-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Brodie <richard@brodietech.com>
Date: Sunday, March 07, 1999 7:51 PM
><<What if for every situation where faith is useful, it can be shown that
>you
>would be at least as well off using reason and sometimes better off?
>Wouldn't that be an excellent reason to abandon faith? Of course it would
>take a reasonable person to understand the merit of this argument and
>therein lies the dilemma :-)>>
>
>OK, I'm waiting for your proof. The trouble is, no such proof is possible.
Say you hold a belief, X, in faith. It is either useful or not. If it is useful, then explaining how and why it is useful is identical to arriving at the same belief X through reasoning. If it is not useful, then no explanation or line of reasoning will show that it is. QED.
David