A little help from all the different people out there please

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@The great Snook
There's this one problem about your religion... what about masochists? You know how they treat themselves

I belive faith is all about choosing. You choose a faith that is most suitable for you instead of sticking to something you do not like and is contrary to your beliefs. Also about people unable to decide what they see... I think it's just the opposite. People constantly see what they want to see and what they think they'll see. IMO anyway.

 

As I was rereading this thread I thought about this again:

Logic doesnt need proving, it can't be proven, logic is the way we think, it even guides faith.

There are three logic rules, which are undeniable, you take them for granted, because you can't get around them, and because you can't get around them, you don't need faith:

1. The law of the Excluded Middle, a statement is either true or false.
2. The law of Contradiction, a statement cannot be simultaneously true and false.
3. A denial of a true statement is false, and the denial of a false statement is true.

 

Isn't "take them for granted" really synonymous with "take them on faith"?

'Cept much of post-modernism and Nietzschean thought would challenge these three. Not even Descartes would have been bold enough to assume those three laws, since theoretically a mischevious god could design a universe where those three are only sometimes true. Nietzsche, for example, once theorized that maybe truth is feminine - a mushy, gossipy mess that mingles mutual contradictions. The only reason we pretend those three rules are true, Nietzsche postulated, was because our patriarchal, man-exalting society had elevated logic to a form of combat - one proposition defeats another, leaving no survivor in the path of brutal logic. Maybe we only take these three rules for granted because we're all subconscious sexists, slaves of the dead white males of ancient Greece.

My point is not to dilute anyone's faith in logic (else you risk going insane), but to point out that taking logic for granted (I mean, "on faith") is a leap unto itself - even if we hardly recognize how much of a leap it is.

 

But if logic needs faith, then why does faith need logic? Isn't that circular reasoning, after all isn't everything based on circular reasoning, I think therefor I am, I am therefor I think?

I mean, can a God exist and not exist at the same time? Can God make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it anymore? Would we have faith in something that we consciously hold false?

 

It is circular reasoning. But that's not necessarily a bad thing - what matters is how broad your circle is, and how much of reality it encompasses. There's nothing - not even Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am" - that can be absolutely, rock-hard, KNOWN without some element of faith. How, for instance, can you KNOW that you are truly thinking? That requires a definition of thought - and that definition is subsequent to, and dependent upon, the thinking process. And how can we know what it means to truly BE? Really, all Descartes does is call his perception process "thinking" and "being" and then naively assumes that his perceptions are foundationally accurate. That ain't necessarily so - look at those with mental illness, whose thoughts betray them; or rocks, which "are" without requiring thought.

So in the end, you have to take your own senses and mental state on faith. And we know that both our senses and thoughts deceive us. So it takes a huge leap of faith to trust in such a shaky foundation.

Yet, we make that leap of faith every moment of the day. And we have to - if we didn't, we'd go insane. So we trust that we really are, that we truly sense and think, and that the reality we perceive really is reality - and magically, once those presuppositions are accepted, suddenly life makes sense.

It's not that much more of a leap to assume that the world was created by a Person, has a purpose, contains beauty, is populated by conscious beings, and is contaminated by evil. (Especially since in our everyday life, people consciously and intentionally create things for both beauty and evil.) These all require faith, but the world doesn't make much sense without those assumptions. Or, rather, the leap of faith is longer when trying to explain the world using different assumptions.

 

Assuming that, takes a leap too

[ June 16, 2004, 16:35: Message edited by: Morgoth ]