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Morgan Dilemna - Take Two By: Aradia on 5/16/2000; 12:38 AM My friend Les sent me an email in regards to the Morgan Dilemna, and I thought I'd repost it here completely without permission. She's a PhD student in Neuroscience at University of Pennsylvania...but her time is infinitely valuable, since she has to make fruitflies glow in the dark. <SNIP> Anyway, visited VOR at your request, enjoyed some of the articles, especially the one about how science is not a "faith" issue. While I agree with his logic, he missed the point- science is a faith because those who follow it have faith that the universe works in such a manner that empirical evidence from repeatable experiments can actually be used to predict the future. We have faith that it works (mostly because it HAS worked so far). </SNIP> Comments?
RE: Morgan Dilemna - Take Two By: Mark Morgan on 5/16/2000; 1:18 AM As you know, I've heard this argument before. I think it makes faith meaningless to reduce it to "anything that we have to take as an axiom." At some ultimate level the scientific method and empirical methods are unprovable. But it seems to me that there is a vast gulf between faith in a virgin birth and faith that the sun will rise tomorrow! One is a religious statement, while one is a naturalistic statement. Lumping the two under "faith" renders the entire concept of faith way too trivial for my tastes. In this matter I agree with the Skeptic's Dictionary's discussion of faith. (Scroll down to the part about "naturalism." I'm more than a little undecided on my feelings about the beginning of that piece.) I mean, there is a substantive difference between "let's see if we can get the plants to breed purple flowers" and "Christ rose from the grave," isn't there?
RE: Morgan Dilemna - Take Two By: Aradia on 5/16/2000; 1:42 AM But the problem with breeding purple flowers and raising dead people is that you have faith with the former. You have seen the purple flowers before, and it can be done everyday. Raising people from the dead has never been done where it was recorded in nonreligious documents. However, if it was done regularly, you'd have faith in it, wouldn't you? Oh, why do I bother? This is one of the infamous no-win Morgan Debates.
Re: Morgan Dilemna - Take Two By: Mark Morgan on 5/16/2000; 10:16 AM In article <Conversant-6882@dns2.macrobyteresources.com> , Aradia <anon0002.Dreamzone-Redux@free-conversant.com> wrote: >But the problem with breeding purple flowers and raising dead people is >that you have faith with the former. You have seen the purple flowers >before, and it can be done everyday. Raising people from the dead has never >been done where it was recorded in nonreligious documents. However, if it >was done regularly, you'd have faith in it, wouldn't you? Actually, I say it's the other way around. If people rose from the dead all the time, faith wouldn't be necessary. What we're really talking about here is expanding the definition of "faith" to make it meaningless. If faith means anything that is ultimately unprovable, that broadens the meaning of "faith" to the point of not having the word at all. "Faith" becomes stripped of any ability for it to provide us with philosophical guidance or understanding. >Oh, why do I bother? This is one of the infamous no-win Morgan Debates. As you know, it's impossible to change my mind since I'm just lukewarm stubborn. (For those of you playing the home game, over on nitcentral a poster has told us that if we don't accept the evidence of the Bible there is not point in trying to convince us otherwise. He also told Aradia that she was just too lukewarm to change her mind. Huh? Lukewarm stubborn? I dunno, either. He needs to read a good article on how to make a logical argument. So do I, or more precisely re-read one. It's an easily lost skill.)
Re: Morgan Dilemna - Take Two By: Brian Carnell on 5/16/2000; 1:54 PM My friend Les sent me an email in regards to the Morgan Dilemna,This really gets to the heart of a lot of epistemological issues which are still hotly debated among philosophers I don't think your friend's argument makes a lot of sense though, since scientific "faith" is universal except in a minority of people with very serious physical or psychological defects, while religious "faith" assumes scientific "faith" and then adds an enormous layer of religious "faith" on top. I'm not quite sure what your friend means by "follow[ing]" a "faith that the universe works in such a manner that empirical evidence from repeatable experiments can actually be used to predict the future." That is a very bizarre way of putting it. I bet Seth gets up every morning and assumes that his Bible didn't turn into a red dragon overnight. I bet your friend regularly takes a drink of water or rides a bike assuming that the laws of physics do not wax and wane like phases of the moon. In fact, it is absurd to deny that the universe is orderly and follows patterns that can be tested empirically, since this is what every human being who has ever been alive has been doing since the second they were born -- forming hypotheses about the world and testing them empirically and formulating theories about how the world works. I do not, for example, feel the need to put my hand on a hot stove every time just to be *sure* that the universe is still functioning the same way it was when I was 7 and burned myself. Of course I could be wrong -- the next time I put my hand on a hot stove I might get the sensation of eating chocolate instead of burning my hands, but I don't know of anybody who seriously entertains that as a possibility (aside from insane people or people with brain defects). To deny empiricism is to abandon living -- if you are alive today you are a de facto empiricist, even if you are very religious. On the other hand, the valuing of religious faith seems to be the assertion
that we can have *reliable knowledge* that is not gained empirically. Clearly
even the most atheistic of persons has knowledge (depending on how you
define the term) that is not empirical, but atheists tend to assert such
information is not reliable for anything except as an expression of personal
states. To me, for example, I think statements like "I have faith that
God exists" have the same truth value of statements such as "That woman
is very pretty" or "That man is very handsome". It is an interesting measure
of the internal statement of the person saying the sentence, but it doesn't
really add anything to the store of objective knowledge (outside perhaps
of sociologically-minded individuals interested in cataloging such things).
Re: Morgan Dilemna - Take Two By: Mark Morgan on 5/16/2000; 3:52 PM I still think the confusion is the result of making "faith" mean "axiom." (An axiom, in mathematics and philosophy, is an assumption you make as an unprovable basis.) On some fundamental level, empiricism is unprovable, because really you can't say "I have experience that empirical methods are valid" because at its heart empiricism is experience. It's a circular argument. But that only means that we accept evidence-based reasoning as an axiom. It certainly strips "faith" of any value as a concept if it's just a synonym of "axiom."
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