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Dear Bill,
I have been rethinking the matter of faith but I think I am basically correct it is something that grows with experience provided we are on the right track if we are on the wrong track the opposite occurs. We can have 'little faith' or 'great faith'. I obviously should have said that faith begins with believing and with experience grows into knowing rather than implying that faith was something separate from believing and knowing.
I think the trouble with creationists is they are on the wrong track and that makes them afraid to take a square look at creation and evolution. As I see it their very little faith is in a traditional interpretation of the bible which is erroneous. I am sure they would deny that tradition has anything to do with it but I think that would be due to lack of understanding. I think this lack of understanding is due to lack of faith in reason which makes them very difficult to get on with. They just keep coming up with the same old arguments borrowed from tradition. I suspect that much of what religious people regard as faith is really make believe.
Our dictionary defines faith as "confidence or trust in a person or thing, belief which is not based on proof, etc.". The Lord likened faith to a small seed which in another parable He said grew into a great tree'. The page I referred Jack to on proof says scientists have confidence in their ideas. I presume this confidence started as belief in an idea and became strong faith when backed up by experience with theory and/or experiment. Scientists publish their ideas so that others can test them and eventually make use of them if they pass the tests. That is what I would like to see happen to my solution to the creation-evolution problem. Seeds may fail to grow for many reasons so I will have to be patient and keep trying until I find the right conditions.
If there is no absolute proof of anything, it seems to me that even knowing must be faith. Somehow I think there must be exceptions to that rule though. Do you worry that somebody might prove that the universe, the earth and us do not exist!?
When I referred to small children being believers I meant very little children. They do very quickly learn to be skeptical. I think they get fed up with having too much that they can't understand rammed down their necks.
I agree that we need enough skepticism to question things. I think there are two good reasons for asking questions. One - to make sure that we understand what is being said or observed and two - to make sure that what is being said is correct. Perhaps I should have said too much skepticism makes learning difficult or perhaps 'an inquiring mind' is a better way of saying what we need. I think skepticism is a very strong word.
I am curious to know why you don't think I believe the Bible is God's word. As I see it not only the Bible is God's word everything in the universe is God's word. As I see it things and ceremony as well as words express truth. Scientists devote their whole lives to searching out truth by studying the things in the universe. To make sense of this though you will have to note my explanation of what I mean by God.
Since everyone who is interested will read this I might as well put a note here for Kenneth Monsch.
Dear Ken,
On the 3rd Feb. you asked "What is rationality?" and in reply I said I must look into it. Well I have. The word 'rational' is to do with reason so I think rationality is the issue.
On the 10th. you said that creationists are irrational and don't understand the difference...... I agree that they are irrational and I think they just don't understand - full stop. I think this is because they don't trust reason and one thing they don't seem to understand is that by trusting tradition they are trusting in the reasoning of who ever started the tradition back in the past. The trouble is how do we educate people who won't listen to reason? I'll have to give it a go with selected individuals. One of them has some of my writings but hasn't come back with any comments yet.
Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: Bill Chaisson/Deirdre Cunningham
To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 2:04 AM
Subject: Re: paleonet Re: Ken's comments
Peter,
I think your question about rationality is a good one I will have to try and
find time to look into it. With regard to emotions and belief I think
emotions need to be kept strictly under control but I am not sure that we
can think at all without belief. To think it seems to me that we need at
least some idea of the rules of logic and mathematics as has to be built
into computers. How could we get that without believing? I think that
believing in something that we are told or that we have observed is how
thinking starts. Faith as I see it is something that grows out of experience
with an object or an idea.
Faith is something arises due to a lack of experience with an object or idea, or at least a failure to understand experience. Faith is generally a substitute for a "real" explanation. This is my understanding of the view of the scientific community. Indeed, it is my understanding of the perspective of Modernism. (A discussion of Post-modernism has no place on a paleontology list.)
The Creationist camp often insists that evolutionists must have "faith" in order to "believe in" natural selection as the engine of evolution. In practice some scientists may accidentally speak of or consider evolutionary theory as if it were dogma, but in fact evolutionary theory is as dynamic as religious dogma is static.
I think that believing grades into faith and faith into knowing. Knowing is the end result of a progression but I don't think we can ever eliminate an element of each.
The history of the development of science out of faith through the 16th to 19th centuries might look this way from the perspective of the 21st century, but I don't think that's how it happened. I have heard the phrase "coming to know God" as a way of expressing an increase in depth of faith, but it has nothing to do with an increase in knowledge of Nature.
A failure to eliminate faith from knowing is just that, a failure.
I think that people who call themselves believers are that in name only. I
think that small children are real believers. I think they tend to accept
what they hear and see without objection and that makes learning easy.
My experience with children is entirely different. Children are the original skeptics; they ask a lot of questions and are really good at spotting inconsistencies in a narrative.
They will only accept things "on faith" if they sense that by doing so they will get the approval of an authority that they respect. This is called indoctrination and doesn't have anything to do with real learning. In fact, it gets in the way of real learning.
The brouhahas in Dover, PA and Georgia are all about parents freaking out because their own indoctrination of their children is being contradicted by the schools' science curricula.
I think being skeptical makes learning difficult and slower.
Being skeptical is the only thing that allows us to build real knowledge, its structure, dynamics and content.
Small children don't worry too much about testing their ideas.
This is all that children do. Or at least it used to be when we let them go out and play.
It might be a small point but I didn't mean to say that God created through
evolution but that evolution is the inevitable result of His continuing
creation work. That He is continuing this work fits with the Lord statement
that "The Farther worketh hitherto" John 5: 17.
If you don't accept that the Bible is the word of God (and I don't), then this is simply circular logic. Whether God has any hand in evolution is of no interest to evolutionary theorists since the existence of God cannot be proven. Proving the existence of God is of no interest since (1) if one turns out to exist and is all-powerful, then that makes all further inquiry pretty pointless and (2) if one turns out to exist and has to follow the rules of physics, then all you've got is the 'god of the gaps'.
Sincerely,
Bill
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
William P. Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
607-387-3892
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