Lack of faith is not a kind of faith

Posted Aug 20, 2012 12:25 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

If you think of a "chicken" as a two-legged vertebrate then we are all chickens :)

What you describe is more "theology" than "religion": the deduction of conclusions based on a set of postulates. Not coincidentally theology is a branch of philosophy, heavily based on logic. In that respect, theology is to religion what mathematics is to science: science does indeed apply mathematical laws to our physical universe, thereby implying that some sets of axioms apply in our world. Answering apoelstra above, physics equates the "2" in "2+2=4" with the "two" in "I have two hands".

What Wol missed above is that science is indeed akin to religion, in that there are no proofs that it works at all but still people believe in them with something resembling faith. See e.g. Wigner:

arguments could be found that might [...] put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form.

There is a big difference though: religions usually demand faith from the practitioner, while science works independently of beliefs. This conceptual leap (pioneered by Galileo himself) is worth centuries of progress.