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Michael Jay wrote:I'm a bit offended by your suggestion that healing power of toilet paper is subject to the same derision as a belief in God (or angels, etc.).

Not happy about that at all...

Then I apologise. Sincerely.

But, as Christopher Hitchens stated (or was it Sam Harris? Can't remember, but it is nonetheless true): what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

I don't see why religion and the universe shouldn't be subject to the same rigour of debate as, say, politics or economics.

Because politics and economics can be proved, or at least theorized based on cold, hard fact.

Religion cannot. It is not open to debate. It is a matter of faith and that is the long and short of it...

You cannnot prove, or disprove, the "unprovable."

If I believe in the healing power of my toilet paper, you cannot prove or disprove it either way. I can say that I had hemeroids (sp) until I started using a specific brand of toilet paper. If I believe it, and I have faith in it, all your arguments don't mean a thing.

Mike.

... to you. But I would take the toilet paper and conduct a robust double-blind experiment using a large enough sample to give accurate results! Because I want to find out what's true.

Saying religion is not open to debate is, I think, an easy way to avoid difficult questions. Sorry, but there it is.

Right, I've said enough. Where did I put those cards...

Michael Jay wrote:Because politics and economics can be proved, or at least theorized based on cold, hard fact.

Religion cannot. It is not open to debate. It is a matter of faith and that is the long and short of it...

You cannnot prove, or disprove, the "unprovable."

If I believe in the healing power of my toilet paper, you cannot prove or disprove it either way. I can say that I had hemeroids (sp) until I started using a specific brand of toilet paper. If I believe it, and I have faith in it, all your arguments don't mean a thing.

Mike.

I didn't start this off with religious leanings but it's gone that way which sometime is the natural flow of a good discussion. I've quoted above due to the idea that because for some people a subject is a matter of faith then for some reason science or rational thought should keep its distance or not even try to approach.
I feel this is really a slippery slope into the archaic past where religion dictated what was and wasn't.
Mankind should be free to do what it has always done, explore and gain knowledge of the universe. To say that we can never truly know whether something is 'fact' is indeed correct but dont make the mistake of then thinking it is a 50 - 50 split.
Without having to dealve to deeply into peoples religious belief as they can get rather touchy when it is questioned I feel this idea works just as well with alternative therapies.
Just because some believes it works, and at the end of the day it is their choice, it is the duty of the scientific community to test the theory using the full rigour of scientific method to come to a conclusion to the validity of its claims.

seige wrote:Beliefs are something we can choose freely.

If I'm going way off topic please feel free to ignore this post: but this is an interesting point.

Belief in an external world is just that - a belief, by virtue of the fact that we can never amass evidence for its existence (sorry to bring this up greedoniz ). Yet this is not something we choose to believe when we grow up (generally speaking of course, I'm sure there are some exceptions) but something we merely accept as a given.

So to say that a belief is something we can choose freely is not quite accurate. Taking a Determinist approach, it could be argued that we do not have a truly free free will; what we choose to believe (not to mention every action we ever make) is influenced by the world around us (if it even exists at all!).

greedoniz wrote:Anyway we can all wax lyrical about whether we truley exist or not, whether its all shadows cast by on the cave wall and all we know is mearly what our senses percive for us so we never get primary input but the fact of the matter is the human being evolved with these senses, we have them and for the time being that's how we make sense of our universe.
None of these pondering changes any of the original question on why some people insist on denying or ignoring the extremely reliable information that science brings us and instead believe in the more fantastical.

Greedoniz, you are correct in saying that the questions raised by Philosophy do not fully answer your original question, but they are important in making apparent just how much we can trust what our senses tell us, and thus the conclusions they lead us to make about the world as well as showing the importance of clarifying the terms involved.

For instance: you say that the rational mind should embrace empirical evidence; but (to use Descartes to illustrate once again) Rationalists reject empirical evidence on the grounds that it cannot be entirely trusted - quite a rational argument indeed!

Descartes reasoned rationally that God existed, yet you claim that the rational mind is one which only accepts something if and only if there is evidence for its existence...

Using my rational mind however I do not believe that there could ever be any proof for the existence of a God - Religion is based on faith after all. The Bible (if I'm not mistaken) mentions that only those who believe in God (different from KNOWing of his existence) will be allowed entry to Heaven - and what better way to distinguish between the believers and the non-believers than making it so that no evidence could ever be found to prove the existence of You (God). But then there are theological problems such as The Euthyphro Dilemma and The Problem of Evil which are quite rational and seem to undermine the existence of a God - thus I am forced to adpot an Agnostic approach.

I hope that makes some sense at least... it's very hot after all.