Quote:
Originally Posted by AENeuman
this approach kind of prevents you from saying other supernatural faiths are wrong
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The problem with faith as a source of truth is there is no way to distinguish between faiths. The Judeo/Christian tradition insists that the afterlife exists in heaven/hell while the Hindu/Budhhist faiths insist we are reincarnated.
Which is true? There is simply no way of determining and consequently no way of deciding if either is true at all. Faith - accepting something because some authority says so - leads to a situation of zero confidence that any faith is true. Anything goes - it merely needs an authority with the charisma and persuasion. Hence the many cults we see.
Historically humans have always turned to the "supernatural" to deal with anything we don't currently understand. The sun, the wind, the sea - everything we didn't understand at the time were supernatural beings. Our real arrogance is in believing that our understanding is so wonderful if we don't understand it then it must be supernatural - ie beyond our nature.
As our understanding advances the supernatural explanations diminish - which is why faith is always on the retreat and proponents fall back on the idea that it does not deal with the same subject material as science. In reality it deals with
exactly the same subject material but without the same humility and acceptance of our own limitations.
It is clearly possible that there is something that could genuinely be called "supernatural" but our history suggests that we turn to supernatural explanations far too quickly and that a little patience may well save us dedicating ourselves to fantastic entities that prove to be illusory. It may indeed be the case that there is something that is beyond our understanding - in which case it's beyond our understanding and manufactured "faiths" do not change that.
In an earlier post I pointed out that I can't understand that the universe is 93 light years across when the combination of the speed of light and the age of the universe calculates to only 28 light years across. Should I conclude there must be something supernatural about this or simply that there is a limitation to my understanding of the subject? We humans are clearly on a path of increasing understanding so maybe we should wait awhile before concluding that some of this stuff will never be understood.
And on the subject of free will - for the moment I suspect that we merely mistake unpredictability for free will.