Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm hoping, probably naively, that this won't turn into a bun fight.
So, I've not Googled the meaning of religious faith but I will just share some of my thoughts here.
There are a lot of religions in the world. They can't all be right, can they?
Surely if what a person of faith believes is true, that particular faith must be true for everyone?
After death we can't all be shooting off to different places, can we?
I haven't read about this but a friend of mine (autistic) has a special interest in faith and reads reams of books.
He is particularly interested in Shamanism and I find that quite fascinating.
I find ancient and 'Tribal' religions of great interest.
I'm agnostic.
However, I'm not sure which fence I sit on as all the major religions have something to offer but some of them have caused a lot of death and suffering too over the centuries.
My husband believes that the world was created by aliens. Is this a faith too, even if not a religious one?
People sometimes talk as though they know that their faith is true.
However, how can it be as the word 'faith' is explicitely saying it's a belief.
It can't be proven as what happens after death can't be known.
Also even if historical figures such as Jesus did live (and there is evidence that this is true) it's our interpretation of their signficance that is pertinent.
Hence the word 'faith'.
If you have a faith, please share why you believe if you care to.
Please also just share your thoughts on this.
Thanks.
I think that individual faith is somewhat reliant on the ability to compartmentalise the mind. I'm a scientist, and worked in 'genetic engineering', I am also a Darwinist and know enough cosmology to be aware of the stupendous vastness of space and time. I do not have a compartmentalised mind, so this scientific knowledge makes it essentially impossible for me to have any religious faith. However, I had a colleague who was, and is, a fundamentalist Christian, with a belief in the literal truth of the Bible. She therefore could not acknowledge any validity in evolution. On a daily basis she changed the genetic make up of bacteria, introducing foreign genes into them, that changed their characteristics (they would synthesise proteins derived from other organisms). Though the changeability/mutability of organisms was demonstrated to her every day, she refused to acknowledge that, even over the eons of time science recognised, that similar changes could occur outside the laboratory, in nature. Her mind was completely compartmentalised, so that anything external, however logically valid, that would tend to make her challenge her beliefs was rigorously kept out of that part of her mind in which her faith resides.
Martin said:On a daily basis she changed the genetic make up of bacteria, introducing foreign genes into them, that changed their characteristics (they would synthesise proteins derived from other organisms).
In fairness to her the argument for intelligent design is hardly weakened by the fact that as a scientist you are yourself designing new life.
Modifying existing life, which is what the combination of random mutation and natural selection, that is evolution, does.
Scientists have created very basic synthetic genomes, which they have placed in existing 'empty cells' to create a form of synthetic life. However, this is more like making your own Meccano parts from sheet steel and bolting them together, than creating life de novo.
The missing dimension in literalist faith is time. If you understand how long a billion years really is, then imagining that complex self-replicating chemical systems, which is what life is, could both arise and develop into myriads of forms is easy. If you have a literalist faith then you have to believe that the benevolent God, who created the buttercup, also created the tarantula hawk wasp that paralyses spiders, so that its offspring has living meat to eat and the onchocerciasis worms that cause blindness in children.
Yet there are lots of religious people who don't feel tied to a particular time scale who still believe in a creator. It should be obvious even to atheists that belief in a creator is more than a byproduct of a belief in life arising over a short time frame.
As a systems biologists let me asure you life is mechanistic. It is the metaphorical mechano parts. It's just that when you add enough parts the complexity makes things look a lot more flexible and unpredictable.