

So, here we go again, nonsensical clowns, can we not go to the far extreme of an example when talking about having faith?

Come on now, that isn’t extreme at all. Faith is what is extreme; the clowns just sometimes insist that you eat a few paper clips, and they really only hang out in closets. The rest of the time it is no big deal. Faith on the other hand is justification for an entire moral code, and ascribes meaning and purpose to every event in the world. Just because you have faith and don’t see clowns does not make the clowns more extreme, I don’t see either.