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Originally Posted by KnifeMissile
Indeed... However, if your contention is that we have done so here, I would disagree. We had a basic understanding of the terms and it was good enough to facilitate communication. Now that we are scritinizing our ideas through our words, we must now be more specific in our words' meanings...
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Precisely. This is exactly my contention. I have found that in these discussions, the terms, although basically understood, do not suffice. IF we are to discuss God, we must invoke the term 'faith', as there is no scientific proof to substantiate the idea. Exactly why the basic understanding that we are employing must therefore be extended to apply to atheism. There is no proof, either, that there is no God.
It seems to be common in the basic undestanding of the term faith, that it is only applied to theism, and not to atheism, even though the two perspectives do not require proof.
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Originally Posted by KnifeMissile
Okay, this clears things up quite a bit. You'll note that this differs from other people's use of that word in this thread but that's okay. As long as I know who is using what word in what way, I can keep track of things...
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Kind of why I am insisting on a common definition. I want to apply the term faith equally to the two ideas, which better illustrates why I can argue to Charlatan that even though he is an Atheist, he employs the same degree of faith as a believer in God.
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Originally Posted by KnifeMissile
By the way, by definition, science doesn't have theorems, as such. They're pretty much the realm of mathematics only and for good philosophical reasons that I can explain but would probably be better placed in Tilted Knowledge...
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Oops, my mistake. Right you are, the term I meant to use was Theory, which is a scientific explanation or model, which must be disproved to be discarded. - Actually, as i write this, I am thinking that faith in God or no God can be easily incorporated into the scientific method as a Null Hypothesis.. Hmmmmm....
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Originally Posted by KnifeMissile
Well, it is true that there are no scientific experiments to show that there is no God. The reason for that is because God is not a scientific theory. There are no scientific experiments to show that there is no Flying Spaghetti Monster but I'd be surprised if you think that such a belief is reasonable or that such non-belief would constitute "faith." |
No i do not claim that non-belief is faith. I merely posit that acceptance of the existance of ANYTHING (God, absence of God, and spaghetti monsters) without scientific proof, requires faith. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just that within the scientific framework, faith has no definition.
And to summarize,
1) belief in God, requires faith. There is no requirement to prove that God exists.
2) belief in no God also requires faith. There is no requirement to prove that God does not exist.