quote:

Originally posted by shanny What I have been saying is that to maximize your enjoyment Optimism is the way to go, and the integral part of that at the end of life, is faith.

I hear you, but I still think you're essentially restating the same point in different forms. You haven't explained why that point is true, only asserted that it's true for you (which, since it's a purely subjective statement, is objectively true) and implied that it's therefore true in the general case (which is the part that I dispute).

Every philosophy is necessarily incomplete, that's true. There's a better logical proof of this statement than any example, though. Philosophy is totally dependent on language, and no formal language can be both complete and unambiguous, nor can anything described in a formal language. This is simply a reality of the universe we live in.

That's tangential to the debate, though. Blind faith, if anything, does the exact opposite of completing a philosophy; it's more of a convenient way of ignoring all the inconsistencies and deficits inherent in some philosophy. It works for a lot of people, I won't argue with that - but to suggest that it's necessary in any way, or is guaranteed to bring more enjoyment to life than some other approach... well, that can't be justified, and if it can, then it hasn't been yet.

If faith in a 5000-year-old earth despite the overwhelming evidence of evolution looks silly to us, then why is this particular type of faith any different?

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