From: Neil Lucock (neil.lucock@zen.co.uk)
Date: Sat Feb 21 2004 - 10:01:58 MST
On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 12:52, Erik Aronesty wrote:
> Faith is only faith in situations when something isn't known.
Hi,
you make an interesting point. English uses one word when we ought to
have several to exactly define what we mean.
Faith, when it refers to religions, might be described as "irrational
belief in a god or supernatural process despite a lack of verifiable
evidence".
We might also use the word to mean "certainty of belief" in a scientific
sense, such as faith that the sun will apprear in the East the next
morning. This might be called a justifiable faith.
We also have a meaning of "reliable" as in faithful.
All of these definitions overlap to some extent, the problem is that
persons using the word in a religious sense use it to mean a justifiable
faith, without meeting the standard of proof required. IMHO it's nothing
more than inaccurate thinking caused by an inability to reason
correctly.
>Assuming God is all knowing, he cannot have faith.
Is it logically impossible for God to have faith in an improbable event
occuring? :-)
The idea of omniscience doesn't work.If God knows what you are going to
do and why you are going to do it, what is the point of running Hell?
If there is omniscience, then the amount of information gathered, per
nano-second, would be rather large (all those sub-atomic particles and
what they are doing is information too). God's memory would need to be
many times larger than the number of particles in the universe in order
to contain any useful information about the past, present and furure
states of the universe. How is the information collected? How is it
stored, and where? Finding out about a particle's state alters it
(Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle). God must be able to interact with
matter in order to monitor it, but must have a selective invisibility so
that we can't detect him.
To be honest, you could spend all day writing about the qualities
needed, but you would be making an argument with so many exceptions to
established fact that God ends up with no properties at all. A thing
without properties does not exist (in this universe).You can justify the
existance of Elves or UFOs with the same reasoning, but you don't
actually get any useful information out in the end.
regards,
Neil
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