Cosmology: Latest theories of everything (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, July 30, 2017, 10:56 (2673 days ago) @ David Turell

TONY: If we can not KNOW, why is faith irrational? It is the only alternative left.

DAVID: There can only be chance or design. dhw hunts for third ways which don't exist.

dhw: Faith: “strong or unshakeable belief in something, esp. without proof or evidence” (Encarta). Don’t get me wrong on this. I am not attacking faith. But it is obvious that the evidence either way is not strong enough to support a general consensus on the subjects we discuss and since, as you say, none of us can KNOW the truth, there has to come a point at which belief abandons reason. Hence irrationality. Faith is NOT the only alternative left. The alternative to faith is to remain open-minded. That obviously applies to the choice between chance and design, but I am even open-minded enough to consider forms of design that do not depend on David’s personal concept of a god.

DAVID: But faith in a designer is not irrational. It can be, and is for me, a logical conclusion, if only chance and design as the ultimate causes are considered.

Again I must stress that I am not attacking your faith, and I find your arguments concerning design perfectly logical. However, you believe in a supernatural being large and powerful and knowledgeable enough to create a universe and life, you haven’t a clue how it could have come into existence but you assume it has always been there for ever and ever, even though you’ve never seen it because it deliberately hides itself, and you acknowledge that you can’t know any of its attributes. Do you really think this belief is rational? Something brought life into existence. That is as far as reason can take us. Your faith that the “something” could be an unknown and unknowable superbeing is as irrational as the faith that it could be a stroke of luck.