Praise the lord, this long dead thread has been resurrected.

Yeah I was re-reading a lot of your posts Shockwaffle and, out of the heat of the moment, they are articulate and well composed, and deserved a little more respect from me

I was wondering.

Serious question.

Is it possible for a reasonable man to believe in God or indeed gods without suspending his reason?


Does any faith stand up to "reason".

I think Faith is what is left when reason has no answer.

So yes, a reasonable man can have faith in that which cannot be reasoned.

Given 'Belief without a basis in reason' is as good a definition of 'faith' as I can come up with, it seems to me the strict answer to your question is 'no'. However, I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. It is possible for a man to know and understand the value of reason in one context yet still have belief through faith in another. Many of the greatest scientists throughout history have had sincere faith, while still rigorously applying the principles of reason in their work.

Jon

Yes, it has never ceased to amaze me how humans have the ability to compartmentalise.

I always take pleasure in being able to reason and I have a reasonable science education. Yet there is still a reluctance to stay in hotel room 13 or to break a mirror.

Faith and superstition, I guess they are the same thing.

Have you noticed that you make friends quicker if you go along with their superstitions rather than say they're complete [LIFTED]?

To be honest I am not too sure about it.

People tend to know when you are being insincere. I would hope to be sensitive to people if they are superstitious but I don't think you do them any favours by allowing the superstition to go unquestioned.

I guess it depends on the kind of friendship you are talking about.

I guess the answer depends on whether you consider yourself a reasonable man/woman/feline, and from there on exactly how reasonable you consider the things you believe in to actually be.

We all have beliefs on a wide variety of topics; things like justice, politics, ethics and so on that we feel very strongly about. But when pressed most of us would accept that there is a point beyond which we cannot prove our arguments in such fields. So we don't even have to define reason very strictly to come to the conclusion that reasonable people believe things about how the world ought to be without it as a matter of course.

The question of how the world is (and how it came to be what it is) though are not the sort of thing where we expect to rely on faith. Ethics is nebulous and grey, but physics is pure black and white factual stuff. But under the science lies the set of assumptions that makes it possible, and if you investigate those you will quickly find problems. Some are relatively sensible objections to do with how scientists can know stuff...
Science is ultimately a method for dealing with uncertainty through experimentation. The experiments do not often prove large scientific statements of fact as such; sometimes they demonstrably disprove something big, other times they lend extra credibility to a grand theory. The rest of the time they demonstrate small things like the electrical behaviour of a material, or the rate at which a chemical does a thing. The very best of the big scientific theories are highly probable because they have passed a series of stringent tests, and they explain all the relevant phenomena and so on, but they are all still just one experiment away from being either incomplete or utterly wrong.

The less sensible objections strike at the very logic of all science: causation, and inductive reasoning. The metaphysics of causation is a massive, intricate, and tbh annoyingly stupid subject that I recommend we don't try and cover here, you can read more about it courtesy of Stanford if you have the patience http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causa ... #HybPriEli let's just say that most people's reasonable view of science includes various things causing other things to happen. I have just used a chemical reaction to ignite a flame, that flame has scorched some tobacco, and one day the resultant smoke will give me a nasty medical condition. We all know all of those things are causally related, but if you investigate too deeply you will find that this cannot easily be proved, and that it involves a certain amount of faith. This may or may not matter, because science might not even rely on causality.

Inductive reasoning is easier and more fun. Induction is what happens when we observe the world, and attach significance to patterns we observe. Science does this every time an experiment is used to justify a theory. (and also every time a set of mathematical transactions is used to predict or "prove" something about the universe). But you can't prove that those patterns have to be, nor that they must continue to be... Consider the chicken who observes every morning that the sun rises, and then the farmer's wife comes to feed him. He will learn to predict the arrival of food based on the appearance of the sun. But one day he isn't going to be fed, that woman will wring his neck instead. This leads to Bertrand Russell's awesome quote: "more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."

There have been lots of attempts to definitively answer questions like those, they honestly aren't very convincing. The sensible answer is that causation and induction are things we can't help but take for granted; they are articles of faith that it is unreasonable not to believe in.

So within reason, a little unreason is probably quite reasonable. And believing things that you can't actually prove is refreshingly necessary.

I think so. Even people of science and atheists (like me) can't answer one question:
Q) Explain consciousness and free will
We can't. How do laws of physics explain those atoms/electrons moving in your brain without following a fixed pattern based on cause and effect physically?

Within reason yes.

Surely not with something as important as religion.

With religion is it not important to be true and reasonable? After all most religions ask you to give your whole life to them, and quite a lot of your spare cash too.

You would not want to do that to something that was not reasonable would you?

I suspect that there are many explanations of both consciousness and free will.

But even if not what is your point? Just because we might not know how a thing works does it help to introduce magical beings? Does it take us any further? Or does such thinking stop us from actually doing the research to find out?

As to your second point I have read it several times now but I am not sure what it is you are saying. Are you asking how the brain works?

OT - but has anyone looked into the ruins at Gobekli Tepe? Fascinating.

You originally posited a question about a reasonable man having faith. I think it's fair in those terms to assume he would be reasonable in his uses of that faith. If the religion in question involves worshiping a carton of whipped cream that demands unbelievers be hurled into a bottomless pit of boiling phlegm, he is going to fail the reasonable man test. If he is a sensible Methodist who feels duty bound to give to charity and do a few modest good deeds, he is liable to pass.