This is actually a slightly edited collection of stuff I wrote over in
Jason's blog in reply to Teh Smooch, but I wanted to make sure I could find it again for future reference (and who knows, maybe someone else will find it interesting).
Faith doesn't explain; it deepens
Faith isn't about "attributing" anything or making things up to explain things. That's just a total misunderstanding about what it's about. Faith is about combining philosophy with spirituality, searching for deeper meaning in things, finding new perspectives, and finding commonalities with each other and with nature.
Claiming something else is rather like a Flat Earth type coming to you and telling you what science is, when you know full well his idea of "science" is bollocks. He's heard a few science words thrown around and knows the terminology, but doesn't understand the deeper meaning of science because he doesn't
want to. I submit a lot of anti-religious atheists feel and act the same way about religion and belief.
I know you (Teh Smooch) grew up in a Christian church, but like any institution, churches tend to fossilize and lose track of what they're originally all about. Scientific institutions can fossilize in the same way, then someone comes along and renews them. The same happens with belief. The problem is that you keep targeting the old fossilized forms of belief without seeing the living bits that are the truly relevant parts.
To put it in terms of psychology or neuroscience, science could be seen as "left-brain" -- rationalistic, deterministic and so on. Belief works very differently, more "right-brain" if you will: emotional, intuitive, primal. It's not a cause-and-effect thing. It's not meant to explain things, either. It's meant to be a guide, a source of inspiration, something to uplift people. Science just can't really do that. Yes, scientists can look at a nebula in wonder, but that's hardly a monopoly of scientists -- and I'd wager the
believing scientist gets that much more wonder out of it.
What hath God wrought!Religion is not a theory
Atheists often speak of religion not providing adequate evidence or proof. But they're thinking in terms of collecting data, which misses the point. Religion is essentially not about hypotheses and data and theories. Religion isn't a theory, if you will.
Smooch posited that science chips away and belief over time and that there is ever less space for belief.
Would the basis of my belief still be around in 200 years? I don't see why not, because that basis has been around as long as there have been human beings. It is innate to our selves. There is nothing in the basis of my belief that science can contradict, because it's just not in the realm of what science is capable of dealing with.
Maybe you should try to experience other religious groups that are more enlightened than your old church, because I think (to use a Biblical term) the scales would fall from your eyes if you just let it happen.
Stop thinking so hard about it. Even if you still choose not to believe (which is perfectly OK), you could at least come to appreciate how others arrive at their beliefs and understand that the just is no inherent conflict between the two worlds. Those who try to say there is a conflict just have their own divisive agenda -- divide and control. Whether it's the Biblical fundamentalist or the radical atheist-secularist, it doesn't matter. Both aren't doing us any favors.
Western and Eastern Christianity and the Reformation
I think part of the problem for you (teh Smooch) with Christianity is that you came from a thoroughly Westernized Protestant church. Western churches, particularly those that arose from the Reformation, tend to have a very literalist ("left-brain", to stick to my metaphor) bent to them. The trap is that they were torn out of the original basis of religious belief and landed smack in the middle of pure rationalism -- and ended up the deer in the headlights of science as they tried to occupy the same space.
The irony is that the Reformation also gave birth to modern science. Without the Reformation, science would never have developed in western Europe.
Eastern churches, and to a lesser degree some parts of Anglican churches and the Roman Catholic Church, stuck closer to the original ancient mysticism and spirituality. Unfortunately a lot of that mysticism has been regurgitated and recycled by New Age types and turned into some ridiculous junk. But there are some common roots of Tao, Buddhism and eastern Christianity (which itself is arguably closer to the origins of Christianity itself). There are forms of mystic prayer in eastern Christianity that died out in the West, but cross-pollenated with Zen and Tao. I mentioned the best-known one recently -- the Prayer of the Heart, also called the Jesus Prayer. Prayer in the old tradition wasn't about reciting words, either, or asking for things -- it was basically a kind of meditation. What we really essentially do in classical prayer is ask for insight, and when meditation is done properly, you can hardly argue that God refuses us that.
Religious icons also have a deep symbolic and mystical meaning to them. They are meant for reflection, not as literal portraits. That's why they don't bother looking realistic at all. It's all about the posture, the coloring, the positioning and so on. They are windows into eternity, as some say. We have a few small ones, and I find them endlessly fascinating, as I do medieval calligraphy, for similar reasons. And they also help to give us insight.
Next consider the idea of Real Presence in the Eucharist -- the notion that God is present in bread and wine. That might sound pretty crazy to a hard rationalist. But consider the emotional power of the ceremony of the Eucharist, and at the same time consider the emotional attachment you have to, say, your wedding ring and how you would feel if someone abused it. Naturally you treat it with some reverence. In the same way, I treat the bread and wine with great reverence because of the emotional attachment I have to the other people present and to God. A literal "presence of God" in the bread and wine doesn't really enter into it -- it's just not that interesting in the end. It is what it is.
Meanwhile in the West, many Protestants and Catholics turned prayer and the Eucharist into some stupid hocus-pocus. Is the bread and wine literally Christ, or not? Can we pray for this or that and expect God to do it? Can "faith healers" really touch people and heal them? And all of that totally, utterly, completely misses the point. Religion is about one thing and one thing only: Our relationship with God and His creation (meaning, each other). Trying to turn it into something else is merely a perversion of it. But if you look at it that way, I think you can see how and why a scientist can fit in belief with his rational way of thinking, because they are truly very different things.
The Bible and Dogma
I don't doubt the Bible at all. Far from it. I simply don't view it as being something that is to be taken word-for-word on its own. Context matters, and the Bible is a historical document. Learning about the history behind it tells us a lot about the meaning of the words in it, and goes a long way to explaining those perceived inconsistencies that hardcore atheists like to go on about. Furthermore, it helps to have the Church (by which I mean all the Church, i.e. all Christians in history) there to interpret it together and try to find some kind of consensus on what it all means, while still giving the individual conscience supremacy in the end.
Meanwhile "dogma" is a word that has gotten a bad rep. "Dogma" really means "that which we all agree to believe". (Christianity began in a remarkably democratic fashion and always sought consensus; anything agreed by consensus was dogma.) It was never meant to be binding with legal penalties and whatnot -- that's the result of the rather legalistic way the Roman Catholic Church has evolved, unfortunately. So I do take it as dogma that there is one God, that Jesus was His son and so on, and have no trouble with the word "dogma" in that sense. I do have trouble with the word the way the Roman Catholic Church tends to use and implement it, though. Maybe it helps to think of "dogma" as "definitions" rather than, well, dogma.
