@Cyracuz,
Cyracuz wrote:
Quote:What is faith, and what distinguishes it from doubt?
I would say that faith is belief in spite of doubt. It is what we do when we embrace a belief without 100% certainty of being true. I think that if there were no such thing as doubt, there would be no need for faith.
Well, what i am what i was trying to say in my previous post (the confusion is entirely my own fault, a product of my usual attempts at conceptual compression), is that beliefs are the products of the dynamic balance and tension between faith and doubt.
Cyracuz wrote:Quote:(...) certain facts previously taken as given have later come under scrutiny, if not dismissal, by the scientific community.
This is true. And still we think of the most recently uncovered facts we have as true/ valid/ correct. Our methods of inquiry give us reason to do so, and we will keep doing so until the very same methods of inquiry give us reason to doubt.
Part of what makes science so successful is it's ability to embrace new information and new ideas, adjusting or discarding old ones as the need arises. We have confidence in the scientific method as a tool to increase our understanding. But once a fact we previously understood to be true (a working description of reality) reveals itself to be flawed or incorrect, we adjust what we think about reality. Once, humans believed that the earth was the center of the universe. That is a belief, no matter how scientific the method of reaching that belief was.
Hmmm...novelty as a guarantor of value is a relatively recent
cultural event, fact-wise or other. The positive value of novelty is popularly understood to be evidence of the idea of "progress" --whether science and "progress" march on together is yet to be proven.
Still and in contrast, science could be said to be resistant to "new" information, insofar as it contradicts current theories -- it only takes a passing review of the history of science to see that info, later proven to be "true" or accurate, was available (via experiment) long before it was accepted as "True". Scientific truth is a more complicated, historical quantity than it would be convenient to believe.
What makes science so successful, is not its embrace of the "new", but its access to the pragmatic. " Our" confidence in science is a product of immediate results, its very ability to respond to "needs" (which always seem immediate despite their continued evolution or futurity.) A scientific "fact" is not valuable as a "description of reality" but as a tool that helps navigate the reality to which you refer. Once a tool is no longer useful, we do not disprove it, we merely dispose of it -- Popper referred to such a disposed of fact as "falsified", but a more honest denotation would be "useless". It is not that the geocentric model is untrue, but that it is currently pragmatically useless that makes it an object of intellectual history rather than a contentious, alternate scientific theory.
Cyracuz wrote:Today, we believe that consciousness is a fluke of nature. A by-product of it that only came into play as sentient creatures evolved to the capacity of thought. We believe this to be true even though it is unproven. This belief shapes the direction science takes in the fields of mind and brain research, and probably in other fields as well. It shapes how we interpret and relate to each other the facts we uncover.
Based on this, it is fairly easy to see how faith guides our scientific inquiries.
Well...i have no desire to deny that faith has some bearing on our scientific inquiries, i merely feel that our scientific inquiries are not a sum of , or limit to, our capacity for faith. i do not mean this statement to imply an anti-scientific bias, or promote a "creationist" misunderstanding. i only mean that our capacity for faith is greater than our use for "facts". Or, in other words (words that require much more explication than i am willing to contribute here), our being in the world [**** you, Heidegger] is more overwhelming than the sense of security awakened by the presence of other beings.
As for your statement beginning, "Today, we believe" -- i think that "we" requires a whole lot more than contemporaneity to qualify it, unless it represents the royal "we". There are a whole lot of contemporary theories about consciousness -- only a few regard it as being entirely the product of accident. However, even if sentience, or consciousness (if exact terminology is as important to you as it is to me), were a "fluke" (although what does that term mean outside of conscious expectation) -- to what degree is that determinative of its development? And to what bearing does that "belief" have on the evidence of its continuance that is not discouraging of its continuing?
