Faith in mechanisms that would be outside our reach and understanding (as a matter of principle)

Hi Sal. Why then don’t you believe the findings of radiometric and other dating techniques that clearly indicate that the earth is billions, and not just thousands, of years old? We certainly can explain and understand these mechanisms and their results.

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I’d say that “fallacy” is the wrong term here. It would be better to use “mistake”.

It comes from a particular view of knowledge – that knowledge is justified true belief – with the additional view that “true” can only be applied to things that actually exist.

It I took that view of knowledge, I would have to say that mathematics is devoid of knowledge. As a mathematician, I’m not likely to agree with that.

I have never really understood that definition. I think that there is a Catch-22 in there - how can you ever establish that your ‘belief’ is ‘true’ without first having the ‘knowledge’ already? This seems to imply that we cannot ever have ‘knowledge’ in the sense of this definition (which actually is a view that I am sympathetic towards).

‘Knowledge is justified belief’ sounds more reasonable to me, and then we could distinguish different types of knowledge such as empirical knowledge (both shared and individual) and subjective knowledge, all depending on the type of justification we invoke.

No it wouldn’t be proper to say that you have faith in a person’s ability to do a project. It would be proper to say that you have a certain expectation of how that person will do a project based on knowledge about the person, his capabilities, and his past performance.

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It never made sense to me, either. I tend to think of knowledge in terms of abilities. The knowledge of a plumber is not in his ability to make eloquent speeches about pipes; it is in his ability to fix the pipes.

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Religious beliefs are devoid of knowledge. That why they are called beliefs and one must have faith in those beliefs because there is no knowledge nor evidence of their truthfulness.

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This not true it is simply an argument form ignorance.

The emergence of life on this planet violates normative chemical and physical expectation substantially enough that unprovable, untestable, unknowable, undefinable, unobservable multiverses are appealed to. How far outside of expectation must an event be before we call it a miracle?

If one says,

there will never be anything so far outside of expectation of accepted laws of physics and chemistry that I’ll call it a miracle or intelligent design.

Then fine, just say so, don’t pretend we’re actually on our way to solving these problems or that the nested-hierarchy of life is actually an argument for naturalism from physics and chemistry, it’s not.

It is not an argument from ignorance. You are making an argument that you have special knowledge of the truth. You are making an Appeal to Authority logical fallacy.

You still don’t know what this means I see.

To have a null hypothesis that you can then reject with good evidence, you have to actually have a … null hypothesis. Something that the null hypothesis says should be the case, which can be falsified with observation. In it’s basic logical form null hypothesis testing works like this: The null hypothesis says X should be the case, but we collected some data and found instead that Y was the case(for example).

So Bill, please inform me, what is the prediction of the null hypothesis that “This biological entity X was designed by a designer”? Since X was designed, we should expect to find that… what?

And perhaps more importantly, how would having this null hypothesis aid research? *And research into what exactly? What insight would or could it lead to, and why, and how?

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We haven’t yet explored all possible natural pathways to the origin of life. For instance, the possibility of at least some of the building blocks coming from space is getting more and more attention as we are getting more and more data on what is out there on the planets, asteroids and comets. I think it is too early to give up the scientific work and say, ‘it was a miracle, we’re done here’.

True, but the only way to explore ALL natural pathways is to be God. Each person, has their threshhold of how much FAITH they can put in some supposed natural pathway as an explanation.

Conversely, each person has there threshhold of how big and what kind of miracle they would need to believe in God.

I asked Tracie Harris, of Atheist Experience fame, if she had been hypothetically like the blind beggar like that described in John 11 who was healed by Jesus. The blind beggar didn’t have the luxury of exploring natural explanations to everything. He was blind, was reduced to begging and hoping for food and sustenance from strangers he could not see. Jesus comes along and heals him. I told Tracie, if I were that blind man, and Jesus healed me, that I would follow Jesus the rest of my life. I asked if she would do the same, she said, “no” and gave her reasons.

To each their own.

So is it faith to believe that storms are caused by natural processes?

We do have the opportunity to look for natural pathways. Why should we blind ourselves?

Why is simply accepting that we currently don’t yet have an explanation not an option? Do we really need to come down on one side or the other at this time? I’m quite happy to say that it is an unresolved question, without claiming that we surely will figure it out one day. We may, or we may not. So what?

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I think the point of the multiverse from an anthropic perspective, is that under natural law in this particular universe, the emergence of life does not violate the chemical and physical expectations.

Until more empirical evidence emerges in favor of the multiverse, personally I hold with those physicists who deem it’s existance speculative.

Perhaps your expectations are too limiting.

That’s an example of “God of the gaps” thinking.

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Interesting claim.

Faith is not pretending to know the unknowable. It’s more like trust.

However you are correct that our faith in something doesn’t make it true or false. We can faith in both true and false things. We can lack faith in both true and false things too.

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In context I don’t see what is objectionable about this statement.

Given the topic I think we have to accept it is a valid feeling about faith and knowledge. You don’t have to like it - it’s Sal’s way of thinking about it, not yours.