I don't have a high level of faith in science at all.I don't know where you get this from.So now to believe what scientists say we have to have a high level of faith? Yes i believe what they say to be true but that doesn't mean i place a huge amount of faith in science.I am merely saying that i am surprised that people would rather believe authors from 2000 years ago  in a time when science was far behind where it is now,than theories that have been created fairly recently using the best knowledge that we have.

You're still playing with words.

Rationalism and scientific method work. They are proven day-in day-out by billions of people. I don't need to have blind faith in the method, I can assess its utility by its results and live with it as the temporary best tool. Especially because it's a self-correcting tool.

Again, please point me to an example of failure of the scientific method or of rationalism, since you claimed such cases exist.

Second, I actually read Taleb's "The Black Swan", and it is not about refuting induction or causality at large.

Strict induction has never been considered a source of absolute scientific results. Popper formalized the argument against induction in scientific theories, but obviously the problem dates back to early empiric schools.

Causality in the strict sense (microcausality) is never touched upon by Taleb. All he talks about are complex, empirical phenomena such as economic fluctuations - the ones you generally study with the tools of statistics not because they defy causality, but because we have no control over the myriad of input variables.

His whole point is about how much you want to trust a gaussian distribution when making statistical assumptions over the data in the past to gain predictive power over the data in the future in those cases where the extreme outliers bring results that are orders of magnitude more impactful than the average ones. In other words, he says that you can't use the gaussian distribution for risk assessment if extreme outliers effect decays with a power law instead of an exponential.

As you see, it's an entirely rational point, simply one that is overlooked by many economists and business managers/analysts, but that any mathematician won't even blink an eye upon.

A biologist before black swans were discovered wouldn't have told you that their existence was unthinkable or uselessly complicated or an offence to logic. Merely that the evidence at the time showed zero black swans over all the known species, so "there are no black swans" was an empirically correct statement on their knowledge base, not an induction. If someone came around and said that a black swan existed, he would be asked to show a proof, and no big amazement would follow if he did - as a black swan is really hardly any less plausible than a white one with regards to all scientific knowledge. If you had asked such a biologist of yore to bet a pound against the existence of the black swan, he would probably have. But bet his life? I dobut he would have.

All in all the black swan is about how bad people are at evaluating drastic consequences of marginal risks. How you can introduce this in a discussion about the god hypothesis, for which no empirical proof can be brought forth, really beats me.

Hopefully most are simply uneducated as to the evidence for evolution - amongnst other facts such as how planets form and so on.  Some no doubt simply refuse to educate themselves because that would require them to shift their thinking.  Some are clearly idiots.  All are almost certainly wrong.

The evidence for evolution is pretty massive vs no evidence for creationism other than faith.

The only way I can see creationism being true is if a supernatural God decided to create the Universe and to create it as if it was in fact ancient and place all these false clues as to how things came to be regarding dinosaurs, animals and background radiation... and then went to the bother of telling the faithful that in fact he created the Universe last week, just to really confuse things.

I find that patently absurd as an idea.

Or we could all be in the Matrix of course.

We have far more evidence than you seem to realise. It's not just a few warped bone fragments and fossils for one (we have a very large collection of fossils now). We have massive databases filled with DNA and protein sequences that show how related different organisms are. The genetic evidence we have is huge. We can trace similar proteins and DNA sequences among a range of organisms. It may suprise you to know a little under 50% of the genomic DNA sequences found in a banana are also present in us.

This isn't even including the massive amount of data we have on protein structures which add further proof with proteins with similar sequences and structures having very different roles and completely changing a cells metabolism. A few simple mutations and you have a completely different function. A collection of these leads to a different organism.

The theory of evolution has very much been re-emphasised since the advent of DNA sequencing technology.

Rationalism and the scientific method work... when you have the right conditions for them to do so.  When they do, as in the case of innovation and the arts, or understanding human behavior, they are limited.  Also, in the scientific method, the origin of a hypothesis is not rational at all.  It will usually come as a flash of insight.  There is a degree of irrational in the scientific method.

A place that practical testing of how things work is economics, and you see that there is irrationality in how economies work.  Here is a show Nova ran on this:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1479100777/

I'd argue (sorry to but in BTW) that the scientific method works wonderfully well in most circumstances as a principle.  However, clearly because in the end it is being employed by emotional, sometimes irrational human beings, some of whom will indeed have unique flashes of insight (Darwin being one of them and Einstein another obvious one) you will see uneven results at times.

But in the end, much like evolution, the point of scientific method in the larger picture is to rely on time and multiple tests and inputs to smooth out and remove elements introduced by human flaws.

At this stage, it seems clear the evidence, for example, massively - and I mean massively - points to evolution as being as close to a fact as you're likely to pin something like that down vs the obvious flaws with creationsim.

As an aside, it's interesting to me that some school's of thought indicate our basic makeup actually makes it hard fur us to process and understand a concept such as evolution, and this is now seen as explaining why it took so long for someone to have the flash of insight in the first place - for example from the evidence you'd have thought someone would have posited evolution much earlier whereas it's pretty clear that without Einstein's flash of intuition we might still not have the General Theory of Relativity.

Everything works only in the conditions in which it can. That's a truism.

The point being that science is a bottom-up work in progress by its nature. And the degree in which it provides explanations and predictions increases in all fields, all the time. It's obviosuly limited as all human constructions, but what I asked you to point me to is some field where it can't work, no matter how much we try.

That's not to say that rationality is always the most important faculty of the individual. When I'm hungry, I need food, not the biological explanation of why I'm feeling that sensation. When  I enjoy a painting, my sensation is valuable to me, indipendently from the exact description of my brain activity we might one day be able to give.

Still, science works as the best tool to know the biology of my methabolism or my brain, and I would never try to promote my hunger or my enjoyment of a given painting to a tool to estabilish objective facts about reality.

Faith in a creator god is just that: it's an assumption of a very complex idea, that only seems simple because our brains are wired to look for human/intentional explanations in our environment. It may be comforting and pleasant to the individual, but it's not a useful idea to understand the world at a basic level.

On the other hand we've been proving day in day out for thousands of years that everything as far as we can see and test works along mathematical models. And that strict and economic rationality has been the best way to develop such models of the world behaviour.

I'll never question the value faith or art or wit can have in subjective lives. I'll always question when they are used as the wrong tool for the job.

What I was saying here is that there ARE conditions where the scientific method is ineffective, and also reliance upon reason produces worse results than trusting intuitively.  An overconfidence in a belief your mathematical models are flawless will cause this to happen.  Watch the Nova article I posted to say why I said this.

Consider a simple reality where someone motivated by a religious text, starts to do good in the world, helping people, practicing charity and so on.   The basis of this is NOT rational, but one of faith.  And, it can be found in science.  Science studies what is, NOT what might be or could be, or things that will happen if a person steps out in faith. 

It would be real good if science could also fully explain the creation process of art, and be able to reduce it to formulas, but it doesn't happen that way.  We aren't at a place where we can get machines to create art either.  And we have a multiple things we consider true, that we can't measure in science labs.  Things like beauty can't be measured by science, nor are other personal preferences either.  People consider morality to be real to, but that isn't found in science either.  People can study how the brain functions when thinking about such things, but NOT the study of ethics or morals.

Another simple way to look this is to take a look at a comment: "That is NOT science!".  Well that means by saying "That" you are acknowledging something exists.  And, secondarily, that it exists outside the bounds of science.  If one says something exists outside the bounds of science, then it means that science isn't equipped to deal with it.

I WILL question your statement above regarding EVERYTHING is able to mapped to mathematical models.  Exactly what kind of mathematical models would be able to account for the ability to invent?  What mathematical models prepare one for "black swans"?  We see art, and we see the subjective.  We aren't able to model that mathematically.   And these things, the art and the "black swans" are some of the most important things we deal with in life. 

Consider this bit from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model

Philosophical considerations

Many types of modelling implicitly involve claims about causality. This is usually (but not always) true of models involving differential equations. As the purpose of modelling is to increase our understanding of the world, the validity of a model rests not only on its fit to empirical observations, but also on its ability to extrapolate to situations or data beyond those originally described in the model. One can argue that a model is worthless unless it provides some insight which goes beyond what is already known from direct investigation of the phenomenon being studied.

Again, back to causality here as a reason mathematical models end up being limited, when one can't prove causality is universal. 

So, on this note, I have to ask, please give the math which is able to answer what the sound of one hand clapping is or be able to confirm that, if wishes were trees, would the trees be fall, as you stand where you live.  However, I should also note that you can use math to create some really awesome fictional worlds with their own unique physics. 

faith and science both are important to humans and both can be abused by humans

creationism in it's modern form ("intelligent design") isn't about faith, it's about politics, which is why it's ridiculous compared to the scientific answer in this case

BTW I personally believe in the flying spaghetti monster, because I feel the world is more delicious than most people think.