Is science based on faith?

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I think alot of Christians would define faith in this way:

"In the New Testament the English word faith is used to translate the Greek word pistis. The New Strong’s Expanded Dictionary of Bible Words says, “Pistis is used of belief with the predominate idea of trust (or confidence) whether in God or in Christ, springing from faith in the same. ‘Faith’ means trust, confidence, assurance, and belief” (p. 1315).

The Bible also defines pistis in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Faith is the substance or assurance of things we hope for, but have not yet received. Faith (confidence, belief, trust) is also our evidence of that which is not seen—the invisible spiritual things. Faith comes before a prayer is answered or before an individual has received what he or she has requested from God. If we have received what we asked for, then faith is not needed."---- https://lifehopeandtruth.com/change/faith/what-is-faith/

 

You miss the point.

First, you are looking through this issue through the spectacles of empiricism, and thereby science, as being the only arbiter of justification. From someone who looks exclusively through those lenses, your position is expected. But it doesn’t answer the question of people who don’t wear those glasses, and how they view faith.

Secondly, no one has said anything about faith offering “objective justification”. I certainly haven’t. The idea that justification need somehow be objective is you again looking through the glasses of empiricism, or of the need for that justification to be convincing to all that hear it. This isn’t the case. Faith does not convince you, nor me. I would not accept that somebody knows something just because they say they have faith. But it convinces them. It is justification for them.

I’m not arguing for a standard. A standard assumes that it should apply to all. I’m arguing that justification is not as simple as you seem to want to make it, that what one might take as justification might not be acceptable for another. You are arguing that if someone’s justification doesn’t fit your criteria then it should not be accepted as justification by anyone. Justification, however, is not always objective.

And the overall point is that when one uses faith as justification they are not “pretending” to know. Whether they know or not depends predominantly on whether their claim is true or not. If one’s epstemic philosophy won’t allow the proposition to be verified, then you won’t accept any justification for the claim/belief to be knowledge. If one’s epistemic philosophy does allow it to be verified then one will only accept justification that fits that philosophy. However, this in no way speaks to whether the other person has knowledge, only whether it can fit within your epistemic philosophy as being knowledge.

You, however, are insisting that if doesn’t fit your philosophy then it can not be considered knowledge at all. You are simply not allowing yourself to consider those who hold other philosophies, yet you are looking to define how they use words, such as “faith”.

Please don’t start the ad hominems, James R. Please don’t start trolling.

Yet you haven’t done. You seem to have simply asserted your position again, and again argued exclusively from your epistemic philosophy. Which means you’ve missed the point entirely.

 

They have justification. There is a whole swathe of philosophical discourse on the matter of what justification should entail within the remit of the Justified True Belief criteria. You are simply asserting that everyone has to abide by your epistemological philosophy in this regard.

Let’s be clear: it’s not a justification for you (or me). However I am not insisting that everyone adheres to my epistemic philosophy in that regard, or insisting that mine is the only one and all others are a matter of pretence, for example.

Here you are just insisting upon your own epistemological philosophy as the arbiter of what everyone else can consider knowledge. Not all knowledge is scientific, nor can science answer the claim that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge. Yet here you are asserting it, if not explicitly then in your positioning. Even when the question is how others that don’t share your philosophy might use words.

It’s not a double standard. It’s the awareness that there is no “standard”, other than what we ascribe ourselves through our own epistemic philosophy. All you can talk about with regard whether something is knowledge is whether it fits your epistemic philosophy that you should consider it knowledge. If someone else has a different philosophy then what they consider knowledge will be different.

No, I’m doing no such thing. First, how do you know it is ignorance on their part? Because it doesn’t fit your epistemic philosophy? Second, you are still asserting a deliberate intention on their part.

I suggest you do a bit of research regarding epistemology, and the various views: notably rationalism and existentialism. You (and I) adhere mainly to the view of empiricism. But I am not limiting discussion to just that, and accept that others have – and are allowed – to have differing philosophies.

Your derogatory view of those with different epistemological philosophies is your own, not mine.

Again, I suggest you do a dive into the realm of epistemology. Rationalism and Existentialism would be the main two other than empiricism for you to examine, I’d suggest.

I don’t know, as what they are claiming through faith I can not verify the truth/falsity of their claim. It is an area of knowledge, if it is there, that would appear closed to me (as knowledge).

Sigh. Again you are asserting that only your epistemic philosophy is acceptable, that only your view of justification is acceptable. You can not know that they are pretending. You can not assert that their justification is unacceptable to anyone other than those who hold your view about it.

And you are still denigrating the one with faith, now through claiming them deluded. If you think them deluded, show them evidence to the contrary of what they believe.

First, no one is asking you to pander to anything. That is not what this is about. If you have other issues with people of religion, take it up with them, in another thread.

Second, show that what they believe is false! Show that it is not knowledge, not just with reference to your epistemic philosophy but theirs! Or show that theirs is wrong. You do know that science can not show that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge, right?

I don’t accept revelation as justification for knowledge, either, James R. But that is because they don’t fit within my epistemic philosophy. I can’t speak for others who don’t hold to the same philosophy.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Please don’t misunderstand what I wrote. I merely gave a list of what people might consider to be justification, James R, and did not explicitly equate any of them to “faith”.

I may get round to answering the rest, but at the moment it seems you are stuck considering everything solely through your own epistemic philosophy and insisting that yours is the only acceptable one for everyone, unable to consider alternatives, let alone put yourself in their shoes and see how certain words might by used by them. Therefore discussing this issue further with you here would be seem to be of little value.
But if I get more time I will review the other responses and, if anything is of interest, I will reply to them.

 

Yes. That's why I often define faith as 'commitment'. When Christians say that they have 'faith in Christ', oftentimes they seem to mean that they are committed to Christ, his message, his path, or whatever it is.

I don't think that they must always be interpreted as claiming to possess some private information pipeline not available to atheists. Although they could, since their own religious experience probably seems to them to confirm and justify their religious committments quite well.

And at risk of repeating myself, I think that science does much the same thing when scientists practice science. They do it when they adopt their methodological naturalism since ontological physicalism isn't something that they can actually know. They do it when they adopt a sensory empiricism as opposed to interpreting experience more broadly as with religious experiensce. They do it when they accept the formal framework of mathematics and logic, despite the lack of a foundational basis. They do it when they trust that reality always behaves in conformity with mathematics and logic and that the uniformity of nature holds true such that scientific induction and mathematical physics succeed.

Science is committed to those kind of assumptions (which they can't really justify without circularity) as the framework for its practice. Much as the religious faithful are committed to their very different presuppositions as the framework for theirs.

I personally share the presuppositions of science far more than those of the 'Abrahamic' religions. Hence I find science to be vastly more credible. But that doesn't mean that I don't see the similarities.

I expect that the similarities are the result of our human condition, where we begin with our own experience of reality and then try to make sense of it, form beliefs about it, and then try to find justifications for those beliefs. We don't begin at the foundations and build upwards. We begin floating in the air so to speak, and seek foundations that might not even be discoverable by beings such as us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundationalism

 

To have a faith in science would seem to mean having a non-static faith, because science does not say it has the only answers and there’s nothing else possible now or in the future?
It would seem funny to have a model of a god. That model would be something like, here is a god model, it has always been the same and will never change. Sounds like an arrogant kind of faith compared to science faith.