Angel believes
Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 6:32 am
I was asked to summarize my position about faith.
This thread is open to comments by anybody and I will try to reply to the comments for better rendering my position. Honestly I don't think a real discussion would be appropriate about this issue. As I will say I think faith is a matter of personal relation with God and I am not interested in scrutinizing it with anybody on board. In any event this may help following/interpreting other threads and that is why I accepted to write this.
The first point I want to touch is the relation between faith and reason.
I believe in God. I believe God is a spiritual entity. As any other spiritual entity I know it is not physical.
By definition of "physical" this means that it cannot interact physically with physical entities.
It may sound heretical, though that is what I think: anything interacting with physical world is "within" physical world. Hence considering God separate from the physical world is the only way out I can imagine, unless you want to equal it to a brick (which by the way is as heretical as my position, I believe).
Physics has its own standards on what is the meaning of "exist", "evidence" and "proof".
These standards are not at all adequate for spiritual entities. One needs to produce different definitions on what means that a spiritual entity "exists" otherwise one is in big troubles to provide evidences that God exists at all.
I accept the scientific definitions of the terms above.
Something exists if is observable (which does not mean it can be seen. Antí¬ything we know about the physical world comes to us as a MEDIATED knowledge. We cannot see the sun. We feel the actions of solar photons on our eyes and we infer the sun as the source of these photons. The physical knowledge is obtained by analyzing the actiion of something on a physical object).
If God acted on physical objects it would be fundamentally as a brick, we could know its nature as we know the nature of a brick (no more no less), there would be universal agreement on its existence and nature. Hence there would be no heresies, no different religions, no need of esegesis.
Another important point to be clarified is the notion of scientific knowledge/ truth. I had the strong impression by discussing on this board that many believes that sciences provides (or should provide) absolute truths, absolute factual description of the real world.
"Scientific evidences" are never proofs in the mathematical sense. Science does not provide us with absolute truths. There is no scientific result which can be accepted as ultimate. Most of scientific "facts" are known to be not fundamental or false. Just to mention some of them: gravitational theory, evolution, climate models, ...
One cannot reason about science embracing a all/nothing truth notion.
The only possibility is to consider science as providing evidences weighting the results and the theories. Any scientific result must be weighted against evidences to check how much reliable it is, 'cos strictkly speaking we cannot be sure that tomorrow the sun will rise.
On the other hand we live in ignorance, though not in absolute ignorance. In the last 400 years or so the improve enourmously our knowledge about the world. We know what to expect in a fantastic class of physical/biological/chemical situation. Our ability to forecast the output of experiments is something which cannot be confuted. Despite each single piece of truth is relative, improvable, sometimes known to be aproximate or in contradictions with other science branches
Just to be clear I believe scientific object as a whole is abolute. It is objectively in growth and progress. It cannot be reduced to a sociological/economical enterprise.
Now let me go back to the relation between spiritual and physical world.
There is no physical evidence of any spritual entity. By definition I would say. The spiritual world is not the physical world, it is not the part of the physical world we still don't know. If it were we would be at risk at any time to discover something which contradicts our God.
Historically speaking, there are plenty of examples. There are hundreds of physical notions which when they were discovered were considered to undermine religion's dogmas (eliocentrism, evolution, round Earth, the first men climbing Olympus Mount, etc.).
Today we accepted them and we consider them compatible with faith, though we HAVE TO BE AWARE that that is because we adapted our faith to them. In the beginning people was burn in the public square because they were considered heritics.
Accepting the scientific sense of "exists" and "truth" one is forced to use other words in the spiritual world, because it is clear that physically speaking spiritual entities do not exist.
Let us discuss soul and it is survival to death. If one considers the sould as a physical entity it is more than obvious that tehre is absolutely no evidence that it exists at all. The only clue of its existence is our "feelings". Unfortunately we are not able to prove that our "feelings" are a reliable source of scientific evidences. That is simply not as science works.
Of course there are antropological evidences showing that any human socienty, also independently believe is some sort of life after death. We have to accept that this notion of a soul after death is encoded in our mind. It can be there by design of evolution but there are convincing evidences that it is there.
On the other hand physically speaking we have no evidences of something which is encoded in a physical structure (our brain) but it is independent of the physical realization. Less that ever, we have no evidence of any structure which is not physically impemented. Which means that unsually when the physical support is corruted the structure is lost.
Hence one can choose either to reject physics and to consider spiritual reality deeper and more fundamental than the physical one or to consider the spiritual world separated from the physical one. In both cases (though for different reasons) there is no reason to look for physical evidences supporting the physical existence of a spiritual object.
I see a continuous trend of withdrowing from faith positions which previously were considered fundamental under the urging of new scientific evidences. I believe it would be better both for science and religion to face the problem once for all and accept that religion does not teach us anything about physical world. My personal way to this is to accept religion does not need to be rational, does not need to be physical or other, though I am aware that there could be other options as reasonable as mine.
I believe that the existing as a spiritual entity means to exists within human mind, being encoded in the human mind structure. As such the spiritual world is separeted from the physical one and asking if God can create a specimens is like investigating how much heat dissipates Santa Claus during his Christmas trip.
I am aware that most peiople on the board will not agree with this position but honestly that is not why I am on board. I am here to discuss evidences of God from science, if any.
This thread is open to comments by anybody and I will try to reply to the comments for better rendering my position. Honestly I don't think a real discussion would be appropriate about this issue. As I will say I think faith is a matter of personal relation with God and I am not interested in scrutinizing it with anybody on board. In any event this may help following/interpreting other threads and that is why I accepted to write this.
The first point I want to touch is the relation between faith and reason.
I believe in God. I believe God is a spiritual entity. As any other spiritual entity I know it is not physical.
By definition of "physical" this means that it cannot interact physically with physical entities.
It may sound heretical, though that is what I think: anything interacting with physical world is "within" physical world. Hence considering God separate from the physical world is the only way out I can imagine, unless you want to equal it to a brick (which by the way is as heretical as my position, I believe).
Physics has its own standards on what is the meaning of "exist", "evidence" and "proof".
These standards are not at all adequate for spiritual entities. One needs to produce different definitions on what means that a spiritual entity "exists" otherwise one is in big troubles to provide evidences that God exists at all.
I accept the scientific definitions of the terms above.
Something exists if is observable (which does not mean it can be seen. Antí¬ything we know about the physical world comes to us as a MEDIATED knowledge. We cannot see the sun. We feel the actions of solar photons on our eyes and we infer the sun as the source of these photons. The physical knowledge is obtained by analyzing the actiion of something on a physical object).
If God acted on physical objects it would be fundamentally as a brick, we could know its nature as we know the nature of a brick (no more no less), there would be universal agreement on its existence and nature. Hence there would be no heresies, no different religions, no need of esegesis.
Another important point to be clarified is the notion of scientific knowledge/ truth. I had the strong impression by discussing on this board that many believes that sciences provides (or should provide) absolute truths, absolute factual description of the real world.
"Scientific evidences" are never proofs in the mathematical sense. Science does not provide us with absolute truths. There is no scientific result which can be accepted as ultimate. Most of scientific "facts" are known to be not fundamental or false. Just to mention some of them: gravitational theory, evolution, climate models, ...
One cannot reason about science embracing a all/nothing truth notion.
The only possibility is to consider science as providing evidences weighting the results and the theories. Any scientific result must be weighted against evidences to check how much reliable it is, 'cos strictkly speaking we cannot be sure that tomorrow the sun will rise.
On the other hand we live in ignorance, though not in absolute ignorance. In the last 400 years or so the improve enourmously our knowledge about the world. We know what to expect in a fantastic class of physical/biological/chemical situation. Our ability to forecast the output of experiments is something which cannot be confuted. Despite each single piece of truth is relative, improvable, sometimes known to be aproximate or in contradictions with other science branches
Just to be clear I believe scientific object as a whole is abolute. It is objectively in growth and progress. It cannot be reduced to a sociological/economical enterprise.
Now let me go back to the relation between spiritual and physical world.
There is no physical evidence of any spritual entity. By definition I would say. The spiritual world is not the physical world, it is not the part of the physical world we still don't know. If it were we would be at risk at any time to discover something which contradicts our God.
Historically speaking, there are plenty of examples. There are hundreds of physical notions which when they were discovered were considered to undermine religion's dogmas (eliocentrism, evolution, round Earth, the first men climbing Olympus Mount, etc.).
Today we accepted them and we consider them compatible with faith, though we HAVE TO BE AWARE that that is because we adapted our faith to them. In the beginning people was burn in the public square because they were considered heritics.
Accepting the scientific sense of "exists" and "truth" one is forced to use other words in the spiritual world, because it is clear that physically speaking spiritual entities do not exist.
Let us discuss soul and it is survival to death. If one considers the sould as a physical entity it is more than obvious that tehre is absolutely no evidence that it exists at all. The only clue of its existence is our "feelings". Unfortunately we are not able to prove that our "feelings" are a reliable source of scientific evidences. That is simply not as science works.
Of course there are antropological evidences showing that any human socienty, also independently believe is some sort of life after death. We have to accept that this notion of a soul after death is encoded in our mind. It can be there by design of evolution but there are convincing evidences that it is there.
On the other hand physically speaking we have no evidences of something which is encoded in a physical structure (our brain) but it is independent of the physical realization. Less that ever, we have no evidence of any structure which is not physically impemented. Which means that unsually when the physical support is corruted the structure is lost.
Hence one can choose either to reject physics and to consider spiritual reality deeper and more fundamental than the physical one or to consider the spiritual world separated from the physical one. In both cases (though for different reasons) there is no reason to look for physical evidences supporting the physical existence of a spiritual object.
I see a continuous trend of withdrowing from faith positions which previously were considered fundamental under the urging of new scientific evidences. I believe it would be better both for science and religion to face the problem once for all and accept that religion does not teach us anything about physical world. My personal way to this is to accept religion does not need to be rational, does not need to be physical or other, though I am aware that there could be other options as reasonable as mine.
I believe that the existing as a spiritual entity means to exists within human mind, being encoded in the human mind structure. As such the spiritual world is separeted from the physical one and asking if God can create a specimens is like investigating how much heat dissipates Santa Claus during his Christmas trip.
I am aware that most peiople on the board will not agree with this position but honestly that is not why I am on board. I am here to discuss evidences of God from science, if any.
