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sakon76So, despite my father thinking that it's a stupid idea**, I've lately been pondering the interconnectedness of social faith, religious faith, and scientific faith, and trying to figure out how they're all related to one another.
If social faith is basically a trust of other people to do what society deems right, like, say, keep their oncoming vehicle on the other side of the divider from yours, tell the truth, pay taxes, not kill people, and basically make the world a surviveable place, then doesn't that feed into scientific faith? Which for the purposes of this train of thought I'm defining as "science/scientists telling us the truth." Because honestly? I've never seen a single atom. I can't tell you that black holes exist, never having encountered one. And quantum mechanics? I'm blindly trusting what I'm told here. Which sounds an awful lot like religious faith, doesn't it? Trusting that your what your religious leader and religious tome of choice tell you are The Truth.
So... in some way, social and religious faith probably coexisted for a long long time before humanity came into an age of technological progresses (which I do not mean as "post-industrial revolution," BTW; science has been happening a lot longer than that), during which scientific faith has arisen from the framework of religious faith and is now duking it out with that human faith in forces invisible and ineffable. Does one necessarily have to win out over the other? Can the old and the new coexist?
Just one of those thoughts that I blindly trip across once in a while and then spend months or years trying to consider, incorporate, and solve to my own personal satisfaction if no one else's. Faith, after all, being as much a personal thing as a societal thing. And, yes, this was stumbled across in the quest to write fanfiction. The older I get, the bigger, deeper, and scarier (to me at least, in how they challenge me and change my life and beliefs) my themes become. So maybe writing is my way to find a better personhood?
**For reference, my father refers to science as Fact, which inclines me to believe that, as so often occurs, he and I are having two different conversations entirely; to me, science falls a bit more toward Theory and I was talking about philosophy and psychology anyway. But then this schism is to be expected: he is an engineer and I am a dreamer and thus, arguably, a disappointment.
If social faith is basically a trust of other people to do what society deems right, like, say, keep their oncoming vehicle on the other side of the divider from yours, tell the truth, pay taxes, not kill people, and basically make the world a surviveable place, then doesn't that feed into scientific faith? Which for the purposes of this train of thought I'm defining as "science/scientists telling us the truth." Because honestly? I've never seen a single atom. I can't tell you that black holes exist, never having encountered one. And quantum mechanics? I'm blindly trusting what I'm told here. Which sounds an awful lot like religious faith, doesn't it? Trusting that your what your religious leader and religious tome of choice tell you are The Truth.
So... in some way, social and religious faith probably coexisted for a long long time before humanity came into an age of technological progresses (which I do not mean as "post-industrial revolution," BTW; science has been happening a lot longer than that), during which scientific faith has arisen from the framework of religious faith and is now duking it out with that human faith in forces invisible and ineffable. Does one necessarily have to win out over the other? Can the old and the new coexist?
Just one of those thoughts that I blindly trip across once in a while and then spend months or years trying to consider, incorporate, and solve to my own personal satisfaction if no one else's. Faith, after all, being as much a personal thing as a societal thing. And, yes, this was stumbled across in the quest to write fanfiction. The older I get, the bigger, deeper, and scarier (to me at least, in how they challenge me and change my life and beliefs) my themes become. So maybe writing is my way to find a better personhood?
**For reference, my father refers to science as Fact, which inclines me to believe that, as so often occurs, he and I are having two different conversations entirely; to me, science falls a bit more toward Theory and I was talking about philosophy and psychology anyway. But then this schism is to be expected: he is an engineer and I am a dreamer and thus, arguably, a disappointment.
