The Science of Belief

by LittleToe 90 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Terry

  But Terry your post got me thinking. For me the science of belief is more akin to the science of love for instance or the science justice. Am i makinfg sense.......

  Dunno...

  JW's make a kind of science out of their belief. That is what appealed to me originally. There was so much to learn that passed for fact. I could soak it all up like a sponge and yet there would always be more.

  With the passage of time and the far remove from the Kingdom Hall's daily grind I see it all differently now. What was really going on wasn't science at all. It was closed system with artificial constraints. Facts weren't facts. It was all a matter of agreement like playing football. Football is a made up sport with rules. Stay within those rules and you are playing the game "correctly". But, Football isn't really about anything at all but football. It can be used as a kind of loose metaphor for almost anything---but, there is no actual and natural correspondence.

  Religion is useful for metaphor. But, the believer loses track of the "this is LIKE this" and thinks "this IS this".

  You can see your neighbor as a householder; a sheep or goat. You can see your neighbor as a character in Jesus' parable. You can see your neighbor as Armageddon fodder. You can relate to your neighbor through the artificial filter anyway you like. But, you fool yourself if you think you are dealing with your neighbor as an actual person or human being like yourself. No. The neighbor has become one of your mental metaphors like a game piece.

  That is the artifice of thinking purely in rigid "type" and "antitypes". The humanity vanishes and it is all a game with pieces on a vast board.

  There is little actual science in BELIEF. But, there is always plenty of belief in actual SCIENCE.

  Keeping track of what goes where and why is where intelligence is vitally necessary. People are who they are before they are anything else you might want to cast them as in your theatre of the mind.
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  bernadette

  Terry I understand you. The JW religion is exactly as you've described - an exhausting game with opposing sides battling it out, but a very damaging one and in the end very meaningless and artificial. IThe worst part is we aren't allowed to stop playing!

  Science and the study of it is more satisfying and real.

  I find that faith is too. Reasonable testable faith
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  hillary_step

  Bernadette,

  Reasonable testable faith

  How is faith testable? Is personal experience of something intangible and open to numerous interpretations actually evidence? After all, if you give a person a hallucinogen that stimulates a certain area of their celebral cortex, they can have faith that they will fly. Is the 'testable' part of your statement the results of a drop from a thirty storey building? If so, surely this is not a test of faith but more a visceral experiment in the chemistry of brain function.

  I am not sure that anything that cannot really be empirically tested could ever be descibed as 'reasonable'.

  LT,

  I think you were showing the cunning political side of your nature when you chose to use the word 'belief' as opposed to 'faith' in the framework of your opening thread. I will show you what I mean :

  Time and again the refrain is heard that belief and science are mutually exclusive, that belief somehow corrupts good science, that belief is not empirical. I'd like to throw another slant on that, if I may.

  One only need replace the word 'belief' with 'faith' in this statement to start a discussion board firestorm. What you call the science of belief, I call the art of belief. Belief is possible, ( often neccessary ) without the involvment of faith to those who examine empirically - in fact it is a safety net to them, but those that settle on a belief in order to strengthen a faith are straying into an abstract territory in which all takers are right and at the same time wrong. To the person who adheres to a religious belief, belief is intriniscally tied in with their faith. You show this by your conclusive thought which I assume was a large part of the motivation for your thread.

  Further to that, maybe there really is a "God" tying it all together in the background, as well.

  I have no idea where and when the human race suddenly and explosively gained its consciousness. This is at the root of the mystery of all our questions regarding faith, belief, and the insatiable and beautiful obsession we all have with understanding where we came from and where we are going to. What we do know so far is that we are chemical creatures. Chemistry can induce religion in us, it can induce belief, it can also induce faith. It can make music and poetry and if we suck the lead from our paintbrushes for long enough, we may even paint like Van Gogh.

  The only reliable belief imho is one deals in tangibles, though I wish this were not so. As I have noted before, I am a very reluctant disbeliever.

  Best regards - HS
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  bernadette

  How is faith testable? Is personal experience of something intangible and open to numerous interpretations actually evidence? After all, if you give a person a hallucinogen that stimulates a certain area of their celebral cortex, they can have faith that they will fly. Is the 'testable' part of your statement the results of a drop from a thirty storey building? If so, surely this is not a test of faith but more a visceral experiment in the chemistry of brain function.

  I am not sure that anything that cannot really be empirically tested could ever be descibed as 'reasonable'

  Hillary

  One thing I have learned is that faith/belief needs constant reality checks - internally and also in debate with others. It needs to be subjected to the utmost scrutiny. So far my faith has withstood the scrutiny I have subjected it too.

  When faith becomes religion then in my opinion it sort of becomes set in stone and that is dangerous.

  bernadette
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  Narkissos

  Hello HS,

  Time and again the refrain is heard that belief and science are mutually exclusive, that belief somehow corrupts good science, that belief is not empirical. I'd like to throw another slant on that, if I may.

  One only need replace the word 'belief' with 'faith' in this statement to start a discussion board firestorm. What you call the science of belief, I call the art of belief. Belief is possible, ( often neccessary ) without the involvment of faith to those who examine empirically - in fact it is a safety net to them, but those that settle on a belief in order to strengthen a faith are straying into an abstract territory in which all takers are right and at the same time wrong. To the person who adheres to a religious belief, belief is intriniscally tied in with their faith. You show this by your conclusive thought which I assume was a large part of the motivation for your thread.

  I think I have a linguistical problem here. As you know the natural correspondence of "faith" in French is foi; "belief" is croyance, from croire = "to believe". They derive directly from Latin, which split the Greek lexical family pistis/pisteuô into two distinct roots, fides for the noun and credere for the verb.

  But (as I realised through the misunderstandings in one of my first threads here, which I [mis?]titled "Faith without beliefs?") it seems that the notions went opposite paths in popular usage, in spite of the parallel use of the words in Bible translation (where "faith," like foi, is used for the basic act or attitude of trust, regardless of its object, as in the healing stories of the Gospels).

  We use foi for the fides qua creditur, the very act of believing, and croyance for the fides quae creditur or "contents" of belief (beliefs, which only dogmatics can separate from "opinion"). This led to different developments, such as the famous motto among late 19th-century French liberal Protestants, le salut par la foi indépendamment des croyances ("salvation by faith, regardless of beliefs"). If I understand you correctly you would have to say "salvation by belief, regardless of faith" to carry approximately the same idea. If this is the common understanding of the nuance (as it seems to be) I find it quite strange it has not yet been taken into account in English Bible translations.

  Anyway, understanding that what you mean by "belief" is what I mean by foi (what Tillich beautifully called "the courage to be"), I loved your sentence:

  What you call the science of belief, I call the art of belief.

  I would only add that the art of belief doesn't rule out a reflexive science of (the art of) belief, which has nothing to do with dogmatics (what is [to be] believed) but takes subjective belief itself as its object. Of course, this particular kind of cogitatio fidei would naturally belong to the realm of human sciences rather than to theology, but I think a religious approach ("pisteology" perhaps) is possible too. Its object would be how belief works, regardless of specific religious beliefs or the lack thereof (for in that sense atheists also believe).
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  Deputy Dog

  Nark

  My French is a little rusty, but don't you guys have two words for "know" savoir, and connais The reason I bring this up is because they carry different meanings My guess the Watchtower would like to use the word "savoir" in John 17:3 at least that's the way the claim to "know" Jesus. How does the Watchtower deal with the difference? John 17:3 Or, la vie éternelle, c'est qu'ils te connaissent, toi, le seul vrai Dieu, et celui que tu as envoyé, Jésus Christ.

  I bring all this up because I don't believe "knowledge" has much use in this passage, I think it has more to do with "recognition". I'm hoping you could shed some light in my discussion with LT.

  LT

  Only if you read it that way. To know someone in a relational sense don't we at least need to know in an intellectual sense that they at least exist? Otherwise, how do you interpret Rom.10:17 "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."? Hence I would posit that there is at least a minimal amount of knowledge needed to form a catalyst, even if that knowledge is merely (?) the direct experience of meeting an individual whom we previously were oblivious to.

  One has more to do with "knowledge" than the other.
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  Midget-Sasquatch

  Lets say that praying improves to some extent the mental/physical health of a number of people.

  I believe it has alot to do with how the CNS can modulate the immune system. IThere's no need to consider a non-material agency, when factors like neuropeptide levels and brain area activation can be gauged. As kid A already posted, there's no scarcity of work being done in this field.
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  Narkissos

  DD,

  You're right about savoir et connaître although they are separated by usage rather than meaning -- savoir is usually more practical, sometimes equivalent to the English use of "can" (je sais nager, I can swim); but in many cases they overlap.

  Btw, Biblical Greek too has two verbs for "to know," oida and ginôskô, and they also overlap a lot; cf. for instance John 7:27: "Yet we know (oidamen) where this man is from; but when the Messiah comes, no one will know (ginôskei) where he is from." There's always the risk of reading subtle nuances into mere stylistic variations.

  The French NWT of 17:3, btw, is not quite as bad as the English, as it renders the so-called progressive aspect of the present tense (one of the pet obsessions of the original NWT, which is interesting in some cases but applies badly to cognitive verbs) without substituting a noun to a verb or introducing the terrible image of "taking in". It reads qu'ils apprennent à te connaître (lit. "that they may learn to know you").

  About "recognition," perhaps you missed my post on the previous page where I suggested that the notion of "knowledge" should be understood against the (broad) post-Platonic background of Hellenistic popular philosophy. It is a widespread conception that all knowledge is reminiscence, recognition, recollection. Hence the idea of "ignorance" as a repression or forgetfulness of "truth" or original "knowledge" in Romans; hence the idea of knowing / recognising the light which originally illuminates every human in John's Prologue. It has always to do with recognising our true origin and true spiritual nature (as will be developed in later Gnosticism).
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  LittleToe

  I'm going to be away for the weekend, so I thought I'd best dash this post off before I go. I look forward to reading more interesting stuff on my return on Monday

  ---

  Didier:

  I meant: This (switching tables etc.) is a temptation which faith cannot give in to (or indulge in?) except by forsaking itself... but the resulting misunderstanding might be interesting too

  Hehe. Now I'm on your wavelength. Like you, I wonder how we might use the term "temptation faith"

  More on knowledge later...

  ---

  Daystar:

  I once asked him if spirits exist, if gods exist, if any entities beyond those that we can see and feel, exist. His response was that it didn't matter. Because it is "as if" they existed.

  I guess this is the thrust of one of the points in my initial post. A fresh look at the mechanics of prayer can surely be approached scientifically?

  ---

  Anitar:

  Is it possible for a person to live their entire life and be totally unaware of the world around them?

  Some people appear to have the ability to switch off the world about them, or else place certain filters on how they interpret it. I suspect that this category of behaviour is usually to do with their spirit being crushed. It can happen in society in general and over-bearing families, as well as in cults.

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  Skyking:

  Faith trumps proof everytime.

  You keep using extreme examples. Resort to hyperbole isn't the most convincing of arguments

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  DDog:

  Collectively we were all connected to the Divine, through Adam.

  Did we inherit Adam's knowledge and relationship, or was it lost through his "fall" and ultimate demise? I wasn't arguing in a communal sense, but rather in an individual sense. How else can you apply your castigation of Derek, but on an individual level?

  I think you are trying to make excuses for people that God says have no excuse.

  What a strange impression to come away with. I'm merely trying to understand through discussion how the end may have been arrived at. Meanwhile I excuse neither myself nor anyone else.

  One forms a relationship with someone he trusts and believes the person has his best interest in mind, not with someone walking down the street whom he has never met but he knows exists because he saw them across the street.

  You're wrangling about levels of knowledge. If you trust and believe someone then IMHO you have already forged a relationship. We have a relationship, even though we've never met.

  My "opinion" does not matter.

  Of course your opinion matters, both from the perspective that this is a "discussion" board, and from the fact that I asked for it.

  ---

  exjdub:

  I have had a very profound and powerful experience with acupuncture and Chines medicine.

  It can shake the very foundations of your previous convictions, can't it?

  ---

  Terry:Good posts. Positive reinforcement is a real factor.

  ---

  Kid-A:
  I guess my point is that the materialist outlook isn't holistic enough. Neither does it truly take into account the biases of the observer, merely by virtue of them being a homo ssapien sapien. They take to the experiment the biases of their own human nature.

  ---

  Dang, I've run out of time, and have to see someone before I go catch a plane. Catch y'al laters
• 

  ellderwho

  LT,

  Im not clear on this:

  Only if you read it that way. To know someone in a relational sense don't we at least need to know in an intellectual sense that they at least exist? .......................Hence I would posit that there is at least a minimal amount of knowledge needed to form a catalyst, even if that knowledge is merely (?) the direct experience of meeting an individual whom we previously were oblivious to.

  Does not Christ address this here:

  Mat 7:22

  Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out demons, and by thy name do many mighty works?

  Mat 7:23

  And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

  Perhaps Im way off here?