Phi for All

I see no difference between explaining faith and explaining psychic predictions. Both thrive on mystery, chance happenings and confirmation bias. And it's not language that fails to explain it, it's credibility. I do find it interesting that people of faith describe it the way you do, like it's some kind of sense that unbelievers lack, like a poor blind man who can't see the light. I couldn't script a better swindle. It's the perfect setup for persuasion by deception. And when the mark starts to suspect something is wrong, people of faith get to shake their heads at the ignorant unbeliever who can't see the light. Or the invisible clothes. Or the magic sky fairy who's plan will somehow turn out best for everyone.

OK. So I conclude that faith is either trumped up hope, or it's the feelings people tell themselves are strong in order to shore up beliefs with no real substance. If one "sort of" believes in the supernatural, that can't be faith, not in the abiding, unwavering sense some people claim to have. I don't think there's anything wrong with hope, but true faith seems like a sham to me, a way to take hope beyond where it should go and ignore trust altogether. I trust that all the people who say they have faith in their respective gods have either picked the wrong one (since there are so many) or they're all wrong, and I trust that because I see no evidence to the contrary. Faith pretends to be a strong house on a good foundation but is really just made of cards with a brick design on the back.

To me, it greatly diminishes Mr Glick's accomplishment to think he did what he did because he thought his god demanded it of him. If I could make such a sacrifice, I wouldn't want it to be remembered as an act of "faith".

When a patient doesn't recover, does the fault lie with the efficacy of Mahapathy?

Only because zombies are unpredictable.

CCTV is everywhere. You might even be attempting to mist one of their hidden cameras as we speak.

I realize I'm more or less forcing my definitions on everyone, but it's only to make the distinctions that are prevalent when people talk about belief. You say you have faith in your abilities, but your belief in them is not what I would call faith. It's trust, because you've trained, you've experienced, you have some sort of actual, observable basis for your belief, but you also know it's limitations. The way many "people of faith" talk about their beliefs, it's 100% but I don't see how they can give that much strength to beliefs that have no empirical basis. Granted, many people, including you, seem to make no distinction between faith and trust and hope, but I feel there are important differences. People of faith talk about Truth with a capital T, they have The Answer, and they believe it with utter conviction. How can that not be different from trust or hope?

I apologize, I thought you had read the whole thread. I've been going into (nauseating) detail about how I felt there was a need to differentiate between types of belief. I've heard lots of people talk about their utter, complete belief in their god and they call it FAITH. In this unwavering regard, it seems like it's supposed to be 100%, all the time, because questioning it makes them feel like they've "lost" their faith. I think the way people believe in empirically supported phenomena, building their belief in them with observation and experience, seems more like TRUST. It's never 100%, and it's always based on things we see happening around us and science is the tool we use to understand them better. Trust is scalable, and it seems to me like trust is capable of more actual "strength" than faith is. I can bet my life on my driving skills, the laws governing the roads and my car's capabilities and so I trust myself to get behind the wheel every day. For things I want to believe in, but have no actual support for, I call that HOPE. I hope I will win big-time at the weekly poker game, but I can't know for sure so I'm not going to go out and spend my winnings prematurely. For any supernatural explanation I want to believe in, at most it would be hope, never trust and certainly not faith. So I guess I agree with you when you say no one can actually have faith, since that would be 100% belief. It seems strong when you say it's 100% belief, but that belief is built on nothing but feelings since there is no actual evidence to support supernatural explanations for anything. I think people who claim to have faith are fooling themselves. Feelings is my word, not theirs. Since there is nothing empirical about supernatural explanations, what is faith based on? It seems to me like it's based solely on the feelings of the believer, supported only by the feelings of other believers, who get together to express their feelings about what they believe in. They have their books, handed down for centuries, translated and re-translated, full of flaws but also full of stories that reinforce the feelings each religion wants followers to have. I hear the reasoning behind such feelings and it seems like religion is all about making people feel confident in hoping they will be blessed or allowed to live eternally or be healed of a malady. Religious leaders know the more confident people are about something that has nothing tangible to support it, the harder they will defend it and the more they will feel good about it. Religious leaders have become artists in the area of confidence, imo.

Sorry, but that's not how evolution works. We're not moving towards some kind of ideal, or "finished product". If there was enough selective pressure, we'd change over time to adapt, even if it meant losing some of what we think makes us humans. It's not a process of scalar variables, it's a process of continuous functions. Political turmoil tends to sweep up everything in its path. The current clampdown on chemicals is just political playacting, soothing the masses while acting on other agendas. It's just such a shame it has to affect a whole generation of potential scientists. Kneejerk reactions rarely result in anything meaningful or lasting. To the OP, someone pointed out in another thread that discoveries aren't always appreciated because we don't have the concurrent technologies that make the discovery valuable. The steam engine was invented in the first century A.D., but there was no technology then that made the engine practical. We probably have some discoveries right now that don't have a matching technology to make them truly valuable.

I think it would be prohibitively expensive (£14.89 for 150 ml!). What about buying tobacco leaves or even gather up cigarette butts and put some in a spray bottle with water?

Faith is too subjective for me to gain some kind of "understanding" of it. 100 people will give you 100 versions of what it means to them. My feelings I've already expressed. What I still don't comprehend is how so many people can talk about their belief in the supernatural using a word like "faith", which many of them define as unquestioning, unwavering, utterly confident and complete belief. Where is this strength coming from? No one can has given me anything but feelings as a basis for such strength. I can understand why someone could be so confident that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that there will be an aggressive reaction if baking soda and vinegar are mixed. Where do they get the confidence that their god is watching over them, when they can easily justify anything that happens as "God's will"? I can literally make up anything to worship and then claim everything is happening according to "The Plan". Where is the strength for this belief coming from? Is it because so many other people have followed the religion of their parents? That's a cultural phenomenon, based on where you were raised. When I really push for meaning I eventually get, "My faith comforts me, and that gives it value". I have no problem with that, but I don't think that's really faith. I think that's hope instead. I would say that was TRUST, not FAITH. You know these people, and the training they've had. You know the equipment and what it can and can't do. If you could TRUST it 100%, that would seem like FAITH, but you can't, can you? You've had people and equipment fail before, and that means your TRUST isn't complete and unwavering, but it's enough to count on in a tight situation. Knowing the capabilities of people around you, knowing how the world works and what can be considered probable, these are issues of TRUST, and I can assign varying degrees of strength to them. But unwavering FAITH in the supernatural? How can that kind of belief be so strong without a whole lot of fooling yourself?

Iirc, hemp seeds contain a good percentage of xylose. I'm always looking for good reasons for my state to grow hemp now that it's legal for us to do so. It doesn't require land used for food, it grows like a weed, but I don't know what kind of yield you'd get for the purposes of hydrogen extraction. Would this process leave anything else of a hemp plant for other uses, like the fibers for cloth?

! Moderator Note So you can have all responses in the same thread, I moved this one to Biology.

The only similarity is the word belief, and there is a great deal of difference between religious beliefs, based on feelings and hearsay, and scientific beliefs, based on mountains of experimentation and observation. The mainstream religious community is adamant that they've found the answer. The mainstream scientific community usually backs the best supported explanation, but is willing to listen to a better one, and shift their support if one actually comes along. To me, that's the biggest difference.

If he's only posting videos, why are we still calling it a discussion?

God could also be the epitome of confirmation bias. We convince ourselves that the shadows hold unseen things, and enough of them do to make us wary. But even when we're shown there's nothing there, sometimes that just makes us even more certain something is. We also become convinced that, since we create with our wonderful hands and tools, there has to be a creator like us for everything. As the gaps in our knowledge shrink, the need for supernatural explanations shrinks as well. It's human error to assume there is a magic sky fairy.

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If the whole planet could agree this was the best, most efficient path to take, we could require everything to be built so it interconnects with everything else. We could build bigger bases and bring them together when the time was right. Eventually. we'd have started a ring world. It makes me wonder, When offworld exploration explodes in the future, will the Dyson sphere concept become the conservative path? It's based on the tradition of getting the most out of any system you work with, and progress with as little radical change as possible. It's a simple (not easy), scalable solution that requires a great deal of methodical effort and long term plans. But will current conservatives ever let us get to that point? Right now it's hard to get nations to agree to codes of conduct for space, and sharing technology specifications is very touchy. The country that comes up with a successful autonomous robotic mining vehicle is going to redefine our whole existence, imo. I just think there will probably be some discoveries that will take us further out, and the focus on building a Dyson sphere around our home star will be scattered by so many directions to go and things to find. History tells us it's very likely we'll spread outward as fast as we can rather than focusing our efforts so close to home for as long as it would take to build a DS.

We need to start mining off-planet and using the ore we find to build more bases to build more stuff off-planet. We'll need to do that for at least half a century to build up infrastructures that make it more economical. I'd say you'd need a couple of centuries of this type of economy to explore the space around which a Dyson sphere would fit. That's a lot of space. The real factor here is need. The surface area and energy provided by a Dyson sphere is staggering, on the order of 600 million times that of Earth. How long would it take our species to reach a point where that much area and energy was a big consideration? It won't get built before then. Such a project would be the ultimate human undertaking, requiring a degree of cooperation and communication that would be truly worthy of our species' capabilities.

Please defend only your first bullet point, about mental illness not existing. The rest of them are obviously subjective generalizations that can be trivially debunked. You paint with too broad a brush when you make assertions about all psychiatrists. Unless, of course, you can adequately support your first reason. If you can show that mental illness doesn't exist, that would explain the rest. So I'd like to hear why you think mental illness doesn't exist before I answer "why can't psychiatry be banned?". You can't drive me nuts. At most, it would be a short putt.

Watch a movie? You're obviously talking about some kind of induced hallucination. Can you tell us what you want to accomplish? There are some cool optical illusions you can do to yourself, but that may not be what you're after.

It's a matter of intelligence and experience, not of evolution. There's really no such thing as "evolved enough". It's more of a developmental concern. I agree. Every discovery in one field leads to more discoveries in other fields. Part of the way we adapt as humans to changing environments is to equip ourselves to deal better in them. As we continue to explore, we find new ways to expand our knowledge. This is one of the many reasons we need to keep funding science. Our intelligence and tool use are augmented tremendously by our ability to communicate and cooperate. Remove any of those qualities and discovery is hampered dramatically. I think we'll start harvesting materials from space in the very near future, for use offworld so we can continue to explore and harvest more. And in doing so, we're going to develop new technologies and new uses for materials to help us solve new problems.

I can live with that, I suppose, until someone tells me they're so confident in their hope for salvation that it lets them lie to me or cheat on their spouse or steal from a neighbor but still be forgiven.

To be fair, not every religious person is a creationist who denies evolution. And also to be fair, creationism offers a much quicker road to understanding than science does. For those who had trouble with biology in school, pearls of wisdom like, "If we evolved from monkeys, why do we still have monkeys" offer easily digestible sound bytes that let them dismiss hundreds of hours of study and reading. And they don't even have to read their own Bible, they just have to learn to parrot what their mentors tell them. I've seen more than a few creationists misquote their own holy book because scriptures were bent to serve an agenda. So it's not really thickness, it's laziness. There are a lot of people these days who don't like to read and just want their education in small doses. So they trade accuracy and depth for convenience. It's magazine mentality.

Thanks for this. I thought I was explaining myself badly, but you grasp the concept very well. Just yesterday, someone told me, "Have a little faith", and I thought about this thread. Was he really asking me to hold out some hope that our work would pay off? Or perhaps trust that the efforts we'd made to improve our probability of success would tip the scales in our favor? But since he said "Have a little faith", and since I know this guy is somewhat religious, I think he was asking me to rely on his god's providence to make us successful. Overlooking the obviously oxymoronic "a little faith", I couldn't help but think that if he really was applying unquestioning, indubitable belief (faith) in our success, he's already be spending his commission check. I think most people use "faith" interchangeably with "hope", and that's a big part of what bothers me when I hear them justifying why their religion is the Truth, the Way, and that faith in their god provides miracles. Faith isn't magical, it's just hope with irrational rationalization.