Is faith a reliable path to knowledge?

Discussion in 'Comparative Religion' started by James R, Jul 23, 2015.

  1. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    No he didn't.
     
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  3. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Please think how you answer don't take peaces only for your suitable answer.
    Did I not tell you that later Hernando Magallanes found the path to india , and Magallenes did not make because was decapitated by Lapo Lapo in the Island ob Cebu. Juan Sebastian finished the trip.
     
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  5. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    I did not realize that is what you were trying to say. I have 2 comments about that. The first is that was not a route that was taken to India from Europe for the spice trade because it was ridiculously long. Secondly, those specifics don't really have anything to do with my comment about the difference between faith and science.
     
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  7. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    It's a correct answer.
    Are you trolling?
     
  8. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Oh yeah? Then why do we still have Indians? Huh?
     
  9. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Oh hell, you got me!

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  10. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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  11. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Don't start that!
    At one time we had a nutcase here who was utterly convinced that Indians were forcibly shipped from America to India (by raft no less!) rather than largely wiped out.
     
  12. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    You like or not Cristobal Colon , by hunch or faith believed the earth was a sphere , even the comon notion the earth was flat he convinced the Queen Isabel to fund the trip.
     
  13. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Completely wrong.
    It was widely known at the time that the Earth was a "sphere" - and had been known for centuries.
    There was no "common notion" that it was flat.
     
    origin likes this.
  14. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Wy wrong . Is your English story tells you that ? If you bases are Vikings arriving in Canada . Those Vikings navigators apparently did not pass the information to the British , sense later paid to a Italian Jew (Cabotto ) to explore the Northern part of the continent.
    I stated it was believed that the earth was a sphere . Now you are stating that is was known for centuries Would you please provide or substantiate your point
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    That's a myth. Every sailor knew the Earth was a sphere. When you see a ship in the distance, the first thing you see is the top of the mast. That would not happen if the Earth were flat.
     
  16. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    I did not know you lived in the 14 th century . Beside on the past navigation were done along a coast . Read history on how the Portugues costed along African continent . Again Vikings in ther travel did not left much in writing.
     
  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Don't believe me then, here's NASA:
    http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Scolumb.htm
     
  18. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    spidergoat beat me to the punch - post deleted.
     
  19. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    As early as the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras — and later Aristotle and Euclid — wrote about the Earth as a sphere.
    Several books published in Europe between 1200 and 1500 discussed the Earth’s shape, including “The Sphere,” written in the early 1200s, which was required reading in European universities in the 1300s and beyond.

    Both quotes from here.
    The only genuine dispute with Columbus' voyage was about the size of Earth - i.e. was it so small that he could reach the Indies before hitting other land.
     
  20. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Can faith lead one to knowledge? Sure, I admit that going in any direction could lead to knowledge. Is it reliable? No.
     
  21. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Exactly. Faith, particularly unsubstantiated belief (hope that something is true, something will happen) is in my mind the modern incarnation of superstition. And while I agree that the "knowledge" imparted by this (which I guess is false ideation about something, for example, something about the way the physical world works) could be manifesting as a persistent unreliable knowledge, the next piece of that process (for the person curious enough to pursue it) is that they were wrong, and after that some kind of catharsis or whatever, and then the knowledge gleaned becomes the more reliable "I was wrong" or "I was duped". At some point something has to give, and all those folks immersed in their denial of science have to come up for a breath and reach this higher state of awareness. Ideally, that is.
     
  22. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Faith cannot lead to knowledge.

    Faith may have some truths in common which "knowledge", but it cannot lead to new knowledge, because it is not based on objective knowledge to begin with.

    The term "faith" is by definition exclusive of "knowledge".

    Any change of faith through knowledge is derived from other sources than that which faith provides. The person must first doubt his faith or practice thereof, before he begins to inquire about objective thruth (knowledge).

    Young Earthers are a perfect example of unyielding faith in spite of scientifically proved truths. The science does not fit the story on which the faith is based and is therefore discarded. In some theocracies it is illegal to express doubt altogether.

    How can that possibly lead to knowledge of objective truth?
     
  23. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Interesting statement, one I would not have framed myself, but the more I think about it, the more I agree. My favorite example of scientific discovery in the face of religious restrictions is that of Galileo, who was placed on house arrest for publishing his discovery that Jupiter has moons (contraverting the geocentric teaching of Renaissance Christian doctrine). It is fascinating to read his express frustration over the denunciations of so many secular leaders who he implored to pick up a telescope and confirm it for themselves (now that he had invented the telescope). Here we are 500 years later and the same stupidity prevails. Come on, dummies, confirm some of this stuff yourselves!

    I like that point as well. The interesting phenomenon in post Nixon (and esp. post Reagan) America, is that Faith is beginning to claim knowledge of things while at the same time denying religion - as in people identifying as "Theists" not associated with any "organized religion". Yet in fact they are identifying with Fundamentalism (esp. Creationism), but trying to hide from this (as crypto-Creationists) to avoid the strident attacks on the fallacies such folks invite from people of an average education.

    Yes, and that exclusion is often self-inflicted, as in the denial of science by Fundamentalists/Creationists. Dig a little deeper, and we note that the word "Faith" here is probably associated with the Protestant notion - esp. American Fundamentalism - of "salvation by faith alone", as opposed to the ancestral Christian teaching "salvation by Faith plus works" (usu. referring to the corporal works of mercy: sheltering the homeless, giving food and water to people who are hungry and thirsty, visiting the sick, the imprisoned, etc.) We see now that rejecting organized religion and calling themselves theists becomes a code word for rejecting social liberalism, i.e. rejecting the so called "welfare state" and analyze this further and you will hear whites complaining about "all those blacks on welfare".

    Also, note that although the ancestral Western version of Christianity was for about 15 centuries Roman Catholicism the modern "Theist" (as defined above) will typically hold Catholicism and the Popes in great contempt, even though these are the cultures which handed down their own doctrines to them. In most cases they do not know their own history, as if nothing happened on Earth from the day a Bible magically appeared and the day they first opened one.

    So now the facts which constitute an average high school level of education join the operative facts in question which we might construe as knowable (typically evolution, the fact of whether a non-viable fetus is alive and whether God gave Adam the Earth to use as he wished [crypto-deregulationists]) and to this modern mix of modern political agendas we add the actual historical facts that the so-called conservatives are either ignorant of, or pretending to be ignorant of: that for the first 15 centuries the Western Christians (most of Europe) were immersed in the love of the arts, sciences, and academia, and if they were illiterate, they still lived under doctrines enunciated by leaders who praised art, science and academia. Again, this is why our antagonists distance themselves from "membership in a church" since it would demand that they show precedence over the ancestral Christianity which is quite impossible to do. (And I deliberately did not use the word Catholicism, since that word took on a new meaning during the Reformation, and the crypto-Creationists will hang their hats on selective oversimplifications, as if 1500 years of development can be reduced to one word like "Papists" or one sweeping generalization, like "Sale of Indulgences").

    To be sure, I am an atheist, but I find this behavior really moronic. The defenders of "faith" are almost exclusively crypto-social conservatives which simply means they want to regulate personal behavior and deregulate industry.

    And if we were living in the 13th century, we would say that whenever Nature is revealed to humans (through science and academia) it is the work of The Holy Spirit, that it cannot possibly be untrue, because God would never create and perpetrate a deception on the people. Yes, they believed scientific discovery was divine revelation.

    And here we have trouble discerning modern crypto-social conservatives from their alias ("the faithful") until they bash science and academia. Then the cat is out of the bag. They don't want to know that their ignorance of history has made them hopelessly cynical about the long standing doctrines and beliefs which preceded the Anabaptists and Puritans (from which their religious identity was born).

    The only possible way is that the scales fall from their eyes, and they fall to the ground and beg God for mercy (just kidding, I am truly an atheist) for pretending to know more than "HE" does concerning the dissemination of facts of Nature upon the students who actually studied, passed exams, and stayed in school long enough to be able to discuss this subject intelligently (at least at the high school level FOR GAWD'S SAKE) !!!

    Yep folks, Gawd truly wanted you to stay in school and learn for yourselves how the world works, not to sit on your laurels and claim that you are saved by faith alone. An easy test for that: which will save you from an oncoming train: (a) the ability to quickly estimate the effect of conservation of momentum, or (b) faith alone ...?


    I don't usually "shout" in bold so much, but these folks obviously are having trouble reading.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2015

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