Faith

My work has gotten busier and I've not the free time I've had for awhile. I'm going to refer you to this thread where Hangdawg and I had some discussions recently. I think there was another thread of 2 we went into this stuff on but I'm discovering it's hard to go back and try to find out where I was saying stuff!And I've run out of time tonight. I lost the forum again. Briefly but it's not something I will go over again here as I'm kind of written out on this topic for now, my interests are in the nondual teachings of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.lfen

Oh, post 56 in Faith and Belief: Agnosticism and Origins is the start of one dialogue I had with Hangdawg on a religious topic. I'm tired and left it out. Gotta to get to bed, my day starts early tomorrow.lfen

Also in Faith and Belief: The Psychology of Christianity and Atheismpost 99 on, is more of that diaglogue.lfen

Thanks.

Of course its random. I think you're under the impression that mutations only happen when they're needed and then only mutations that are helpful happen. This is not the case at all. The majority of mutations are neutral (they neither increase fitness nor decrease it). Many mutations are harmful, they cause fitness to reduce. Some mutations will be helpful, they make the individual more likely to reproduce. Natural selection ensures that the helpful ones are forced to stay, and the harmful ones are forced out. The neutral ones are neither forced to stay nor forced out.Edit to add....what i'm trying to say is that mutations happen with every individual. I can't remember the exact number, but I think on average each human has about 50 mutations that their parents never had. They don't just occur to solve a particular problem a species is going through. And they don't occur for every problem. If a helpful mutation doesn't come along, the species may just go extinct.This message has been edited by happy_atheist, 09-08-2004 07:41 AM

As long as we bear in my mind while reasoning that our reasoning may be 'baloney' we are not putting our 'faith' in anything. It's only when we and try to prove that reasoning isn't 'baloney' that we would enter into the circular argument, and therefore need to rely on 'faith'. The author ratherly cleverly tries to trick us in to doing so with the sentence 'He's wrong, of course, but can you prove it? Guess what? You can't.' Of course we can't!!! We just bear it in mind and carry on as best we can. This is pretty basic A-Level (in the UK anyway!) philosophy. It's stuff Descartes and Hume were torturing themselves over hundreds of years ago. The author's just added some clever wordplay to completely reverse the point of the argument in order to try and convince everyone they have faith, and therefore, he probably reckons, that they must be unconsciously be religous or some other such nonsense.