Mental Masturbation, or: I haven't Written a Proper Blog Post in Ages, Dammit!

I had a discussion a while ago, 3 September now that I think of it, with an interesting fellow. We started off on astronomy (mostly him calling me on my attempt to fake my stargazing-- I used to know where cassiopeia was, damnit!), but wound up quickly on faith. He was determined that science is as 'faith-based' as religion, and I was convinced that it isn't. Two hours later and we've both edged a bit toward the middle position, but still more or less polarized.

In the end, it came down to semantics. He considered that 'faith' meant simply believing something to be true that you have not directly experienced, based upon someone else's word. For me, having had a strongly religious upbringing, it had a very loaded definition that could be summed up briefly as: faith = willful ignorance. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with his stance; as a working scientist I know that most scientific work is done by first reading primary literature and determining whether the conclusions drawn from any particular investigation are valid. Someone else did the work, and I have to take it on 'faith' that if I were to repeat the work I would get similar results, within error.

But I don't call that faith.

Why does that matter, though? Simply put, humans have been trained over millenia to see the world through the lens of descriptive language, and while it is incredibly useful it can, like all tools, become limited and even hindering when edges are pushed. Even ignoring that every language has its own little biases and omissions, consider language as a whole. Language is, at its deepest roots, a shorthand for describing the world. The resulting information is compressed. When I say 'a rock', you can picture a rock, and it may look something like a rock that I pictured when I wrote that word. But it is but a label. Sure, I could have done a better job of describing it; given dimensions, density, composition, morphology, gross and fine physical descriptors, and the like. But each of those is still but a label; some compression of meaning is involved, and it is my opinion, my intuition, that it is a lossy compression.

Can I be described? Aspects of me can be described, but is that me? And if not, then what am I? How can I communicate that essence?

 

I totally disagree with you on "faith equalling willfull ignorance." Faith CAN be based upon an astutute hypothesis, as in having say 60% of an equation down pat and finding everything pointing towards that missing percentage. Whether you call it anything else, there is a definite order in the universe. The problem? Anthromorphism, imparting human qualities/attributes unto a deity: "HE has a white flowing beard and casts lightning bolts from his throne." Whether Thor, Jupiter or G-D, humans have this sadly ridiculous ingrained bias. Kind of like extra-terrestrial life. We assume two eyes, a mouth, et cetera.

Back to faith...again, like "extra-terrestrials;" We have no concrete proof that they exist. I'm not talking about whether any have ever been here, et cetera, merely, their existence anywhere in the universe. Seeing as how it would be statistically impossible for there not to be another planet anywhere that didn't have at least some form of life, no matter its intelligemce level. Yet we don't know this in concrete terms. We know life can exist in thermal jets in very extreme temps, in conditions scientists had always considered beyond the reaches of biological organisms. We know that Mars, at one point, was quite similar to Earth and that is merely a single planet relatively next door...yet we don't know this in concrete terms.

"Religion" is much the same dynamic. Not knowing in concrete terms is NOT "willfull ignorance." Religion is merely humankinds' ability to deal with the Creator on the Creator's level. We, with our ingrained athromorphic bias, are relegated to conceptualising the Creator as a "caring" (in human terms) and "compassionate" (again, in human terms) entity. Anyway, I don't wanna make this too long, just to say that faith CAN be examined entirely differently.

Why don't you agree that "faith" is akin to reading peer reviewed literature and assuming the same outcome? In a literal sense of course science isn't like that. One reads an article, ideally, with a deeply critical and skeptical stance. Of course, in reality, it is far different. In fact, that IS far different from my conceptualisation of "faith," but why do you see it differently from your own?

Language doesn't define us of course, it is entirely defined BY us.

 

dave, your definition/idea of faith is similar to richard dawkin's idea of faith

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

i find it interesting how words get their meanings. and how we define words as much as words define us. i don't really have time to expound on the idea right now. perhaps later on i shall.

 

rach - heh, I'm certainly not surprised to hear that we disagree on that point.

I'll run with your example of extraterrestrial life. Nobody within the scientific community is saying (to my knowledge at least) that there is extraterrestrial life. Rather, that it would be incredibly unlikely, given the size of the universe and likely abundance of planets that would support life that we would recognize, much less that which we may not. But nothing is said with certainty-- it is possible that we're alone, but it would be far less likely than if there were others out there.

Regarding the 'creator'-- and this is getting closer to the baggage that I have attached to the word 'faith'-- there is no physical proof whatsoever of its existence. Every datum within every rational, unbiased theory-- using the scientific rather than colloquial definition, by the way-- points to an ordered, self-consistent and fully autononmous universe that functions of its own accord. We may not know exactly how the universe began, but that means nothing-- if we simply stopped questioning whenever there was a gap in human knowledge, because 'goddidit', you and I wouldn't be speaking now. We'd be right where we were pre-renaissance. There will likely always be gaps, but they have been and will continue to be filled in through experimentation and theoretical work done by those trained in the application of the scientific method.

So, perhaps to clarify, from my biased standpoint 'faith' means a lack of curiosity and a willingness to not question what one is told. Faith is "because I told you so, that's why."

 

a_c: I'd love to hear your take on etymology and the interplay between language and experience!

:D

 

i've always considered myself to be agnostic, but i've been somewhat questioning of that lately (i even went to a buddhist meditation session last week). even if it might not be true, the statement that science is a faith is somewhat comforting to me.