Is faith the answer to cognitive dissonance?

The point is you are using naive empiricism and intuitive rationalism here. You had an experience, and you used your intuitive reasoning to conclude what that experience was.It might be the case that cause of your experience is something that science does indeed 'miss' for whatever reasons. But science is just a formalised system of gathering evidence and applying reason. And science has shown that on the whole humans are pretty crap at intuitive reasoning under certain circumstances AND that they are prone to giving undue confidence in their intuitive conclusions.So if you are 'committed to {science as an evidential basis.' then you have to conclude that relying on your perceptions of your experiences and your personal interpretations of them is prone to significant error. I'm willing to bet that they are scientifically investigatable, but doing so is beyond the scope of your lab, not science. But it is evidence. I have further evidence for the hypothesis that many humans claim to have had some kind of religiously based experience.If I accept that people have had these experiences, then I just need to a hypothesis to explain why they have them.One is that these experiences stem from the brain, that something occurs neurologically that causes an experience that is interpreted religiously. This maybe similar to a bout of extreme paranoia, only with a reverse emotion. A feeling of unseen forces acting in your interest rather than against you. Maybe other such neurological events combine to produce various effects.The other is that the experiences are caused by the things the humans experiencing them think they are caused by (at least approximately). Again, that you have a memory of it, you have strong evidence that it occurred. As far as I can tell, you have no evidence of what caused it. You do have evidence of some of things that can cause those kinds of experiences.I once watched a man cut a woman in half in front of my own eyes. I experienced what a man cutting a woman half would look and sound like. But we both know that the experience probably wasn't caused by a man cutting a woman in half. I am talking about a childhood memory, so I don't remember the names of the people involved, the venue or the date. So using your naive (in the technical sense) method I could conclude that in this case the woman really was cut in half and was kept alive by magic and that just because in some cases there is a more mundane and replicable explanation that doesn't mean it was in the case I remember. Not at all. Straggler isn't saying that you disliked the religious experience. He isn't saying it didn't happen. It would be more like Straggler saying "But you don't have any evidence that chocolate exists, it is a well studied fact that humans have spontaneous novel taste experiences and that they fill this mystery with various mythological 'perfect dessert' archetypes." And he isn't saying that because you can produce a bar of chocolate and tell him that this is similar enough to the thing you ate and you enjoyed the taste. You can deny it. I've had multiple highly convincing religious experiences. I've seen optical illusions. I've experienced the belief that I was more competent than I was. I've engaged in confirmation bias, fallen prey to peer pressure, subjected to authority figures without question and so on. I know that I can trust my senses, but only so far. I know I can trust my instincts, but only so far.And that's what the religious people on these boards seem to be calling faith. Trust in their senses, in their gut feelings to a degree that science has shown is too far.The Christians often comment about our moral failings being integral to our existence. But it isn't just moral failings, our failings cover a wide range of cognitive issues. It would be foolish for evolution to evolve a being that questioned everything it experienced. Of course you are going to be inclined to believe the magician really flew, or that a loving presence is guiding you through the hard times. It's not that we're crazy, it's that our brain is filled with shortcuts its dying to make, associations swirling around. You feel a sense of awe and protection? That's associated with the emotions one might have for one's father. Some kind of superfather of some kind might be an intuitive explanation for it...The weird thing is that you know this. You know people, despite their best intentions, will get in the way of themselves. That biases that we may be unaware of will colour our actions. You know this because you respect the scientific method which has been developed as a means to getting around all the failings we have.And if you want to claim that in your personal case (and in the personal cases of others) science cannot directly investigate because it is in the past - I submit this is flawed.I had a headache last week that lasted an hour or two.Science cannot study my headache, since it no longer exists and it is probable that the cause has since passed and any evidence of it is now gone. Other than my memory.But science can study headaches.We can't rule out a supernatural cause, and some people do believe in supernaturally caused headaches.We could go on. Every scientifically investigated phenomenon has a supernatural explanation. And there may be some people that strongly 'feel' that the supernatural explanation is correct in some cases. Maybe they heard a voice from the agent in question, or felt its chill 'presence', or had whatever subjective experience that they personally interpret in whatever way that if true would confirm existence of said agent.I wouldn't say faith is about resolving cognitive dissonance. Any cognitive dissonance that might arise is its own affair.To me though, a good deal of faith comes from allowing a personal experience with no understandable cause to be interpreted in an intuitive fashion almost entirely uncritically. Intuition is the kind of thing that recognizes people's faces, tells us their emotional state based on subtle fatial geometries and so on. There's no conscious working anything out. It is like identifying the taste of chocolate. It's automatic, and we generally don't think about it in any depth. Once the impression has passed uncritically from intuition, it becomes experiential fact and so the conclusion 'God is with me' is as unquestionable as 'the table is in front of me'.'Faith' is simply 'selective naivet' Where naive means 'believing uncritically an experience'. Calling it 'faith' makes it sound more palatable - indeed even noble. There are many times when this kind of faith is appropriate, but it shouldn't go unchecked. It is appropriate to engage the more analytical part of the mind to double check intuition's working because intuition is demonstrably bad at some tasks.I can't argue with your feelings, or your memory CS - but I will argue that analytically you should be sceptical of the experiences you had. If you aren't - then you are not being committed to the science which strongly disagrees with you.So you are either committed to science or merely mostly committed to science except when it is talking about your own failings. Maybe that's where the cognitive dissonance comes in?

I suspect also that it was physical evidence that led to it being written down - when lots of babies died from premature circumcisions, someone spotted the pattern and reduced mortality and wrote it down so that more babies didn't die (and in this hypothetical scenario - if the person dishonestly claimed it was the word of god in order to convince everybody to wait until they cut - I don't blame them at all). The risk of severe bleeding is high during the first week - but it doesn't vanish on the eight day.

Great - then consider the error margins when dealing with your measuring equipment (ie a human brain). I'm not saying you were mistaken. I'm just saying that the entire point of science is to avoid making mistakes that humans are prone to making and taking an impression at its face value is one of those mistakes.If I created a motion machine that I was convinced was perpetual, but then broke the machine by mistake. Then I was unable to create another machine that I perceived as being perpetual. Or indeed any scientific idea, such as cold fusion. What is more likely - that I made an assessment error the first time around and didn't have resources/time to spot it or that I really did hit the golden goose?If I went to the media and got on the front pages - what would you rate my chances of successfully replicating my results? I'm assuming you had a religious experience. Whether you think I'm implying they are miniscule reasons is something else. I certainly think concluding that the supernatural exists from that is somewhat willy-nilly. Sure, you've reasoned about it no doubt, but I would wager you did so in a way that would be destroyed in any academic paper.It seems to me that your reasoning is essentially:
I experienced a set of things which I associated with the supernatural.
Therefore I now think there is 'another, non-physical, world'.Though I'm sure you dressed it up prettier than that when your rationalizing what you had experienced. No - the reason you should doubt yourself is because science has shown how terrible an individual's perception of things can be.Here's an example.You have the full reasoning capacities as you have now. You are sat there reading this sentence. And as you begin this sentence you hear a voice. It says "I bet, with a bit of research we could track Modulous down. Kill him and you'll be rewarded with Beer/heaven/whatever appeals."The question is: Do you reason that you are experiencing a disturbing aural hallucination. Or do you reason that there is a being from beyond that is trying to bribe you into murdering me? I'm not asking about the possibilities, but how you'd actually handle the situation. Would you be more concerned about mental illness ("Am I going crazy here?") or about malign otherworldly entites ("Am I being haunted?").I'm just saying that you should worry about your mental health and if the voice continues, consider speaking to a doctor.And if you have a pleasant experience that could be explained by benign otherworldly entities, you should enjoy the ride but you should be more concerned again about your mental condition (and happy with the pleasant life experience) than pleased that something nice paid attention to you (if you were going to have any long term psychological response to it).