NialScorva

You're playing a semantics game. In the passages you quote, Wittgenstein asks a bunch of rhetorical questions to make the reader think, he says nothing about faith or religion. Rather, I believe he's talking about the fact that we accept secondary sources as direct knowledge. The semantics game comes in by equivocating such secondary belief that cooberates with direct experience with that of religious experience that does not. I really wish I had a copy of "On Certainty" available to check out those passages.

Just from my knowledge of the good arch-empiricist Wittgenstein:

We accept such authoritive sources as equivalent to empirical fact. We accept something as confirmed a million times without confirmation because it's good enough for use. It's sorta like nesting empirical confirmation within empirical confirmation. I trust that the data in a book is confirmed because I've empirically confirmed that such books contain reliable data. Each nesting and confirmation reduces the certainty of such information. In other words, if the authority claims there's a 90% confirmation, and I have a 0.9 confidence in that source, then I believe assign a certainty of 0.81 to that information directly. The rest seems to be made up of what you're calling "faith" or belief. The problem lies when the methodology comes into question. For books like the bible or other religious texts, based upon my *direct* experience, I put no confidence in the authority. So even if they claim it's absolutely true, I have no reason to trust they're data as a secondary source. For me, the gap between my experience and they're claims is more faith than I'm willing to tolerate. For the same reason, young earth creationists can deny evolution because they assign no confidence to scientists authority. So, insofar as secondary claims of authority are concerned, we're on somewhat equal footing.

However, all secondary claims are not created equal. I can empirically validate claims made in geology books and engineering books. That is direct experience, and has the highest possible confidence. However, in my *direct* experience, biblical and religion claims cannot be validated at all. Zero, zilch, nada. This is direct, and to call such experience to be "faith" based makes the word useless, as there is no greater degree of confidence. This is how I reject such claims of faith, not by saying I strictly don't have such unwarranted beliefs, but by saying that seeking the minimal uncertainty is as close to certainty as we can get, and calling it faith is nothing more than pedantic word games. It's like the amature that claims that we cannot be certain of reality, thus we cannot be sure that anything is real. It implicitly defines a word such that either the word is always applicable or never applicable, when clearly the usage of the word allows for gradients if not poles.

1sec

Anyway.

Even in the simplest and most basic experiences we have there is a lot of faith we put.

From the certainty that we'll wake up in the same world the next morning to the answers that a computer gives to our questions and we take for granted.

There is no 100% certainty in anything, rigourously speaking. Look, I'm writing this here and I believe I'm right but I am not convinced that anything I've said has absolute consistence.

Are you? Then you're much more faithful, generally speaking, than I am.

emphryio

I get the strange feeling my last post was ignored?

One last time, faith that you really do exist and faith in something that goes against logic are two entirely different things that should be represented by two entirely different words. To call the two the same thing is an ABSURDITY!

I know that just sounds crazy. (Inventing new words and all.) But that is the problem.

Francois Tremblay

I don't need faith to know I exist. I already perceive it and can conclude it very well.

WJ

"If I need God for emotional reasons this suggests a weakness of character, or a lack of resolve. Perhaps we are better off having pets as companions than needing figments of our imagination for emotional reasons."


1/ Most humans, being emotional beings as well as rational beings, know of love.

2/ The Devil is love

3/ Therefore, most humans know of the Devil.


Explain whether the conclusion is true or false? If you feel it is false, then reconstruct the argument to make it true.

Since all men can be irrational, and rationale is based on analytic, objective propositional truths, faith is alive and well.

All men have character weaknesses.

Walrus
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Truth is Subjectivity.

eowynn

Our whole world is taken on "faith" if you will. I cannot know FOR SURE that when I walk up the stairs, my kitchen table will be there. I am fairly certain that it will be, because it has always been there and every other time I have been upstairs it has been there, but do you really know for sure? You don't know for sure that the table even exists. For all I know, the table upstairs could just be a figment of my imagination.

So in that sense, yes, you have to have faith in all of life. But, as I think I have demonstrated, there are some things you just take for granted. I am 99.9999...% sure that the table upstairs is there. I don't KNOW for sure, but I have no reason to disbelieve.

WJ

E,

One could also make a case for the element of faith in scientific reasoning-induction.

Then the next question might be, what is the difference between good and bad faith?

Walrus
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Logic itself cannot solve the basic problem of verifiying the premises behind propositional arguments; for that we need some other tool.

Francois Tremblay

I don't need faith to know that things usually stay where they are. Unless you have a sentient, walking table, it's rather unlikely that it will move on its own. To say that faith is required to suppose the high probability that objects stay where they are is, to say the least, bizarre.

As I said, I think many people confuse faith with straight-forward probability assessment. It does not take faith to reckon that the sun will probably be there tomorrow or that a table will not move, but a simple application of reason (which, of course, is the opposite of faith).

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

Laurentius

Let’s say we have a proposition, like [this business plan will work].
Let’s now compare the following sentences:
(a) I KNOW THAT this business plan will work.
(b) I BELIEVE THAT this business plan will work.
(c) I BELIEVE IN THE FACT THAT this business plan will work.

Sentence (a) expresses an objective conviction devoid of any subjectivity in relation with the truth of the preposition;
Sentence (b) expresses a partly subjective and partly objective conviction;
Sentence (c) expresses a subjective conviction devoid of any objectivity in relation with the truth of the preposition.

Let’s now distinguish between RATIONAL FAITH and IRRATIONAL FAITH.
Expressing sentence (a) requires a certain amount of RATIONAL FAITH (confidence, self belief).
Expressing sentence (c) requires a certain amount of IRRATIONAL FAITH (belief, creed).
Expressing sentence (b) requires a certain amount of both RATIONAL and IRRATIONAL FAITH (acceptance, conviction).

In 1971 Fred Smith initiated Federal Express, a rapid overnight delivery business based on a plan he had elaborated in college (Yale University) and for which he had received a mediocre grade because it was considered that the initial effort was too high for the business to succeed. Undaunted, Fred Smith invested his $4 million and other investors’ $91 million in the idea. He established the headquarters in Memphis (due to its central location), bought planes and trucks, hired people in 25 cities and launched the operation in 1973, when he was 28 years old. There was no profit for 26 months. However, at the end of 1976 Federal Express recorded a profit of no less than $3.6 million, and it has been successful ever since.

I think all these three were true, more all less simultaneously or at different times.
Fred Smith KNEW that his business plan would work.
Fred Smith BELIEVED that his business plan would work.
Fred Smith BELIEVED IN THE FACT that his business plan would work.
AVE

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: Laurentius ]</p>

emphryio

Possibly christians in general have just used the word faith incorrectly. They have equated a strong belief in simply trusting your sanity with a strong belief in ignoring the evidence which reality presents.

They say, "You have faith that 2+2=4, having faith in god is essentially no different".

Obviously the two are different. Is the problem that, saying you have faith that 2+2=4 is an incorrect usage of faith?

Or is it that the word faith as it is simply used in the English language has become too ambigious thanks to christian apologists?

Right or wrong I think the usage of the word has simply become too ambigious. Therefore see my above posts on the solution.