(urth) Information, etc

[Chris]

James said:
>For modern seculars Faith is practically antonymous to Reason.
>In Faith, we place all those things that Reason denies, but which we
>require as humans. Reason says we are the product of natural forces
>within a closed system. But most can't live like that so they take a
>"leap of faith", a jump into darkness, that there is a divine Creator
>who made us in his image, (temporarily, if they are enlightened)
>suspending their knowledge of what Reason tells them. Reason says
>that Love and Altruism are a natural phenomenon of evolution,
>a trick of sorts by our brains and glands, that gave the genes of our
>ancestors the upper hand over those of competitors. But when we
>look in the face of our beloved we cannot as human beings accept
>thinking of them that way: we would not give up our lives for our
>genes. So we take the leap again and declare that Love is transcendent.

The problem you get into there is that when you explain love and altruism as 
evolutionary phenomena, you find that what is left of "love" and "altruism", 
lacking moral/normative dimension, no longer fits the description of the 
original terms. When you say that they're evolutionary tricks, you have not 
explained love or altruism, you've claimed that they do not exist and gone 
on to replace them with two homonymous terms. And there is a school of 
course that does this, but many other "seculars" who are not particularly 
interested in "faith" don't accept this view. All that aside, I think that 
the modern secular view is, like Dan'l said, that faith and reason are 
complementary. After all, you have to get your first principles from 
somewhere, and Reason can't give them to you. Faith is one place you can 
start from.

>On the other hand, the modern observants (lets use seven-day
>Creationist Christians as our guinea pigs here) see materialist
>seculars as merely followers of an alternate (idolatrist) religion.
>They believe Genesis, and seculars believe what some science
>journalist they've never met wrote in Discover Magazine or said
>on Nova on PBS. The faith of observants is founded on their
>observed experience: they trust the integrity of the Person that
>has so influenced their lives, and therefore believe what they
>think he has told them. ("Faith is the substance of things
>hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" Hebrews 11:1)

It's not my habit to make strong statements like this, but I'll go out on a 
limb and say that while this view of faith is distinctly modern - in fact 
it's the one Kierkegaard railed against - it is only "faith" in a degenerate 
sense, and certainly captures little of the primordial meaning of the word. 
What you're describing is simply unreflective belief, which is a set that is 
not co-extensive with faith.

>could not have arisen without the world-view established by
>Judeo-Christian theology, he predicted that science as-we-know-it
>will end when we all follow this tact to its logical conclusion
>that Reason itself (founded on the premise that human
>observation is valid) is itself unreasonable.
>
>J

Matt's quote of Popper was interesting on this point, although Popper was 
certainly putting a spin on Hume. You don't need Hume to know that inductive 
reasoning doesn't meet rationalist standards. Remember that rationalism 
looks for truth that is *universal* and *necessary*. Inductive reason never 
claimed to give us that. What Hume did was to place inductive reasoning in a 
more central position. You could maybe say that Hume thus showed that all 
our knowledge was somehow uncertain, but it would be better I think to say 
that he claimed that our *real* criteria for what we call "certainty" in the 
daily course of our lives is not quite so strict as rationalists suppose. 
Science has come to grips with this quite easily - you won't find many 
scientists claiming the necessary, absolute truth of their theories. But 
this can only be a gloss since Hume's move runs a little deeper than this.

In any event Reason does not become unreasonable by starting from a premise 
that itself has no rational justification - if that were so, logic could 
never have gotten off the ground even with the ancients. The same charge 
could be levelled against the very first geometers and mathematicians, it's 
not characteristic of the modern age.