Faith or Facts

[Pangloss]

Originally Posted by VideCorSpoon

Because there was a time when religion and science were synonymous. What were the stars in the sky at one point but holes in the celestial spheres. How they moved depended on the will of an unmoved mover. Religion (the concept of God) is that term attributed to things that could not be explained. Now we think it is absurd, but back then it was an adequate answer.

You could practice faith and science, but you have to understand the limitations of both practices.

Religion and science were synonymous in the sense that religion occupied both domains of inquiry that are now occupied by both science and religion.

Interestingly the quote in my signature applies to this...it was attributed to Socrates by Aristophanes in the play, "Clouds", in reference to the charge that Socrates was in the clouds, looking down upon the gods, contemplating the movement of the sun and stars. Of course to do this means that you would first have to doubt that the gods are causing these phenomena, and so one of his supposed crimes was spreading ideas against belief in the gods...much of this was the result of Aristophanes' play, though Socrates did later admit that he had spent time studying some form of science in his younger days.

[boagie]

Most insightful!!

The Anatomy of Belief The World According to Xenocrates

[Binyamin Tsadik]

Originally Posted by VideCorSpoon

Because there was a time when religion and science were synonymous. What were the stars in the sky at one point but holes in the celestial spheres. How they moved depended on the will of an unmoved mover. Religion (the concept of God) is that term attributed to things that could not be explained. Now we think it is absurd, but back then it was an adequate answer.

You could practice faith and science, but you have to understand the limitations of both practices.

Interesting that both Scientists and the Sages disagree with this.

The RaMBaN (Nachmanides) wrote an article against this very point.

There were a few Rabbis in his generation that stated that every law in the Torah that we understand are logical Laws and all of the others are Divine.

The RaMBaN wrote that this implies that God is Illogical, which is not true. Therefore, even the Laws we don't understand are logical, we simply do not understand the Logic.

Divinity is in both what we do understand and in what we don't understand and is always logical and True.

Galileo, Newton, and Einstein all beleived in God. Physics, in their minds, was the expression of the perfection of His universe. And what they understood was logical and scientific, and what they did not understand was yet to be understood through logic and science.

Newton even spent his latter years (although he remained christian) criticizing the church, learning Hebrew and trying to decode the Torah with Mathematical Algorithms (as if it were an encription). Today with computers it is much easier, and there are many people that are associated with this today.

The Light of Torah Codes

Bible code - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Rose]

I don’t see any harm in having faith until you believe and believing until you know.

[boagie]

Originally Posted by Rose

I don’t see any harm in having faith until you believe and believing until you know.

Rose,

Does that really makes sense to you? "Thoughs whom say they know, do not know, those who know they do not know, know. Upanishads

[Didymos Thomas]

To the thread starter - science is not necessarily fact. Consider the array of scientific theories once held in high regard only to be shown to be inadequate and not factual. Science is not fact. Science attempts, and does so quite well, to arrive at an objective account of reality.
Faith tends to deal with the subjective. Sometimes, as Benyamin points out, faith and fact are the very same. It is possible to have faith in a fact, or to take sometime on faith (faith as in Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith') that happens to also be a fact.

[Whoever]

Well said. Nor can faith be defined as belief in God, as it was in the first post here, since faith is also important in atheistic religions.

[boagie]

Originally Posted by Whoever

Well said. Nor can faith be defined as belief in God, as it was in the first post here, since faith is also important in atheistic religions.

Whoever,

What atheistic religions?

[Rose]

Originally Posted by boagie

Rose,

Does that really makes sense to you? "Thoughs whom say they know, do not know, those who know they do not know, know. Upanishads

Well, yes. As a Seeker a lot of what I am told is taken onboard in faith until I do some research then I might believe it - believing isn’t knowing. Then with more research I might come to accept it as the truth - isn’t that knowing?

[boagie]

Rose,

Actually its is problematic to term what most people would call being open minded with the term faith, I do get your meaning, but it is an unfortunate way to express it.