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Dear George,

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Thank you for those indications on Buddhism.

I make a distinction between "faith" and "blind faith" as follows:

In my terminology, "faith" is belief where there is no material evidence, only circumstantial evidence or a credible eye witness (or both).

"Blind faith" is belief where there is no material evidence, no circumstantial evidence and no credible eye witness.

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Dear Banjo,

Thanks for explaining your terminology. So you speak of “faith” (that is not blind) if there is “circumstantial evidence or a credible eye witness (or both)”, and “blind faith” where there are no such things.

I thought when speaking of “circumstantial evidence or a credible eye witness” (e.g. in the court of law) one doesn’t use the term “faith”. For me only the second case makes sense when referring to metaphysical assumptions. Even so, the English language - in distinction to e.g. German or Slavic languages, and also French (well, you know better) - can distinguish between religious faith (as a state or disposition of mind) and religious beliefs (as what is called “intellectual consent”). So even in the second case, for what you call “blind faith” I would use the word “belief”, especially “a priori belief” (the matter is more complicated since “I believe”, “Ich glaube”, “Je crois” is often the equivalent of “I think”, “Ich denke”, “Je pense”).

As I wrote elsewhere, in my view there are in principle only two such metaphysical “a priori beliefs” (presuppositions, axioms): Either - as Carl Sagan put it -
(i) that the physical universe/reality is all there is, without cause and without purpose, or
(ii) that there must be Something (different religions model it differently) not reducible to the physical universe of which it is the cause and purpose, which Itself has no cause and no purpose.

(Scientific theories represent or model the structure of physical reality, religions play a similar role in modeling that Something sub(ii) for those who believe in it.)

Of course, neither (i) nor (ii) can be supported by “circumstantial evidence or a credible eye witness (or both)” acceptable to everybody. There is no rational way to decide a priori in favour of the one or the other presupposition: one decides for the one or the other depending on other, personal, educational, cultural, etc, factors.

Gosh, I have drifted even further away from the original topic. So let me just thank you again for making me clarify my terminology (also) to myself.

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Dear George,

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Carl Sagan's problematic of God or no God leads to a dead end.

By an historical, perhaps I should say, anthropological, investigation of the development of human ideas I approached the question with an open mind to see why the question arose in the first place, how it originated and developed.

I came to the understanding that it was provoked essentially by fear and awe at the power, fury and beauty of nature with which man felt the need to communicate in order to placate it and express his fear or gratitude and recognition of its superiority. He invented the concept of supernatural beings as an explanation of the natural phenomenon he feared or admired and developed a strategy of survival based on that concept, offering human and animal sacrifice as scapegoats to spare the rest of society from its wrath.

The concept of anthropomorphic gods developed from this, followed by that of the Unique God, the jealous God, who forbade the worship of all other Gods. The Concept of the Unique God as the father of mankind, the all powerful ruler, mirrored the structure of the human family.

I realised that all this symbolism had become deeply embedded in the human psyche ever since mankind separated from his common ancestor with the chimpanzee 5 to 7 million years ago and continues to exercise an important influence, even on the most evolved intellects today.

Blaise Pascal calculated that belief in a God was a safe bet but he seems to have left some important elements - such as the holy wars (Crusades), the Inquisition, Nazi ethno-religious ideology, and religious fanaticism - out of the equation. There have been tremeandous losses and It is still not a safe bet for everyone.

Modern democracies have developed within their courts of justice what are considered to be the most efficient procedures for determining the truth. Nevertheless, absolute certainty is rarely achieved. Faith-based judgments are the norm. Happily, though, not judgments based on blind faith, where there is no material evidence, no circumstantial evidence and no reliable eye witness.

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Dear Banjo,

Please note that there was no mention of God or supernatural beings in my previous post, exactly because today there is no understanding of these concepts that would be shared by everybody. They are so basic that they cannot be formally defined, and their understanding has varied throughout (Western) history: for instance, different phenomena were seen as “supernatural” during the Middle Ages, and different things by those who still use that term today.

What I built my (i) and (ii) alternatives on was another basic concept, namely physical reality (i.e. reality accessible in principle by science) which also would need some explanation to do, but somehow is more accessible via contemporary insight from the philosophy of science than God and the supernatural. Thus (ii) was formulated as a belief that there is a “dimension” (feature, aspect) of reality that is not reducible to physical reality, i.e. that is beyond the reach of (natural) science.

Please remember that I had a basic atheist (Marx-Leninist) education so I am familiar with the conclusion atheists draw from the more or less standard account of how religion came about that you presented here. You could similarly describe the anthropological, prehistoric and historic sources of mathematics. I would disagree only if you used these facts to make conclusions about the validity of this or that mathematical theorem, or applicability and usefulness for practical purposes of this or that branch of contemporary mathematics.

Pascal’s wager is a relatively simple thought construction meaningful only for those who accept his (at his time universal) understanding of “God” (and somehow tacitly assuming that “afterlife in heaven” was the only reason for a person to follow the Christian way of life). I do not see how Inquisition or Nazis fit into that scheme.

I think we have indeed started to talk past each other. Apologies if it is because of me not being able to make my point of view more intelligible.

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Dear George,

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"I am familiar with the conclusion atheists draw from the more or less standard account of how religion came about that you presented here"

I was not an atheist during the 60 years of my investigation. Having finally understood that the supernatural and deity are purely human concepts with no existence in reality, the question which had remained open in my mind all those years was settled.

That does not alter the fact that I still consider myself a Catholic (non-papist), that my religious family is the Church of England and that I have sympathies for the social work of The Salvation Army and the philosophy of Buddhism.

I presume that having taken a bite of the apple of the tree of knowledge, I am now banished from the Garden of Eden and considered a heretic, an infidel and an atheist.

Never mind, I am surely no worse off than Joan of Arc, Galileo or Mary MacKillop.

"You could similarly describe the anthropological, prehistoric and historic sources of mathematics. I would disagree only if you used these facts to make conclusions about the validity of this or that mathematical theorem ...".

The comparison you make here is not strictly analogous to the model it refers to. For it to be analogous, you would need to say: "I would disagree only if you used these facts to make conclusions about the existence of mathematics".

Indeed, I am tempted to say that, like the supernatural and deity, mathematics is a purely human concept with no existence in reality. But I should be delighted if you would convince me of the contrary.

Your interpretation of Pascal's wager seems to be a fairly personal one. The usual conclusion is "that a rational person should live as though God exists" (simply because it might be true).

Pascal's chief argument that "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing" is false because many people have been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and assassinated for their religious beliefs. Hence my reference, inter alia, to the Inquisition and Nazi ethno-religious ideology.

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Dear Banjo,

Apologies if I wrongly concluded, from the way you presented your account of the sources of religion that you considered yourself an atheist. I know that my teachers called themselves atheists, but I also know (e.g. also from discussions on this OLO) that today the term "atheist" has many different meanings. I don’t want to open that can of worms again.

>>the supernatural and deity are purely human concepts with no existence in reality<<
Well, as I see it, the problem is not with supernatural and deity but with what one understands by “existence in reality”.

Horses "exist in reality", unicorns don’t, this however, is not that simple when talking about more abstract purely human concepts like e.g. quarks, electromagnetic or other fields, space-time, states of a physical system, Lagrangians, phlogiston, aether etc. The last two concepts turned out to be of only temporary usefulness when trying to explain physical reality, the others seem to be more lasting and useful.

Something similar holds about God, supernatural beings and other “purely human concepts” that try to explain reality beyond what science can explain. As I wrote above, scientific theories represent or model the structure of physical reality - the concepts I listed above are parts of them - religions play a similar role in representing/modeling that Something sub(ii) for those who believe in it; and the concepts of God, divinities etc are usually parts of that representation.

In physics, mathematical models play a crucial role (besides visual ones), in religion mythological and anthropomorphic models, play a similar role (besides other e.g. parables in Christianity. It is not easy do decide which physical theory adequately represents which part of physical reality, and in the case of religious representations of reality this is MUCH MORE COMPLICATED since the representations essentially involve the very subject who does the representaion (i.e. believes in ...) with his/her personal, cultural etc. determinants.
(ctd)