From: Erik Aronesty (erik@zoneedit.com)
Date: Sat Feb 21 2004 - 17:13:27 MST
When someone has faith in, say, heaven and hell - low probability possibilities with little evidence - it is nearly all pure faith.
High percentages of faith-based futures are intended to inspire others in a new concept, in order to generate a social outcome, rather than to generate the actual future.
Since faith often leads to outcomes consistent with the inspiration, people learn to think that “faith alone” is enough to create reality.
This is the delusion of which you speak.
Cryonics and SETI are 99pct faith or therebouts. But it is that small possibility, grounded in a justifiable trust in technology, that keeps the industry going.
I believe that anything we ( a large percentage of society ) have faih in - if it is extrapolated logically from what we know - will lead us down a path of great breakthrought in health and life. This is not an irrational faith - it is based on my understanding of science and patterns progress.
Which is why I evangelize transhumanism and life extension.
-----Original Message-----
From: Neil Lucock <neil.lucock@zen.co.uk>
Date: 21 Feb 2004 17:01:58
To:virus@lucifer.com
Subject: Re: virus: Corollary to my prior definition of Trust and Faith
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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