It's important to know what people mean when they talk about their "faith". It's important to know what they believe about belief!
Do they understand that faith is not reason? Is the apparent inconsistency in their belief(s) due to the abandonment of reason as a requirement for belief, or just bad reasoning?
It is in most cases the latter, since very few people, when pressed, accept that it is perfectly acceptable to believe something for no reason at all. That is, when they really think about it, faith is not an acceptable foundation for a belief. A serious, strongly held belief at any rate.
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I commented before but it seems to have disappeared...my question was why do you think humans across time and geographical location have come up with a series of mythologies, some of which share remarkably similar features, to explain the origins and purpose of life? do you think that if science takes an ever increasing role in our understanding of phenomena that this will eventually die out?
ReplyDeleteApologies for the slow reply.
ReplyDeleteLeaving aside serial mythologising (as in cultures adopting and adapting the mythologies of preceding, or indeed co-existing, peoples) I think there is simply the same yearning in all humans, regardless of location, for an answer to the questions and fears that constitute the misery of the humnan condition, namely that we are conscious of our own mortality, and we understand things in terms of cause and effect.
In the sense that science can and has filled in some of the gaps in our understanding of the universe, I suspect (and indeed hope) that some of the more outlandish, indeed destructive, belief systems will wither away.
However there will always be new questions that science is yet to answer, or may never answer, and, as history has shown us, the human mind abhors a gap! What I hope for is that as the scientific method of understanding our universe perhaps becomes more pervasive even in lay society, there will be more of us who are able to reserve judgement when a gap exists rather than fill that gap with nonsensical, or worse hateful, dogma.