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Originally Posted by Strangelet
The relationship between faith and knowledge is easily the corner stone of all religious mischief, so its important by those who want to use religion to manipulate to keep the faith/knowledge relationship as complicated and ambiguous as possible, so that you don't know where one ends and the other begins.
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I agree. It's also this need to respect that often puts something beyond challenge in many circles. On an individual level, what this often amounts to is avoiding embarrassing people by exposing these outlandish claims for what they are - hope without evidence - letting things go unchallenged in a way that we don't with their 'beliefs' about mathematics or geology. We're expected not to enquire too closely into someone's belief in, say, Armageddon being around the corner, or Jesus being the son of God, or the veracity of claims made by any of the other various religions, even though many believers insist that they 'know' these things to be true and that an ancient book offers 'proof' (and on this, I'm reminded of a past conversation with Myrrh)
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Originally Posted by Strangelet
Anyway, in terms of faith versus knowledge, my own take is that there is no such thing as knowledge outside of the analytic and the a priori, in other words we can know things in definitions and mathematics, but that's about it. so that our relationship to, for example, the bohr model of the atom is one of faith.
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I agree to a degree, but this is the point at which the difference between dogma and the scientific method (aka an open mind) comes into play. I think we have to be honest and admit that our 'belief' about the working of the atom has rather more to back it up than the belief that Jesus was born to a virgin. And of course the Bohr model has itself been refined over the decades and I don't doubt that it would be dropped just as quickly as the plum pudding model of the atom a century ago were we to uncover something that falsified it. Additionally, there's usually a clear and honest distinction in science between things of which we are fairly certain (a conclusion reached through repeated experimentation and open, honest and robust peer review - e.g. quantum electrodynamics) and things which are speculation, such as string/M-theory. In other words, there's an honesty about what we know and don't know.
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its possible to be religious without believing in God.
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In the sense of faith and worship, or in the sense of pursuing an interest with great vigour?