Philosophy and Religion both

Because experience or knowledge are more reliable ways of knowing than faith.

That is the best answer. If you have to think about it, you are confusing yourself.

 

If you don't think about it, then you are missing the point. That statement alone shows your huge amount of FAITH in experience and knowledge as reliable ways of knowing. Both ways have huge fallacies associated with them, yet you continue to trust what your experience tells you. Why? Please don't ever think that anything is beyond questioning.

 

Sorry, but you don't look too fucking bright atm.

Why do you think I argue against the downfalls of faith. Same reason as you...it is belief in something WITHOUT questioning.

 

Faith is not necessarily belief in something without questioning. It is only belief in something that one cannot prove for sure. I think that faith applies to everything we say we "know." We have faith that we are actually here right now and we aren't just a brain in a jar somewhere being stimulated by electrodes. This isn't something that we can prove.

 

faith is not a way of gaining knowledge but rather a manner of belief

 

experience and knowledge can reinforce faith but essentially it is a leap into the unknown

 

But what I'm saying is that experience and "knowledge" are also leaps into the unknown!! Faith is not more weaker than these because experience and knowledge can't be proven true either!

 

So we take the argument out of context and into a new realm. Ok, yes, I agree with you. But if you look back to my original points, they were about organised religion...a place where faith is often branded at the expense of reason. I'm not saying this is wrong, but one must not give it credit for being "the truth".

 

Although there is no real "evidence" for our experience of the world it would obviously be irrational to believe it didn't exist, or that we were in a jar. To say something like "since you can't disprove it, it could be so" doesn't really hold much weight (for me anyway) and seems like a typical theistic argument (no offense; you can believe what you want). These things are foundational, and (although potenially erroneous) constitutes human understanding from birth and requires little if any "faith." Now, if later in life you take another leap of faith, one that is far less justified then the former, and become a thiest, just know that this belief is certainly not foundational and requires a lot more hope on your part.

Yet, in a theist's defense, if one believes in God for most of his/her life and has "experienced" God(which according to you we cant fully trust anyway) in his/her life, I might say that that is rationally justified.

 

Academic philosophy is not about following other peoples beliefs, quite the opposite in fact. The majority of people who attend universities in The USA and UK are taught Anglo-American philosophy. This rests heavily upon the principles of logic as applied to
both mathematics and the logic of language. Academic philosophy teaches you to be descriptive not prescriptive, and it also teaches you to look for the flaws in other peoples arguments. Scientists are by nature philosophical they have to attempt to discover the errors in their own thinking before they present a descriptive proof of their work. Religion, on the other hand requires no proof that what it offers has any basis of truth and is prescription based largely on the big assumption that god exists