Is faith blind?

...So no "facts" can be known with absolute certainty since one never knows when a black swan will appear...[ ]... Since facts can never be known with 100% certainty...

I don't understand that... If I drop a bowl on my kitchen floor and it smashes, that my bowl is smashed is a fact, and I can know this with certainty. If my dog dies, its a fact, and I can know it with certainty.
 
I wonder if a lot of misunderstanding is caused by the English phrase "Believe in" It seems to mean two things - ether believing in the existence of something or trusting something. When Jesus said "believe in me" he was talking to people who were there with him so it is hardly likely he meant "believe I exist" and yet many seem to interpret it that way.

Indeed. Surely, the two definitions are intertwined. While believing in Jesus would obviously entail some ontological commitment (no mythicism!), that alone would not capture the true force of the phrase. It is better understood as placing oneself within, and choosing to live by, a particular narrative about existence that orbits around this central figure.
 
If I drop a bowl on my kitchen floor and it smashes, that my bowl is smashed is a fact, and I can know this with certainty.

If you saw this happen from a position out and above your body, would you still believe it happened with certainty and there was only you in the room ?

If my dog dies, its a fact, and I can know it with certainty.

Not really. The dog may be able to be brought back, so it's not really dead surely ? :)
 
If you saw this happen from a position out and above your body, would you still believe it happened with certainty and there was only you in the room ?



Not really. The dog may be able to be brought back, so it's not really dead surely ? :)

I and anybody else can verify the bowl was smashed... same goes for the dog...
 
Indeed. Surely, the two definitions are intertwined. While believing in Jesus would obviously entail some ontological commitment (no mythicism!), that alone would not capture the true force of the phrase. It is better understood as placing oneself within, and choosing to live by, a particular narrative about existence that orbits around this central figure.
Nice post.;;/? Language to some degree seems to limit our experience. I noticed when I moved to Sweden and had to learn Swedish that you have to adjust your concepts and how they are applied in order to understand the language.
 
March 2017 AOM: Singing the Stars to Earth

Göbekli Tepe straddles the world of settled agriculture –for which we at least have some context- and the (debatably) pre-agricultural world of the Palaeolithic hunter gather. And instead of an alphabet, what this ‘Rosetta Stone’ unlocks is the inner world of the Palaeolithic –revealing it to be as rich and haunted and profound as our own. With one gentle slap of its central T-pillar, Göbekli Tepe erases the notion that ‘religion’ is nothing but stories farmers told each other at night once the grain was brought in. It looks more and more like ‘asking the big questions’ was the first thing we ever did. The functional explanation of religion –that it emerged as a means of social control in stratifying early urban centres- can no longer be justified. As the discoverer of Göbekli Tepe, Dr Klaus Schmidt once remarked, “the cathedral predates the city”.i

In the last few decades, anthropology and archaeology have had a good hard look at the origins of their previously unexamined axioms -seeing them as the imperialist, materialist mind viruses that they are- and somewhat sheepishly jettisoned them. Nevertheless, a few of those old imperial ghosts remain –typically as descriptive terms that arose in the bad old days of anthropology but somehow survived the purge.

Consider that the academic term ‘hunter gatherer’ still codes for the long-abandoned concept of civilizational progress, because the subtext is one of an interrupted agricultural development. It has also turned out to be an inaccurate description of the food sources of the Palaeolithic (as well as modern hunter gatherers, frankly). Early 20th century European anthropologists considered ‘farming’ to be the sowing of grain but much of the population of the planet did something more akin to gardening. That is, the management and cultivation of local plants that the early anthropologists mistook for ‘pristine nature’.

Australian Aboriginal cultures are arguably the oldest continually practised cultures on Earth. Thanks to the work of academics such as Duane Hamacher, we are beginning to see just how sophisticated and vastly ancient their astrotheology really was/is. He has shown that Aboriginal legends have described events such as meteor impacts and the separation of Tasmania from the mainland at the end of the Ice Age that date back more than 10,000 years –convincingly and finally drawing a line under the debate over whether oral cultures can ‘accurately’ describe ancient historical events. They can. (Which suggests we should take another look at all those flood myths, yes?)

Within the star lore of Australia, we find some surprising correlations to much, much later cultures. For instance, 90% of Aboriginal tales associated with Orion are to do with hunting.ix The Pleiades are almost as commonly considered a woman or group of women who is pursued by Orion. Duane Hamacher suggests it is either ‘cultural convergent evolution’ –which has its own burden of evidence if that is so- or else it ‘suggests a much earlier story common to both cultural roots’.

Aboriginal legends are particularly useful in attempting to do what the king’s men failed to do; put a sunken continent back together again. With specific reference to Sundaland, Dr Stephen Oppenheimer postulated in his essential Eden in the East that it would be the Melanesian and Polynesian cultures that would likely give the best evidence of the original continent’s belief system.

But the baby was thrown out with the bathwater as clearly ideas and stories and technologies move between cultures and we should be able to examine these movements without making claims of racial superiority. Dr Witzel manages to avoid the old imperial error by conducting a worldwide comparison of mythology and then mapping that to genetic and archaeological evidence –something that mythology should have been crying out for these last few decades. The use of hard scientific data is the best defence against ‘stacking’ cultures in order of personal/racial preference on the one hand, and lazily relying on psychological ‘explanations’ for the appearance of similarities in mythology across time and space.

To dramatically oversimplify his process, Dr Witzel essentially performed a genealogy of mythemes such as ‘world tree’ and ‘warring brothers’ and ‘separation of earth and sky’ by examining in which modern cultures they appear and then looking back through our genetic history for the last time the ancestors of these modern cultures were in the ‘same place’. This made the great civilisations of the ancient world –Sumer, the Indus and Egypt- ‘secondary centres of mythological innovation’. Mythology did not originate in these centres but was dramatically transformed by them. The stories themselves were on the move beforehand and after.

Dr Witzel’s schema breaks down into the two following macro-groups –both of which emerge from his subsequent reconstruction of what may have been mankind’s earliest belief system. He has named them Gondwana and Laurasia (and the hypothetical earliest belief system Pan-Gaean) although these titles do not relate to geography or landmasses.
 
I don't understand what that has to do with facts.

It means facts can always be doubted. There is a little leap of faith that occurs whenever we accept that our perception of reality compressed into symbolic representation (words) is reality... a fact is a symbolic representation of our perception of reality that is most useful to us within the context.

We can re-frame an event to change the fact. We can also question the accuracy of our perceptions. We can increase confidence with induction by piling up more and more consistency, but induction can never get us to 100% confidence. Solipsism is always a viable choice, though not usually the most practical.
 
It means facts can always be doubted. There is a little leap of faith that occurs whenever we accept that our perception of reality compressed into symbolic representation (words) is reality... a fact is a symbolic representation of our perception of reality that is most useful to us within the context.

We can re-frame an event to change the fact. We can also question the accuracy of our perceptions. We can increase confidence with induction by piling up more and more consistency, but induction can never get us to 100% confidence. Solipsism is always a viable choice, though not usually the most practical.

Can you show me an example of how my bowl was smashed (a fact), is not smashed, by 'reframing'?
 
Can you show me an example of how my bowl was smashed (a fact), is not smashed, by 'reframing'?

Reframing doesn't say what is not. It just draws a different box around what is to generate a fact that is more relevant or more useful to the purpose at hand...or perhaps less relevant and this is a way to deceive. Perhaps your bowl fell on the kitchen floor and smashed because a tornado tore through your house smashing everything... in which case describing the event by simply saying your bowl fell on the kitchen floor and smashed is kind of absurd. Or we could say entropy in a set of silicon dioxide crystals increased. Or potential energy was transferred to kinetic and then to heat and noise. Or perhaps a bug was innocently traversing the floor and got his legs chopped off and the condition of your bowl is irrelevant to him. The single "fact" that you care about could be covered up by an infinite number of irrelevant pieces of information, but you've drawn your box around the event and distilled the essence of its meaning to you in a simple short sentence. And what you mean by that short sentence might not be what I think you mean. I've had a brittle bowl in mind this whole time, but perhaps your bowl was copper and so it has a dent in it and I think you're being melodramatic so I wouldn't say it was smashed but rather slightly gashed - easily repairable. Nevertheless if you distilled the event down in such a way that is most meaningful and relevant to you, then to you that fact plainly stated is good representation of your perception.

But more in line with the discussion at hand... you could've dreamt your bowl got smashed and in fact your bowl is still safe in the cabinet. You could be lost in a simulation and find that when you come unplugged, your bowl is in fact in tact.
 
Reframing doesn't say what is not. It just draws a different box around what is to generate a fact that is more relevant or more useful to the purpose at hand...or perhaps less relevant and this is a way to deceive. Perhaps your bowl fell on the kitchen floor and smashed because a tornado tore through your house smashing everything... in which case describing the event by simply saying your bowl fell on the kitchen floor and smashed is kind of absurd. Or we could say entropy in a set of silicon dioxide crystals increased. Or potential energy was transferred to kinetic and then to heat and noise. Or perhaps a bug was innocently traversing the floor and got his legs chopped off and the condition of your bowl is irrelevant to him. The single "fact" that you care about could be covered up by an infinite number of irrelevant pieces of information, but you've drawn your box around the event and distilled the essence of its meaning to you in a simple short sentence. And what you mean by that short sentence might not be what I think you mean. I've had a brittle bowl in mind this whole time, but perhaps your bowl was copper and so it has a dent in it and I think you're being melodramatic so I wouldn't say it was smashed but rather slightly gashed - easily repairable. Nevertheless if you distilled the event down in such a way that is most meaningful and relevant to you, then to you that fact plainly stated is good representation of your perception.

But more in line with the discussion at hand... you could've dreamt your bowl got smashed and in fact your bowl is still safe in the cabinet. You could be lost in a simulation and find that when you come unplugged, your bowl is in fact in tact.

Yeah, that my bowl was smashed remains a fact, you can't alter that fact. Nature just ain't bothered how we might like things to be... it does what it wants, the bowl smashed, the pieces of a bowl are in my bin, and I have one less bowl in my cupboard. I can question it all I like, but it won't change the fact. A trip to IKEA is planned at the weekend actually, because I'm now down to just three.
 
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