Faith or Facts

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What do you think?

Faith: Believing in god

or

Fact: Science
Quotes:
Faith means not wanting to know what is true. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. - Edward Abbey

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. - Delos B. McKown

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. - Christopher Hitchens

On the first day, man created God.( wow what a givaway for an atheist who wants to prove a theist wrong

So what do you think, do you believe in science or religion. It's not like faith and facts can be the same thing. If they can prove it to me.

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@MITech,

I think that quotes will have a hard time convincing me that faith is more right than fact, or vice versa, if that's what you're trying to get at.

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@Holiday20310401,

This article might be more useful than some quotations:

Nonoverlapping Magisteria

Quote:

"The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven."

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@Pangloss,

Facts and Faith do not necissarily need to be seperate.
One who has Faith based on Facts.
And there are many facts within Faith.

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@Binyamin Tsadik,

MITech, it is easy enough to claim that through science something of faith is questionable but that is not proof that it isn,t true. Take evolution for example. I am a strong believer that Charles Darwin was correct for all the species of animals. Then with man I find discrepancies. Where is the missing link and stop looking for fossils, because if it doesn't exist in what is here now you cannot prove to me that it existed in the lives of other creatures. We are unique. I don't mean superior I mean different. Now if science proves that other beings on this planet are more unique than I have been taught to believe, then maybe I will question the Supreme Being idea with a little more scrutiny. To date, science is taking just as great a leap of faith as religion did in its past. Science is still filling the gaps with hypothesis of unfounded credibility.

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@MITech,

Faith and facts are the two opposing and hazardous negotiations.

The people who have faith and the people with facts would disdain each other.No one could come to a cease of this animosity.It depends on one's option of whether he/she might opt faith or facts.

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@Ennui phil,

Random thoughts on this...

For some notions, I'd say, "I have faith"
For other notions, I believe they're based in fact.
Then again, I'd also say that there are many concepts where i have no faith nor facts.

If you have faith in something, by definition, such faith is, "... firm belief in something for which there is no proof". One says, "I believe!", another says, "I know" while dilbert stands in the corner with neither faith nor perceived knowledge.

... depending on our direction in this thread (read: semantics, support for ideas, opposition in theological systems, etc), there's a lot of ways to skin this cat.

<meow>

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@MITech,

Quote:

So what do you think, do you believe in science or religion. It's not like faith and facts can be the same thing. If they can prove it to me.

Maybe I'm just ignorant here, but can someone explain to me how science has anything to do with religion, or why if I practice one I cannot practice the other? You're right, fact cannot be faith, but why must anyone choose between the two? Are you saying that because I know the theory of relativity that I should not believe in God? This makes no sense to me.

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@Solace,

Because there was a time when religion and science were synonymous. What were the stars in the sky at one point but holes in the celestial spheres. How they moved depended on the will of an unmoved mover. Religion (the concept of God) is that term attributed to things that could not be explained. Now we think it is absurd, but back then it was an adequate answer.

You could practice faith and science, but you have to understand the limitations of both practices.

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@Solace,

Solace;27663 wrote:

Maybe I'm just ignorant here, but can someone explain to me how science has anything to do with religion, or why if I practice one I cannot practice the other? You're right, fact cannot be faith, but why must anyone choose between the two? Are you saying that because I know the theory of relativity that I should not believe in God? This makes no sense to me.

You might find this an interesting read:
EINSTEIN AND GOD/CREATOR: AN ANALYSIS OF HIS BELIEFS/VIEWS ON GOD, RELIGION AND THE BIBLE

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@MITech,

VideCorSpoon;27673 wrote:

Because there was a time when religion and science were synonymous. What were the stars in the sky at one point but holes in the celestial spheres. How they moved depended on the will of an unmoved mover. Religion (the concept of God) is that term attributed to things that could not be explained. Now we think it is absurd, but back then it was an adequate answer.

You could practice faith and science, but you have to understand the limitations of both practices.

Religion and science were synonymous in the sense that religion occupied both domains of inquiry that are now occupied by both science and religion.

Interestingly the quote in my signature applies to this...it was attributed to Socrates by Aristophanes in the play, "Clouds", in reference to the charge that Socrates was in the clouds, looking down upon the gods, contemplating the movement of the sun and stars. Of course to do this means that you would first have to doubt that the gods are causing these phenomena, and so one of his supposed crimes was spreading ideas against belief in the gods...much of this was the result of Aristophanes' play, though Socrates did later admit that he had spent time studying some form of science in his younger days.

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@Pangloss,

Most insightful!! Smile

The Anatomy of Belief The World According to Xenocrates

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@VideCorSpoon,

VideCorSpoon wrote:

Because there was a time when religion and science were synonymous. What were the stars in the sky at one point but holes in the celestial spheres. How they moved depended on the will of an unmoved mover. Religion (the concept of God) is that term attributed to things that could not be explained. Now we think it is absurd, but back then it was an adequate answer.

You could practice faith and science, but you have to understand the limitations of both practices.

Interesting that both Scientists and the Sages disagree with this.

The RaMBaN (Nachmanides) wrote an article against this very point.

There were a few Rabbis in his generation that stated that every law in the Torah that we understand are logical Laws and all of the others are Divine.

The RaMBaN wrote that this implies that God is Illogical, which is not true. Therefore, even the Laws we don't understand are logical, we simply do not understand the Logic.

Divinity is in both what we do understand and in what we don't understand and is always logical and True.

Galileo, Newton, and Einstein all beleived in God. Physics, in their minds, was the expression of the perfection of His universe. And what they understood was logical and scientific, and what they did not understand was yet to be understood through logic and science.

Newton even spent his latter years (although he remained christian) criticizing the church, learning Hebrew and trying to decode the Torah with Mathematical Algorithms (as if it were an encription). Today with computers it is much easier, and there are many people that are associated with this today.

The Light of Torah Codes

Bible code - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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@MITech,

I don't see any harm in having faith until you believe and believing until you know.

1 Reply

@Rose phil,

Rose wrote:

I don't see any harm in having faith until you believe and believing until you know.

Rose,

Does that really makes sense to you? "Thoughs whom say they know, do not know, those who know they do not know, know. Upanishads

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@boagie,

To the thread starter - science is not necessarily fact. Consider the array of scientific theories once held in high regard only to be shown to be inadequate and not factual. Science is not fact. Science attempts, and does so quite well, to arrive at an objective account of reality.
Faith tends to deal with the subjective. Sometimes, as Benyamin points out, faith and fact are the very same. It is possible to have faith in a fact, or to take sometime on faith (faith as in Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith') that happens to also be a fact.

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@MITech,

Well said. Nor can faith be defined as belief in God, as it was in the first post here, since faith is also important in atheistic religions.

1 Reply

@Whoever,

Whoever wrote:

Well said. Nor can faith be defined as belief in God, as it was in the first post here, since faith is also important in atheistic religions.

Whoever,

What atheistic religions?

1 Reply

@boagie,

boagie;31003 wrote:

Rose,

Does that really makes sense to you? "Thoughs whom say they know, do not know, those who know they do not know, know. Upanishads

Well, yes. As a Seeker a lot of what I am told is taken onboard in faith until I do some research then I might believe it - believing isn't knowing. Then with more research I might come to accept it as the truth - isn't that knowing?

1 Reply

@Rose phil,

Rose,

Actually its is problematic to term what most people would call being open minded with the term faith, I do get your meaning, but it is an unfortunate way to express it.

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