| WereKitten said: You're just playing with words, here, but let's get to the meaning. I have "faith" in laws of physics not changing suddenly so that the airplane I'm travelling in doesn't plummet from the sky because its wings are suddenly useless. That's a statistical inference: it never happened since humanity kept track and we have no evidence that it ever happened even before that. Thus, it's "faith" only in the sense i which if I extracted 999 times out of 1000 a black ball out of an opaque urn and only one white ball, I have "faith" that the majority of balls inside the urn are black. It's an assumption that the world follows some laws that we can rationalize mathematically in some way. It's apprently a big assumption, but it has been tested again and again billion of times every day in all fields of human activity, even before the scientific method as we know it was formally adopted. As such even though blind induction is still a logical no-no, the theory that laws of physics keep working on our human time scales is the best tested theory of all in a Popper-ian sense. The faith that a god or other mystic force created our world or keeps to meddle with it, on the contrary, has no value as a scientific theory according to Popper exactly because we can't falsify it. You can say it's faith in both cases, if you want, in the same way that the number of atoms in the universe is the same as the number of living unicorns in Wales this instant. They're both numbers, after all. But leaving aside this superficial abstraction, the underlying concepts are both quantitatively and qualitatively different. Last but not least rationalism in epistemology has little to do with "behaving rationally" in everyday's life, but has all to do with using rational tools for the exploration of the world's behaviour. Proof be that there are rational, scientific studies on human behaviour according to "gut feelings" , brain areas and inconscious risk assessment, see e.g. Damasio's "Descartes' error". Please point me to a real case where rationalism fails in this sense, since you say that "There is some weird things in reality that defy rational thought. " |
There are several definitions of faith, both of which are connected to some degree. The first is the considering of statements about reality to be true. The second means a reliance upon something. In both these cases, it depends on what one considers to be trustworthy as a means of either giving information that is accurate or to utilize and base one's life upon. In short, what does one consider sources of authority that is reliable that one checks with. This can be one's own reasoning, one's own senses, or other methodologies like religions systems, experience of others, or science. In all these, at the core, is an act of faith to trust that source of authority. So, in this, it comes down to faith.
In regards to falsifying, what has been shown to be falsified is the belief in causality. We have multitudes of examples of how doing something for the Xth time ended up not yielding the same results. Without being able to prove causality, then even the ability to falsify anything is suspect. One can only falsify that something happened at a certain time in a certain space, and that it has had multiple times. See "The Black Swan Theory" in regards to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
So, the only thing we can say is that we personally don't have evidence for such being here. But that doesn't mean it is so. Also, we can't even say that such will still be true tomorrow, due to the issue with black swans. Not taking ownership over this, and accepting it, leads to people to develop flawed models that seem to work, but end up being subject to the butterlfy effect. We have witnessed a meltdown in financial markets due to people building mathematical models on how both housing prices ALWAYS go up somewhere (most recent) to one that factored in Russia not defaulting on its loans (look up Long-Term Capital Management for info on this). In both cases, a LOT of people got hurt, because individuals persumed that, based on their pure reasoning, and math, they couldn't be wrong.
Groups also have been known to have groupthink, so they make bad decisions based on that, eventhough it seems rational. And individuals will seeming to be totally rational in their decisions. However, such individuals will end up seeing their rational decision-making be flawed, because it ends up not being purely rational. Or, even if it is, there are cases where using intuition, to feel out that maybe the data is wrong (without physical evidence to support it in the current sample space), leads to better results.
In regards to the faith that there is a god/God meddling in reality isn't really worth much. However, if such a God does meddle favorably, then that is favorable. In regards to how possibly believing that which is not true now may be more beneficial than believing what is, there is the case of the placebo as one. Also, people who end up doing visualization of that which is not there now, but see it as it is, show performance improvement.
