Thursday, July 06, 2006

An Atheist Harrassed

4 comments:

Hellbound Alleee said...

Why is belief good?

Yes, I thought he was a bit off when he said "It works for you." I don't exactly see how it "works."

ktylizbth said...

In my opinion, science isn't a faith system because it is a belief with questions. Faith which being religious allows no questions.

I could be wrong though.

Hellbound Alleee said...

I think that bigeblind is on our side.

I don't agree with you, Southside. You don't have to "believe" things. As far as groups go, you probably shouldn't "believe" in group tenets. You have tools at your disposal with which to evaluate group tenets. I don't see any reason we have to "believe" anything. I don't see a big difference between belief and faith.

Science is not a group that holds tenets. Science is defined either as a methodology or information. By its very definition, there is no need to place belief in it.

Shawn said...

Southside, you said "If we didn't put trust in the tenets of friction, inertia and gravity it would be impossible to ride a bicycle." and "Without trust in voltage and current no one would plug their computers in."

This goes a little too far into a bad semantic area, and could be attacked by religious people. Friction, inertia, and gravity would all work whether we put trust in them or not. A monkey or a bear can ride a bike, without having to wonder if gravity will still work.

People who plug in their computers do not need to trust voltage or current. They have a simple test ahead of them -- turning the computer on. Perhaps you could use the word "experience" rather than "trust," but even that is not necessary. A person with no experience can follow a list of instructions, not knowing about computers or electricity, or even knowing that something is supposed to happen when they follow the instructions, and the computer would still turn on if they followed everything properly.

Even when the computer does NOT turn on when it's plugged in, trust still does not come into the picture -- neither trust that the power company is still providing power, nor trust that the computer is not broken, for then we perform tests to rule things out (plugging other devices into the same socket to see if they work, for instance).

The point of all this is that no, we do not need to trust anything. The sane person does not stop and wonder if the laws of physics will suddenly change before taking an action. We simply do things the way they've always worked before, and only need stop and assess the situation if things perform in an anomalous way.

You seem to be saying that people would not take action unless they actively believed that things would continue to function as normal. But no. People take action without thinking about it all the time. Having stumbled barely awake to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and then had no memory of it in the morning, I can say that from experience.