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Rev. David Safford, D.D.

Proof vs Faith

  • I recently debated with an Atheist relative who used a variation of the "Russel's Teapot" argument to illistrate the lunacy of believing in a diety. He took it a step farther, postulating a "Stegosaurus in a space ship orbiting Neptune".... to which I responded "I can't prove or disprove that. I don't believe it, but it isn't for me to try and correct you."

    With that my Uncle quickly escalated the conversation to talking about how impossibly ridiculous his idea was, and that no one in their right mind could agree. He explained that such blind faith was foolish and detrimental to mankind as a whole. Of course, explaining to him that the general scientific community was taking just as many things on faith the debate took a turn once more and became a war of definitions and words.

    My point was "In a world where we can only rely on our senses, and perception is reality, can we really say for certain... or even speculate; that the universe sprang into existance from nothing. How do we know there aren't unseen forces we simply can't perceive at play if all we are basing this on is what our eyes tell us? (Anyone who's ever seen an optical illusion should realize we're not always seeing things as they are [Read Plato])

    I consider myself to be both a champion of Science and Spirituality. I believe they work very well together... after all, who's to say that God didn't create evolution. (To you bible-thumping critics who point out it doesn't appear in the bible/torah/etc... the bible doesn't say a lot of things it initally did, and the closest we can get to the original is the Vulgate.) There is no reason anyone should be able to disagree with the existance of God based on lack of evidence, but then champion ideas of the scientific community that have intellectual roots but no actual empirical evidence. If you have faith that black holes exist without ever having visited one, you're no different from a man who believes something started it all.

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