Thread: Have Faith
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Old 12-20-2003, 11:56 PM   #13 (permalink)
Mantus
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So the topic has changed to whether faith and emotion can be used to prove that something exists. I will try to illustrate why this cannot be.

Faith is not about attaching an emotion to subjects and objects. Faith is defined as a belief or hope in the truth of an object or subject.

Also it seems that i have not made a strong enough case on why emotion cannot be used to define existence. We do not sense though emotion. We use emotion to process our sensory input. One must first perceive in order to feel, it cannot work the other way around. One cannot feel and then deduct the object that one is feeling without having an experience of that object first. Let me give an example: a person is pricked by a pin and feels pain (emotional pain). If all five senses were disabled and this person suddenly felt pain he can deduct that a pin pricked him. Yet if that person had no prior experience of being pricked by a pin and suddenly felt pain, he could not know the cause of it.

Further more, morality and freedom are titles of things that we all actually experience. Art and love are both subjective. They are words without a definition that every one can agree on. Yet when we call something art, the reality of the object is certain. When we call something love the reality of that act or feeling is certain as well.

Concepts, abstracts, and other such things are real yet they do not exist objectively. They do not have the property of a contingent existence. For example one cannot deny that the concept of a dragon exists. Yet one can state that no real dragons exist. Attaching emotion to the concept of the dragon will not make it exist. Having faith in the concept of a dragon cannot make it exist. Only if one sees some objective evidence of a dragon can one contend that it actually exists.

What would a farmer that has faith in a dragon act like? He might build a net above his fields so that the dragon could not prey on sheep. He might put metal plating on his roof to make it fire proof. Every week he might leave a calf at the foot of the mountain to assure that his children do not get eaten on their way from school. If one meets this farmer and sees all that he has done one might only think two things either he really knows that there is a dragon, or he is completely out of his mind. As you notice the existence of the dragon is not proven the only thing we are sure about is that the farmer has his faith and feels really strongly about it.
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