I’ve been reading this thread, and find the discussion thus far to be very interesting. I thought I’d throw in my two cents...
I personally am an Episcopalian. What I believe, summed up succinctly, is to be found in the Nicene Creed.
Regarding Flying Spaghetti Monsters, Tooth Fairies, faith, scientism, and reason:
Religion (specifically, Christianity) is not faith-based, in that it is not believing something despite having every evidence to the contrary. It is faith-based in the sense that it is believing something towards which the evidence points without having conclusive proof. There is plenty of evidence for God - the various versions of the Cosmological arguments, Plantinga’s Ontological argument, the Teleological argument, the moral argument - but these evidences don’t establish God with 100% certainty. I think of faith in my religion as similar to faith in your wife... do you know 100% that she loves you, is not cheating on you, etc.? No, of course not - there is always some doubt. However, past evidence of her loving you, not cheating on you, etc., leads you to place your faith in her. That is exactly like my faith in God, based upon the above apologetical arguments, and the personal witness in my life of the Holy Spirit.
The reason belief in God is different from belief in FSM, tooth fairy, etc., is that the absence of evidence is only evidence of absence should we expect to find more evidence granting the conditional. In the absence of evidence, we can deny the existence of something only if we should expect to possess evidence sufficient to know that exists but in fact lack it. This link provides further explanation of this: (http://www.reasonablefaith.org/is-god-imaginary)
Many people here have adopted the empiricist / scientist position, and say, essentially, that we must have scientific (i.e., provable and repeatable in a laboratory) evidence backing a proposition in order to judge that proposition to be true. But surely this is wrong-headed: the proposition cannot even support itself, because it is not provable in a laboratory! Indeed, you would have to give up all kinds of commonly held beliefs were you to follow this mode of thinking: belief in the reality of the past; belief in the reality of other people; belief that you are not just a brain in a vat being controlled by mad scientists to have sensory experiences... In other words, not only is the scientist position self-refuting, but it also leads much of our everyday experience to be abandoned.
I personally am an Episcopalian. What I believe, summed up succinctly, is to be found in the Nicene Creed.
Regarding Flying Spaghetti Monsters, Tooth Fairies, faith, scientism, and reason:
Religion (specifically, Christianity) is not faith-based, in that it is not believing something despite having every evidence to the contrary. It is faith-based in the sense that it is believing something towards which the evidence points without having conclusive proof. There is plenty of evidence for God - the various versions of the Cosmological arguments, Plantinga’s Ontological argument, the Teleological argument, the moral argument - but these evidences don’t establish God with 100% certainty. I think of faith in my religion as similar to faith in your wife... do you know 100% that she loves you, is not cheating on you, etc.? No, of course not - there is always some doubt. However, past evidence of her loving you, not cheating on you, etc., leads you to place your faith in her. That is exactly like my faith in God, based upon the above apologetical arguments, and the personal witness in my life of the Holy Spirit.
The reason belief in God is different from belief in FSM, tooth fairy, etc., is that the absence of evidence is only evidence of absence should we expect to find more evidence granting the conditional. In the absence of evidence, we can deny the existence of something only if we should expect to possess evidence sufficient to know that exists but in fact lack it. This link provides further explanation of this: (http://www.reasonablefaith.org/is-god-imaginary)
Many people here have adopted the empiricist / scientist position, and say, essentially, that we must have scientific (i.e., provable and repeatable in a laboratory) evidence backing a proposition in order to judge that proposition to be true. But surely this is wrong-headed: the proposition cannot even support itself, because it is not provable in a laboratory! Indeed, you would have to give up all kinds of commonly held beliefs were you to follow this mode of thinking: belief in the reality of the past; belief in the reality of other people; belief that you are not just a brain in a vat being controlled by mad scientists to have sensory experiences... In other words, not only is the scientist position self-refuting, but it also leads much of our everyday experience to be abandoned.
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