Faith Balanced By Reason

I recently ran into someone using that phrase in a discussion I was involved in. In about half a second this jumped into my brain:



Because the truth is there is no such thing as "balancing" faith with reason, at least not the kind of "faith" we are talking about in the context of religion which is where this phrase is inevitably utilized. Faith is UNreason. Faith is what is resorted to when you realize reason isn't going to support you believing in that thing you really want to believe in. But people don't want to look at it that way, so they instead try to make this silly argument that if they mix in enough reason over here then that it somehow mysteriously offsets the areas where they're not being reasonable over there.

Sorry folks, doesn't work that way.

People who just aren't helping.

This will require a little background...

A few weeks ago while I was engaging in some discussion about evolution in a comments section somewhere I encountered a poster who goes by the name of "Human Ape" who is... well, very angry about some things. That's something I can empathize with, since I happen to get pretty angry about a lot of the same things he does.

I didn't really have much interaction with him but apparently he clicked through the links to my blog, read some stuff here, and posted a comment in "The Creationist Mindset" post stating, and I quote:

"Lance is a typical creationist. Too stupid to understand anything. I admire the patience you have with idiots."

I replied, and moved on. Then the other day while I was wandering through the blogosphere I came across this post on his blog.

First of all, asshole Christians, intelligent design creationism and Bible creationism are the exact same things, and if you deny this obvious fact you're a fucking liar.


If you retards call magic "design" it's still magic. Understand Christian assholes? If not you can fuck off.


...

...and, well, it continued on.

Recognizing the author as the same person who just three weeks ago was admiring my "patience with idiots" I left a comment suggesting that getting that worked up about the issue was counter-productive and he really might want to try taking a deep breath and counting to 10 before posting these things. Which led to this, and this.

Apparently in three weeks Human Ape's position on the possession of patience with dealing with creationists had gone from "I admire that" to "that makes you responsible for terrorism".

That's quite the impressive turnaround in his worldview in less than a month.

Now the problem I have here isn't with some angry person on the internet calling me names. It's with some angry person on the internet running around everywhere making atheists look like people with Tourette syndrome and serious anger management issues. I'm engaged in an effort to employ reason and logic to bring undertanding of certain complex scientific realities to people who don't understand them and don't believe in them... and I really don't need my position being associated with conduct like this. It doesn't exactly make my task easier. I can understand the occasional outburst, dealing with this particular debate can ger *really* incredibly frustrating... but when you start declaring that the only two sides of the issue are that you're either screaming profanity at creationists or you're a terrorist sympathizer we're a little beyond that.

Now apparently making this point to this particular person is not really an option that is available consideering the response it generated the first time I tried it... but for anyone else out there feeling frustrated when you discuss evolution or religion with fundamentalists and feeling the urge to scream obscenities at them... could you please fight it? For me?

I'll give you a cookie...

"Faith"

Well, I got started with the content creation then kind of slacked off for a while. To try and kick start things again I've hunted down some previous writings of mine from various discussion forums and will be putting them up here.

This one is on a subject that just recently came up again in another conversation I was having... which caused me to remember this post. I wrote this about two and a half years ago... my views on the subject are unchanged since then.

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This is a topic I've wanted to address in greater detail for some time now. Let's start with a few examples of what "faith" is, as there are many different kinds.


1. "Faith" as a description of confidence in extremely reliable data. For example, I have faith the sun will rise tomorrow morning. The reason I have faith in this is because I have massive amounts of data available to me that inform me that this will occur barring an incredibly unlikely occurrence... like the sun exploding overnight or the space fairies halting the Earth's rotation. The sun has risen all 11,000+ days of my life to date, right on schedule, and I have no reason to suspect that pattern will be disrupted in the next 14 hours or so.

2. "Faith" as a description of well earned trust. For example, you can have faith that a good friend or close acquaintance will deal honestly and fairly with you. This is based on your experience of and familiarity with this person and their personality and behavior. Your judgment of their character. Really, you are expressing confidence in your own ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of another person when you encounter and interact with them.

3. "Faith" as an expresssion of loyalty and commitment. Usually to an individual or ideal which you have good reason to hold as worthy of support, as in 'keeping the faith'. You have evaluated and judged this person or principle and have come to the conclusion that it is worthy of your loyalty and efforts to advance it, and faithfully stand by it.

4. "Faith" as a description of an insistence on believing in something without regard for or even in direct opposition to any related information or evidence. For example, to cite some extreme cases, you can have faith that there is a spaceship carrying Jesus riding along and hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet and if you commit suicide while it passes your soul will float up to zoom around with Jesus in outer space. Or, you can have faith that food and water are unnecessary for your survival, and humans can survive by being photosynthetic or something. People clinging to this type of faith can usually be identified by statements such as "It doesn't matter what you say you can't change my mind, I hold my position through faith and my faith is unshakable!"

"Agnostic"... The Most Abused Word In The English Language

Well, probably. I don't have hard data or anything but if it's not number one it has to be in the top five.

If I were to tell you, the reader, that I was an agnostic I would put good money down that you would think I had just told you I was something that was somehow...somewhere... between an atheist and a theist. Because that is how everyone uses the word, despite the fact that that is ridiculous and nonsensical.

Here is how the words "atheist", "agnostic" and "theist" actually properly relate to each other:

		Do you believe it is possible to KNOW if a diety exists?
		YES	NO
Do you BELIEVE a diety exists?	YES	1	2
	NO	3	4

Now, depending on your answers to those two questions you are going to fall in one of those four boxes. And this is what you are as a result:

1: You are a theist.
2: You are a theist AND an agnostic.
3: You are an atheist.
4. You are an atheist AND an agnostic.

There... simple, right? And yet nobody gets this correct. It's incredibly annoying.