What if faith is like love? What logic is there in loving one person so much more than all the others?
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THANK YOU! That's exactly the point the article was making.
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But the point is invalid. You can't use love to determine if the person you "love" exists. Faith is a bit like love in that sense: both are useless at determining the truth of a proposition.
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Exactly - and yet you still probably believe that people you love do exist. And we can have "Faith" in our hope of making the world better even if we can't prove that hope valid by reason alone. That's the kind of faith the article discussed.
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You ignored what I wrote. I do beleive the people I love exist, but I had physical evidence that they existed before I loved them. Does this sound rational to you? "I've never seen your wife; is she real?" "She can't be seen/heard/felt, but I feel her love inside."
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You said that love in itself doesn't prove existence? Love is usually given wrt to a person, faith is wrt morals, life, the universe, etc. Neither prove existence, they're each only meaningful given the things we have experienced (people, life).
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In the wise words of
@timminchin, "love without evidence is stalking". Point is, religious faith is belief in the absence of evidence. It's inconsistent with the evidence based scientific reality of how the universe functions. -
Right, and more than that, religious faith (belief without evidence) is a demonstrably unreliable method of determining what is true.
End of conversation
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I have faith that the chair I am sitting on will not break underneath me, causing injury. There are various degrees of faith, believe it or not. Reason-Faith is cut into facets, dimensions.
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Reason, can teach one to love in general with the same mind of intensity that it can create one to become a nazi. Smiles.
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Love is so much more than preference or desire.
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"Reason can't get me to love diversity"
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Love can be propositional. Here's an example of love as a proposition: "My wife is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen". Reason (probably) won't get you there.
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Your opinions of beauty are a preference, though...
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No. You have a preference for beauty, and a preference for a certain person (your wife), but the proposition "My wife is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen" is a proposition, an expression of belief: "I believe that my wife is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen".
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Yeah, but it is a proposition about a preference. The degree to which you find your wife beautiful is a preference. Beauty is subjective.
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That's still a belief. It doesn't have to be objective. In fact that's sort of the point: Pinker claims that love is all about preference, with neither reason nor faith being involved. But expressing the proposition "my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world" is a belief.
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But that belief is not love. That’s a belief that stems from your love. Pinker’s claim is about love. It seems you’re moving the goalposts.
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That's a more reasonable objection, but it's question-begging. Love, qua preference, is deeply involved in the proposition, but the proposition is also involved in love. Believing that my wife is the most beautiful person in the world may be a big part of being in love with her.
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That renders this re-statement that "love is just a preference" question-begging, because I've not been given any independent reason to believe that it's just a preference.
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