Reality and Proof

[Parallo]

But Faith is believing without proof or evidence.

[zanzibar]

But Faith is believing without proof or evidence.

Except that your definition of proof isn't the only definition out there.  To people who believe in faith, faith is a kind of proof.

[Parallo]

But how can you believe something thats so absurd and has no basis in reality? If I said I was able to move through walls would you in your heart believe me and call that evidence? Would you not laugh at someone that did?

[Pizzasgood]

Your webcam isn't religious

Well, it depends.  Maybe all matter possesses a little bit of a spirit.  In that case, it is.  So it depends on who you ask.

You say prove there is a spirit.  You claim there is no way to do so.  I deny that.  It is perfectly possible to prove or disprove (depending on whether there really is).  The problem is that we don't have the needed physics yet.  2000 years ago, you could have asked me to prove that you didn't have a whole mess of little wriggly squishy things shoved together to create your body, and I wouldn't have been able to.  By your definition of "know", we now know that you are composed of a vast number of cells, each one a living creature that eats, metabolizes, grows, reproduces, and dies.  In essence, you are actually a composition of many smaller creatures who live and cooperate with eachother to support the community that we see as your body.  All you are is the sum total of them.

But 2000 years ago, that would have seemed even more ridiculous than saying that you are insane and only imagine having this conversation with me, or that I have a spirit, or maybe eight trillion spirits that merge together in a kind of government to create the entity known as Pizzasgood.

With the rate modern science has been progressing, who knows what we will prove or disprove in the next 2000 years (if we don't kill ourselves or partake in a religious ending first).

I'm not trying to prove spirits exist, just to explain why it isn't ridiculous to believe such a thing. 

[bilbous]

I believe in grey blobs, but I don't expect anyone else to. Oh and hey a webcam is an electric eye so it has a soul....

[zanzibar]

But how can you believe something thats so absurd and has no basis in reality? If I said I was able to move through walls would you in your heart believe me and call that evidence? Would you not laugh at someone that did?

Reality is based on perception and perception is based on assumption.

If a person defined evidence as "That which Parallo says is true", then they will take your word as proof.

[emeraldfool]

Zanzibar's right.

If you told anyone from the year 1000 that you could instantly talk to someone in another country using a small metal box they would react pretty much the same way you did to spirits being real, Paro.

That's because they could never perceive, or conceive, or assume of such a thing, or whatever you want to call it. That doesn't mean wireless cross-country communication doesn't exist in 1000 AD. It's just nobody knew about it.

Maybe that's a bad example, but you know what I mean; in 1000 years man could easily discover, using some sort of electro-magnetic detection device or something, that souls really do exist. Just because we don't have the means to prove something now, doesn't mean it's unprovable.

[swordsbane]

But Faith is believing without proof or evidence.

Except that your definition of proof isn't the only definition out there.  To people who believe in faith, faith is a kind of proof.

I don't buy that.  Pretty much everyone agrees on what proof is and it's NOT faith.  The tricky part is knowing when you have proof.  Some people mistake what they see as proof when it is only evidence.  Proof is what logically can only point to one thing.  Seeing something is not proof (ie seeing a dot in the sky not acting like any aircraft is not proof of aliens)  Proof is not an absolute, but it is so narrowly defined that it isn't open to much interpretation, certainly not to be confused with faith.  Faith is a belief accepted as fact.  If you can, at a later date prove what you already 'knew' to be true, then your faith is vindicated.  If someone proves you wrong, then your faith was misplaced.  Faith does not have much intrinsic value to the discussion of weather something is or is not.  If 99% of the world believes in something that isn't true, it does not make it true.  The only value faith has is that if someone believes something, then there is a reason for that belief.  Not necessarily a valid reason, but a reason nonetheless.  The absence of evidence is also evidence, not proof.  If something exists, it necessarily leaves behind evidence of it's existence.  If you find no evidence, then it supports the conclusion that what you're looking for doesn't exist, but it is not proof.  You can't prove a negative, but you can by process of elimination go beyond a reasonable doubt in that direction.  Once you do, any continued belief in its existence becomes faith..

This is why people get hung up on the relationship between science and religion.  They are not opposed philosophies.  Science has specific criteria for accepting something as fact.  It does not deny those things that fail the test of that criteria, but it doesn't incorporate those things into its body of knowledge  That is where faith comes in.  Faith is an attempt to explain what science hasn't gotten around to yet.  The only problem I see with faith is when it attempts to redefine what science has already defined, or refuses to accept what science discovers because it doesn't fit the reality that faith has constructed.  Science and faith are not opposing forces, but if we accept science into our lives, we have to accept the possibility that it will someday destroy or at least radically alter all parts of the universe we have come to accept through faith.

Yes.... I am way too wordy for my own good.  My Dad was an aeronautics engineer and my Mom was a philosophy major.  What can I say?

[emeraldfool]

I can say that you're probably right if you're talking about the present world in general

The problem with science as 'fact', is that science is based on other science, which is based on other science, which could be fundamentally wrong to begin with.

Like Zanzibar was (kind of) saying; Faith is a kind of proof because it's just as valid as scientific proof is. Scientific proof is done with gizmos that measure things and then give a number for us to plot onto a graph and interpret, or something like that, whereas faith relies on humans rather than human-made machines. Is there really a difference?

Kind of like when they used to believe that the fact that the sun moves around the sky was irrefutable proof that the sun orbited around us. They didn't really understand about gravity or how the sun's higher mass constitutes a higher gravitational pull, they just assumed based on what they knew at the time.
Which is all we can do, too.

There's obviously going to be things that we'll say are impossible that will be possible, just like there was ten years ago.

[LARAGORN]

You cant compare the two.
science fact, is continualy challenged, and when it is proven to be incorrect it is changed. Science is continualy evolving as the understanding of the things around us improves. It is not absolute, and never will be, if it was then we would be all knowing, if we are all knowing then we would be gods.

Faith or the R word, is absolute. There is no room for error, the rules and laws are set in a totalitarian way.

[swordsbane]

I can say that you're probably right if you're talking about the present world in general

The problem with science as 'fact', is that science is based on other science, which is based on other science, which could be fundamentally wrong to begin with.

Like Zanzibar was (kind of) saying; Faith is a kind of proof because it's just as valid as scientific proof is. Scientific proof is done with gizmos that measure things and then give a number for us to plot onto a graph and interpret, or something like that, whereas faith relies on humans rather than human-made machines. Is there really a difference?

Kind of like when they used to believe that the fact that the sun moves around the sky was irrefutable proof that the sun orbited around us. They didn't really understand about gravity or how the sun's higher mass constitutes a higher gravitational pull, they just assumed based on what they knew at the time.
Which is all we can do, too.

There's obviously going to be things that we'll say are impossible that will be possible, just like there was ten years ago.

Not true that faith is a proof as valid as science.  When you flick on a light switch, you are providing evidence of electricity.  Science is testable.  Everything accepted in science has an effect that is reproducable.  Faith does not have that reliabllity.  If it did have that reliability, then science would accept it and you wouldn't have to take it on faith anymore.  All the supernatural phenomena in the world that people swear by cannot be produced on command.  Psychics can't read peoples minds all the time, or even 60% of the time.  Remote viewers can't see their target more than 50% of the time and when they do some of the time they produce wrong images.  Ghosts do not always appear to people at their haunted places (and they are conspicuously absent when camera's are around) Prophets of the future are either frequently wrong or are so vauge that you can understand the prediction only after it came to pass.  Even if all these phenomena are real, they are so unreliable as to be impractical.  Things like this happen all the time in science.  Cold fusion is a perfect example.  Dozens of scientists have come out claiming to have discovered how to do it.  When their experiments are tried by others, they don't work, get wildly different results or turn out to be contaminated data.  Does it mean these people weren't on to something? no.  Does it mean that they should stop their research? no.  But it means we can't say cold fusion is possible.

Another example: There have been several attempts to prove the effect of prayer.  The closest they've gotten is that sometimes prayer SEEMs to have an effect, but the same experiment done again yields different results, mostly negative results.  Even if the first result was actually prayer healing sick people, it failed the second time under the same circumstances.  So either it was a coincidence, or there are variable outside our control that dramatically affect the outcome.  Does this mean that prayer has no effect? no.  It does mean that with the tools we have now, we can't prove that it does, and more importantly, because of those unknown, uncontrollable and apparently very influential factors acting on prayer, we can't rely on it either.  You are free to believe whatever you want and do whatever you want, but does it mean that we put prayer into medical textbooks?  No.

[Parallo]

From the history of people going to lourdes in their thousands per year six have thus far been cured without intervention attributed to medicene. In other words six out of thousands of thousands got better. Enough to convince people they'll get better? Of course! Look how many people go! Science is made up of theories. Everytime an experiment is carried out and the evidence 'proves' the theory that just means that it has survived. There is no way of knowing for certain the outcome each time of even the most mundane experiment but through previous testings of the same theory we have ammased evidence with which we can make an educated guess at the outcome. Thats what evidence is about. Now, once again, where is the evidence of spirits?

[bilbous]

If faith is proof then the heavens must be crowded with various gods as a lof people believe in a lot of different gods, Hindus believe in a whole bunch all by themselves. How do these supreme beings all get along? That would seem to be evidence that religion is fantasy. Now the human brain is a lot more complex than we can understand and it is possible there are sound scientific reasons for what passes as miracles that we just don't have enough information to comprehend. An example would be the placebo effect (w)

[Parallo]

As Dawkins put it "Your Atheistic about all the other gods. Some of us just like to take it one god further."

[Pizzasgood]

Now, once again, where is the evidence of spirits?

That's the point.  We don't have any yet, because we don't have the tools to detect them.  Lack of evidence doesn't make something ridiculous or non-existent.  There are many things that physics will describe in a thousand years that we currently have no evidence of.  The evidence for those things exists, we just aren't aware of it.  Just like the evidence for other solar systems existed in 50BC, but nobody was aware of it.

Nobody is saying spirits are scientific fact, just that they may become scientific fact in the future.  In the mean-time, why would something that science doesn't account for be ridiculous?  Improbable maybe.  But that doesn't make it ridiculous.  Only the people who refuse to accept that they don't know everything call such ideas ridiculous.  Do you really wish to be thrown in with those people?  They do make up the majority, but every so often they are shown to be complete fools.  Meanwhile, those who allow the possibility of different ideas only learn whether the idea is correct or not.  They never claimed it was true, only that it could be.  When they are wrong, they move on to another idea.  When they are right, they still move on to the next idea, or maybe pursue the original further.  But they don't feel ridicule, because they never behaved ridiculously.