Should employers be blind to private beliefs? (Richard Dawkins)

I agree that science and faith are theoretically compatible, but you intentionally omit that they have been compatible in practice for hundreds of years.

I would say that the evidence that they are compatible is overwhelming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_s...

"Faith is, fundamentally, the process of maintaining beliefs in the face of 1) absent evidence and 2) conflicting evidence."

That's your definition. There are multiple different definitions, even in a dictionary. It is an error to choose one and insist that it applies to all things that get the word "faith" applied to them. Definitions do not have that power. It's a common error, but an error nonetheless.

A definition I find much more useful, the relevant metric of a definition, is that faith in a statement is acting as if the statement is true. I sit in a chair and by doing so demonstrate faith that it will hold my weight. I have in the past sat in chairs where my faith was misplaced, so this isn't even a faked up academic point, I really do have less than 100% confidence in this statement from either a Bayesian or a frequentist point of view, but nevertheless I have this faith and act on it.

In my opinion, this is a much more useful way of understanding it, and in particular as my example shows actually reaches well beyond the "merely religious"; matters of this sort of faith come up in all sorts of places, including science and engineering. I readily agree in advance that scientific faith and religious faith are not the same thing, but they are points on a continuum, not binary opposites, and ultimately we must all have some sort of faith in the things that are beyond the purview of science, which, regrettably, includes rather a lot of very important things.

Push comes to shove I don't have enough evidence to accept any cosmology as 100% likely to be true. Per that article about archilects a few days ago, some form of Intelligent Design is a lot lot less "stupid" than people think; strict atheism is nowhere near as casually obvious as it was forty years ago. (We have a tentative-but-developing recipe for building gods, things that would make the Greek gods look like children by comparison. You may have faith that no such entity anywhere ever been created (by any means), but you really can't prove it, nor can you prove that no such entity lies somewhere in our history or possibly at the root of the current universe.) Yet by my actions I demonstrate faith in some belief. So do you. Neither of us have 100% confidence in the strict mathematical sense. If there's some way to get to 100% confidence, I don't know what it is.

The definition of faith as "choosing to believe things you know are false" is not a useful definition in describing or learning about the world. It's a rhetorical beating stick that allows you to dismiss claims without having to examine them. And you have not done the real work necessary to make your point relevant, which is to establish that your particular definition applies to the person in question with evidence beyond mere assertion.

Definitely a lot of eye surgeons out there that believe in the stork theory of reproduction, it's much more common than people are lead to believe. Good example.

Last month we turned down a developer candidate because his weblog said he was a Discordian who believed in a flying spaghetti monster. He was the best candidate by far, but flying spaghetti is an irrational belief which indicates profound mental illness.

I think my real problem with all this really comes out when he mentions the Kurt Wise case:

"Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand."

The problem with this line of thinking is not with the conclusion - his conclusion is soundly derived from his body of evidence. But I take issue with what he chooses to admit into the corpus of evidence to be considered.

If you read the Scripture as the word of God, I have no problem with that. If you take that as a guide for what determines a good life, that's totally groovy. But the Bible cannot and should not be used as a piece of evidence in determining scientific fact.

A text that considers calling something a "miracle" adequate explanation is, by definition, non-scientific. If you believe in such miracles, that doesn't bother me one bit, but if you accept a miracle as evidence without explanation, you are not practicing science.

One of my favorite video games as a child ended with the realization that the entire game took place inside the dream of sleeping whale (the game ends when you wake up the whale). I always think it’s important to consider (although not too seriously) that perhaps we are just acting in the dream of a giant, sleep whale.

The point is that reason and logic always only exist within a specific framework of axioms and assumptions. There is no universal set of axioms and assumptions that apply to all situations, if there where we would have a set of truths that could describe the age of the earth accurately both in the case that the world is as it immediately appears to be and the case where we exist in the dream of a whale. We can only reason within contexts, and in all the examples given in Dawkin’s post, individuals are reasoning excellently within the specific context.

The problem, whether it involves religion or not, is when people start to believe that they do have access to a universal set of axioms and assumptions, that they have presented themselves with an absolute truth. Which is why I always think it’s important to consider, at least for a moment, what if we are inside the dream of a giant, sleeping whale.