Le 18-janv.-06, à 20:35, danny mayes a écrit :
I doubt the beliefs of fundementalist Christianity will ever be absolutely proven or disproven, and as a faith belief I reserve the right to discard it at my choosing!
And what if you make the personal experience of God afterlife or before, or to take a less hot example, what if you wake up in the morning with the belief that you exist, as a first person (with private subjective life and all that). In both case you get something that science will never been able to prove or disperove. But does it need an act of faith? One problem is that the word "faith" has already (like "theology") big "social" connotations, but many "reasonable things", especially in science, needs some amount of faith in the sense "belief beyond proof".. What I mean is that those questions are difficult, and there is no clear-cut frontier between many sort of beliefs. I have given reasons (often in this list) that the belief in a primitive material universe/realm is already a sort of religious belief. Actually the belief in any application of a theory is beyond provability. But as I said, also the belief in a personal pain, like headache, is beyond proof, although we don't need a proof to understand we have headache. In any case I am not sure it is a question of choice, although that, concerning religious belief, perhaps some form of open-minded education could help young people to be less influenced by the their parent's beliefs (which are not chosen by the children of course). But then that "choice" question could lead us to the "will" or "free-will" question which is not simple too. I am not sure I am clear: to sum up I think we have many beliefs on things with no proofs nor disproofs, but I would'n say it is a matter of choice. We always need evidences of some kind, I think, but for some just a lovely sunshine could be taken as an evidence for God or Gods, and for others just the existence of Nazis will be taken of evidence for Evil, Evils, if not devil(s). That leads to the question of what is an evidence and how does evidences add up (and here many interesting models and theory are developped in Artifical Intelligence (and alike), and the evidences add up toward the idea that that stuff is not obvious at all.
Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
