FMF posted: "Belief in belief is the notion that religious belief has positive benefits and should be fostered or tolerated, without the need to subscribe to the belief in question. In western societies this is commonly expressed in cases where people feel that religious belief brings comfort and moral guidance. ~ rationalwiki
What are the strengths and weaknesses of this - to your way of thinking - from a spiritual, religious, or ideological point of view."
Even though I'm a scientist and an atheist, I always thought religion held value for people, on balance. Religion is humanity's earliest self-help book, earliest counseling session, earliest motivational speaker.
But for important questions like, say, the Purpose of Life, I always viewed "belief" as a cop-out or short-cut. Surely, I would say to myself, important questions cannot be settled with something as non-rigorous as "belief."
So I've spent a lot of time trying to work out Life's Purpose in a logical way. Yes, I knew that Bertrand Russell had tried to derive mathematics from pure logic and failed. And that Kurt Godel later proved why it could not be done with his Incompleteness Theorem. I guess I just wasn't seeing it.
The day I realized that Science and Religion BOTH rest on Human Beliefs was actually quite a relief.
Ask 'Why?' enough times, and you eventually arrive at a place where you simply have to take something on faith. This is where you start. These are your axioms. Even Richard Dawkins takes axioms on faith. He can't prove them. We could argue with others about whether they have the right axioms or not - but unless an axiom contradicts an observable fact, there isn't much to assail it with.
What is more interesting is that, starting from remarkably different foundations, the most devout theist and the most hard-core atheist can build edifices that end in similar places.
That's amazing.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of this - to your way of thinking - from a spiritual, religious, or ideological point of view."
Even though I'm a scientist and an atheist, I always thought religion held value for people, on balance. Religion is humanity's earliest self-help book, earliest counseling session, earliest motivational speaker.
But for important questions like, say, the Purpose of Life, I always viewed "belief" as a cop-out or short-cut. Surely, I would say to myself, important questions cannot be settled with something as non-rigorous as "belief."
So I've spent a lot of time trying to work out Life's Purpose in a logical way. Yes, I knew that Bertrand Russell had tried to derive mathematics from pure logic and failed. And that Kurt Godel later proved why it could not be done with his Incompleteness Theorem. I guess I just wasn't seeing it.
The day I realized that Science and Religion BOTH rest on Human Beliefs was actually quite a relief.
Ask 'Why?' enough times, and you eventually arrive at a place where you simply have to take something on faith. This is where you start. These are your axioms. Even Richard Dawkins takes axioms on faith. He can't prove them. We could argue with others about whether they have the right axioms or not - but unless an axiom contradicts an observable fact, there isn't much to assail it with.
What is more interesting is that, starting from remarkably different foundations, the most devout theist and the most hard-core atheist can build edifices that end in similar places.
That's amazing.