Why does faith get a free pass?

You obviously have no grasp on the concept of a predictive model and how it is not something that requires faith. A predictive model requires evidence, consistency and testability. All of which are met when human brains learn what a chair is.

I can't tell if your purpose in life is to please or to plague me. Based on our past discussions, just assign a percentage to how much we agree. Also assign a percentage to how much you think I do meth.

Related to this- in movies or TV shows, I hate it when they say, "Have faith your friends'll save you!" or such.

Because if they're friends, then it's not faith, it's just counting on them being them. "Trust in your friendship" works, but it's not faith.

Wait..is it have faith that your friends will want to save you, or have faith that they can?

If the term 'faith' is being used to describe a situation or concept whereas it's making a prediction that can be validated or falsified, then the term 'faith' is not being used in the same context as religious 'faith'. Theists try to pretend the term covers both those concepts, that way you have 'faith' a pencil will hit the floor when you drop it and it's no different then their religious 'faith'.

It's a typically dishonest argument that attempts to distract you away from the fact of how useless faith is by trying to pretend everything is faith based.

I wouldn't call that faith exactly... more like trust. You can expect your friends will be more likely to save you than strangers, just as people who don't like you won't be as inclined to help.

If you want to call this faith, go right ahead; but it's not the same kind of faith you have to place in a god to believe in it.

Why not?

I don't see how it's so fundamentally different. I can trust people that I can see and objectively verify the existence of, and I can trust an omnipotent being that I can't.

Ask a human friend to help you move your couch. Then ask your omnipotent friend to do so. Let us know when you can submit an example of your omnipotent friend moving your couch we can verify as easily your human friend doing so.

But isn't causality an extremely thorny question? If you're really trying to demonstrate technically what caused something and what didn't, aren't you immediately into some tricky-ass metaphysical shit?

I wouldn't ask either to do something I can do myself anyway.

Since when is it tricky metaphysical shit to get a friend to move your couch? I can produce an example of a friend moving something of mine very easily, and I don't need to invoke any mumbo jumob bullshit. It will be a very direct, observable experiment.

The fact that theists invoke mumbo jumbo bullshit, attempt to inject metaphysical nonsense and add endless qualifiers to their omnipotent/invisible friend performing such a feat is proof right there that the term 'faith' means two very different things, even if one concedes to using the term for both situations.

Oh how cute, you being evasive. Fine; use an example of something your friend can do that you cannot do yourself and then get your omnipotent friend to do the same thing. And make sure we can verify both doing it just as easily.

Or concede that 'faith' for both is not the same.

But what actually causes the couch to move?

And because I always argue with you atheists in this thread I just want to make clear that I am a radical atheist.

So go read up on physics if you're intent on wasting time with stupid questions.

You don't have to explain exactly what causes the couch to move... the fact that the couch could magically transition from one point in space to another for no apparent reason is evidence. One of the things I intensely dislike about creationist excuses is that they don't deliver the goods. They say there is no limit to what their god can do, yet they cannot produce a single example of it doing anything that can be observed or measured.

You don't have to explain the supernatural cause to observe something being physically affected by something which cannot be perceived... and this is the point that creationists seem to miss.

Exactly. This is what distinguishes faith from things that are not faith. It is perfectly possible to get by in the world without a single iota of faith.

Faith and 'taking it for granted' are not the same thing. Faith is, as Darth_Yuthura notes, the act of believing in something, whereas 'taking it for granted' does not require belief.

No it isn't. Faith is adopting a course of action because you believe something to be true. Logic is adopting a course of action based off of what evidence indicates to be least false. They are not the same, and they are not interchangeable.
Oh, and the only arguments I've seen declaring that they are interchangeable invalidate burden of proof, which makes reasoned debate unresolvable, which invalidates all arguments, including the argument used to invalidate burden of proof.

No I don't. I act on what is least false. I do not believe it to be true, because such can't be proven. I could be in the matrix and in the real world chairs are actually non-euclidean cheese monsters. However, the least false possibility, based off of available evidence, is that chairs are chairs.

Certainty is the thing you religious folks don't seem to get. It is correct to say that faith is required as a basis for certainty. However, it is perfectly possible to function without certainty. For example, let's say that I conclude based on available evidence that the least false conclusion is that there is a 99.9% chance the chair is sound. I will sit in the chair. Its possible that I am mistaken about the chair being sound, as it was in the 00.1% probability range. It is also true that the evidence and methodology I used was itself based off a least false conclusion, and that there is a probability that it was wrong. So on and so forth it could go. However, it doesn't matter, because the least false conclusion is the least false conclusion based off everything one has available to make conclusions. Agonizing over what you do not have available and what alternatives it could indicate as least false is an utterly pointless exercise, something which the least false system recognizes.
The irony is that religious people insist that non-faith based epistemologies lead to solipsist absurdity, when in actuality it is religion's denial of burden of proof that leads to such.

All this arguing about lawn chairs and all I can think about is risk assessment and weibull distributions.

I think engineering has broken me.

It tends to generically cover both, but especially that the friends will come back and brave whatever dangerous situation to save them.

Okay. Let's have a go at this.

I should make a disclaimer at the start. This may be about religion or faith in general, but I need to narrow it down. For the most part I will be talking specifically about Christianity, because that's the faith tradition that I know the most about. (Not to mention, of course, the faith tradition that I am part of.) Some Christians might disagree with what I say, so I should lay out my views and biases a bit more specifically. My Christianity is probably somewhere around mainline or liberal Protestant, as the terms are used in the United States. To be more specific, my church is part of the worldwide Uniting movement and theologically is basically Wesleyan. Compared to other Christians on SB, my views lack the robust ecclesiology of someone like EmperorSolo or the scriptural inerrancy of LordofHosts; I believe I once distinguished my approach as 'conscience first' compared to LordofHosts' 'scripture first' approach. If a fellow Christian reads this and feels that I am downplaying the importance of scripture or the validity of apostolic tradition or anything like that, then I beg indulgence. I am trying to defend the validity of religious belief in terms broad enough to cover most religions, but I am writing from my own perspective, so please bear that in mind.

I'm not particularly going to claim that, but I think it's worth stopping for a moment to highlight this point. We should make clear what is and what is not in the domain of science. It's particularly pertinent since science does blur into other fields at the sides. Is mathematics a science? Is history? Is, for that matter, philosophy a science? As I'm sure you're aware, there have been significant movements in the twentieth century aimed at making philosophy continuous with science, eliminating certain areas of philosophy and leaving it to science ('Epistemology Naturalized' and so on), or, to borrow a phrase, making philosophy the handmaiden of science.

I'm not proposing to get into technical definitions, but I should make clear what I will use the word 'science' to mean. By 'science' I will mean, broadly speaking, the empirical investigation of a presumed external world, the positing of hypothetical consistent laws governing that world, systematic experimentation aimed at falsifying those hypothesised laws, and a resultant project that I will refer to as 'the scientific endeavour'. The scientific endeavour is an attempt to construct a picture of the world. This picture will be internally consistent, explanatory, and predictive; that is to say, it will be possible to, by reference to this picture, explain why things appear to be the way they are and then to predict how things are likely to change in the future.

Now it seems prima facie obvious that some of the things religious people believe have relevance to the scientific endeavour. If you are a deist, then you may safely sit back and relax, as you don't believe in anything that might change the picture of the world that science will build up. The deus otiosus or clockmaker god doesn't pose any issues. However, deism mostly died out; it's probably true that deism was the gateway to atheism. Religion depends on a bit more than that. (I must bear in mind in this topic that I am not simply going in to bat for the idea that God exists. That's a very minimal hypothesis.) Let's take something like the Resurrection, or the idea of miracles in general. Obviously the reality of miracles poses a problem for the scientific endeavour. At best, the entire endeavour will need a disclaimer tacked on saying 'unless God decides to temporarily change things'. If our religious claims have validity, then there are going to have to be a couple of holes in the picture built up by science.

I should think it's obvious that any robust theology is going to have an account of when, where, and how we might expect the scientific picture to be inaccurate. Religious teachings will have to deal with the question. "If the Resurrection happened, why doesn't it happen anywhere else? Why does death seem to be consistent in every other case? What made the Resurrection to special?" That's just one example. I just want to get it out there straight off that this is a challenge and I have no intention of downplaying it. For reasons of brevity I can't get into every single challenge like that, but I should at least make it clear that I'm aware of the issues.

I just talked a bit about the picture of the world built up by science. (Just to name-drop, it might help to think about it as a Sellarsian scientific image; or the world that Eddington's scientific table inhabits.) It would be remiss of me to fail to acknowledge that there are other pictures of the world, though. There are perhaps, to keep on with Sellars, original images and manifest images, but so as not to overload the post with jargon, I'm going to talk about a religious picture of the world, and about a general layman's picture of the world. (Here the layperson is conceived of in distinction from the scientist and the priest.) Let's take an example; say, a table. The layperson's picture of the table (this is the general image or original image) is of a solid object made of wood and nails and some varnish. We're all very familiar with this picture. The scientist's picture of the table (this is the scientific image) is of a dispersed cloud of subatomic particles arranged in such a way that light bounces off it and interacts with the machinery of the human eyeball in such a way as for it to appear wooden, such that if you touch it your hand (which is also a dispersed cloud of particles) will not go through it, etc., etc. The table is actually just a bunch of little tiny scientific particles arranged table-wise. I would contend that both of these pictures of the table are valid.

(I don't say 'true' because I'm not a scientific realist, but if you are, you can just say that both are true. I personally am agnostic as to the existence of unobservative, postulated entities like, say, quarks. I think entities of that sort are models we have created to help us understand observations. They might or might not actually exist. If you do think that entities like quarks really do exist, then you might say that both pictures of the table are true but the scientific picture is more precisely true. The layperson just made an approximation. It doesn't terribly matter.)

So now we can come along and have a religious image as well. The priest looks at the table and sees an element of God's creation, let's say; or perhaps the result of a conscious act of creation on the part of a human which in its own way mimics the primal act of divine creation (this is technically called sub-creation, I believe), deriving from the human creative faculty, which is part of the image of God. A table is perhaps a rather wonky choice of examples. To pick another one, if all three people look at a human, the layperson sees a person, the scientist sees various complex biological operations and, at a more precise level, the cloud of subatomic particles, and the priest sees the image of God. These are all different pictures of the world.

The point I am rather laboriously trying to get to is that different pictures of the world are not necessarily in contradiction to each either. The layperson's image and the scientist's image aren't contradicting each other and both are in a sense right. I don't see any reason why it's inconceivable that the religious image might also be correct. It seems possible, to me, that a person could be solid flesh, a cloud of particles, and the image of God all at the same time. These pictures of a person are complementary, rather than contradictory.

Scaling up now, I started thinking along these lines because it does sometimes feel as if the religious live in a different world to some of their non-religious colleagues. Often people regularly move between worlds. The way a molecular biologist thinks while eating dinner is rather different the way she thinks while in the laboratory; and of course, the way a religious person thinks while in the middle of a church service is different the way she thinks while at work. We move between spheres as necessary. A religious scientist probably moves between all three, and I daresay there are more valid pictures of the world than just these!

The original worry is about what happens when one picture seems to contradict another. What if divine intervention can circumvent scientific laws? Well, I don't see that as a huge issue because I'm not committed to the idea that the scientific image must be a complete description of every aspect of reality. I don't think science needs to aspire that far. Rather, if science can produce a picture of the world that is coherent, consistent, explanatory, and predictive - and we successfully use this picture to create new technologies, predict weather patterns, make sound economic decisions, etc., etc. - then I think science has been entirely successful.

At the start of this section I mentioned the desire, in some areas of philosophy, to try to make everything as scientific as possible. Philosophy should adopt the methods of science or indeed become the handmaid of science. The logical positivists had a lot of very vehement things to say about this. The desire to use science as a model for all other areas of knowledge, and make everything as scientific as possible, is sometimes referred to as 'scientism', and you'll have figured out already that I'm not a big fan of it. To my mind it is important that science, philosophy, theology, history, etc., all be studied with great rigour with a high regard for logical consistency - and these areas must take note of each other - but it does not seem reasonable to me to suggest one must necessarily override the others.

Well, it's at least a coherent view of the world, I grant, that the scientific image is the only correct one. The general image is just a fair approximation; the religious image is nonsense. I don't find that view very tenable, though, because at the most basic level science is done in the general image, and grows out of it. There is a little debate in the philosophy of science about just how much science you can do in the manifest image. (That is to say, how much science you can do before you have to postulate unobservable entities.) I don't think that you can use science to come back and knock out its own supports, so to speak: if any image takes precedence, it is the general or original image, not the scientific one.

I kind of want to discuss this further, but this section is already dangerously long. Pardon me if I come back to it tomorrow. I'm already touching on a positively huge number of fields in this post.

Let's get to the challenges as they stand!

I don't particularly believe that. There's a fairly old paper by Antony Flew called 'The Presumption of Atheism' (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1972) that I think hits the nail pretty much on the head. Basically, when it comes to theism, the onus is on the theist.

I should clarify a little bit, though. I would actually modify it to a presumption of agnosticism. 'There is no God' is a positive claim and it cannot be taken as a default assumption. That's really only quibbling the details, though.

Since I don't feel that there should be an automatic presumption in favour of theism - or in favour of any other particular religious belief, for that matter - I'm going to have to revise your question a little. The question I'm going to attempt to answer is, "Given a presumption of atheism or at least agnosticism, what justification do you have for your religious beliefs in general and for your theism in the particular?"

I want to start by stepping back and thinking a bit about justification. What sorts of reasons do you need for a worldview?

While I was scanning the local paper for links in the previous topic, I came across someone who linked to this piece, in which Lightman - an atheist and a scientist, if that matters - points out that the scientific endeavour is built on unprovable postulates. In fact I think his treatment of the matter is fairly light. There are more postulates than just his 'Central Doctrine'. Science is predicated on a number of shared principles: that there is an external world, that this world obeys consistent laws, that the human mind is up to the task of deciphering these laws, that it is morally legitimate to investigate that world, and so on. The scientific endeavour is actually pretty complex and it's not surprising that it only arose in one specific intellectual climate. (A climate, incidentally, that was powerfully shaped and defined by the Christian tradition in Europe; though I realise that the role of Christianity in the development of science is no particular argument for any given Christian doctrine.) These are important premises, they're not all immediately obvious, and most importantly, none of them are provable.

I think the scientific endeavour is entirely legitimate, so I endorse these premises, and I'm sure you do too. I also think that while they are unprovable we also have good reasons for believing them. What are these reasons? Some of them are going to have to be pragmatic: believing these things lets me do science. It lets me build up a coherent picture of the world (or at least, of the sensory stimulus I experience that I call 'the world'). I can interact the world on a productive basis thanks to this picture; and the scientific image of the world seems to have proven itself very useful. It provides for intellectual growth and enriches my life immeasurably. These seem good reasons, to me. I cannot prove in any abstract sense that these scientific principles are true, but I can explain some of the benefits of holding that they are. In the long run this is probably the most effective way of spreading belief in those principles: showing how belief in them is productive, life-affirming, and intellectually coherent.

When it comes to religion, I also endorse some premises that I cannot abstractly prove to be true. These include ideas like the existence of God, the notion of a divine plan or at the very least divine will, the usefulness of prayer, meditation, and other spiritual exercises, the abstract possibility of miracle, the moral importance of forgiveness and universal compassion, and so on. I can of course fairly easily point out that I have good pragmatic reasons for believing these things. Being part of a shared community of faith improves and enriches my life. Belief in a creator God is coherent and it helps me to make sense of reality. I believe I've spoken before on SB about how, for me, my religion is something that causes the world to make sense. When I interact with the world on the basis of these basic religious premises, I find it very useful to believe them. Or in short, it helps to enable some of the things I said about salvation. (On a side note, the point above about spreading the scientific principles also applies here. I feel that the best way to go about evangelisation is not to hassle people but to show, through my life and in my words, what these principles can mean.)

There are of course other reasons. Personal spiritual experience is a pretty significant one. If I am struck by a presence while performing a spiritual exercise (like prayer or meditation), then, accounting for the possibility that I'm just deluding myself and my mind is playing tricks on me, that would seem to be circumstantial evidence for the existence of a higher power. If I encounter a divine presence, then I might as well believe in it. Accounts of people who have had spiritual experiences of this sort are quite easy to find, though they're often muddled or contradictory. However, I'm not using experience of that sort as a reason for these beliefs for the same reason that "But I see an external world!" is not particularly convincing evidence that there is one. It is at best circumstantial corroboration.

What about this notion of faith? After all, it's in the very title of this topic! I don't really believe in faith as an epistemological tool, per se. I think that 'I believe X because of faith' is a very silly thing to say. My religious understanding of faith is that it means something like 'loyalty' or 'confidence'. When I say that I have faith in God or that I believe in God, I mean that in the same sense I would mean it if I were to tell a friend 'I have faith in you' or 'I believe in you'. I wouldn't mean 'I am confident that you exist'; rather, I would mean 'I trust you' or 'I have confidence in you'. Religious faith is not an epistemic bludgeon, but a confidence. A well-grounded faith grows from reason. I watched this video today and while it's a bit preachy, the metaphor of falling in love is a good one. You might have good reason to believe that your significant loves you, but ultimately there is an act of faith involved. That's the sort of faith that I have in mind when I use the term.

You might now come along and ask me: but then why do so many religious people use the word 'faith' in that other respect? If faith isn't an epistemic bludgeon, why do people use it like that? Obviously I can't know why other people do the things they do, but I have a few guesses. Firstly, as you acknowledged, it shuts down debate. Throwing out the word 'faith' often means just 'I don't want to talk about this now; please shut up'. As the use of 'faith' as a rhetorical strategy like this can't be countered, it can be very tempting. Secondly... well, you can see how long this post of mine is! Naturally most people don't want to make huge spiels like this, nor can most people do the sort of critical reflection needed at the drop of a hat. Most people are pretty smart, but not everyone is educated in philosophy, theology, or even just in argumentation, so I don't blame people for falling back on easy answers. (On the other hand, I do find it far more disturbing when theologically trained people, like priests or ministers, fall back on things like this.)

A final note. I talked about the idea of believing unprovable principles. Such principles underlie science, and of course they underlie most religions. I want to make it clear as well, though, that such principles underlie even daily life. It's not just the scientific and religious images that rely on axioms of this sort. A person's ordinary, everyday assumptions - like the existence of the external world, like the existence of other minds, and so on - are unprovable principles. Simply being anything other than a solipsist involves assenting to unprovables. For that matter being a solipsist involves assenting to unprovables. I'm not sure how it's possible to be anything without believing in unprovables. I would contend that the ability to believe particular principles without absolute proof is essential to human cognition. We all do this.

Let me make my case in summary, then. It is clearly the case that it is sometimes acceptable to believe an unprovable statement to be true. Nonetheless, we should have good reasons for such beliefs. I believe that I, at least, have good reasons to believe certain religious statements are true.

You seem to be saying that in every other debate on every other subject, belief in an unprovable would be greeted with ridicule. I would argue that that's demonstrably false.




Okay:

I've been writing this on-and-off all day, and I think we've got 3000 words or so. That's a pretty meaty bit of writing for you all to digest! There is a lot that I could expand on, but this is an incredibly broad topic and I've delved into a number of different areas. I hope some of the ideas I've given here can serve as springboards for further discussion.

That said, I don't really want to get into a 'does too!' 'does not!' debate about whether there's a God. We've had an awful lot of those on SpaceBattles and if we do seem to get that direction I'll probably just leave off. I hope we can get some productive discussion out of this, though. By all means disagree with me, but I hope we can be civil and constructive.

Ironically, we are not 'certain' of the opposing view either. That's why they are theories and not laws. Much like we believed memory can be categorized as short-term and long-term for several decades and now we 'believe' that is not the case. We can observe memory working, and run experiments on the conditions in which memory fails but there is still some unknown factors.

It's perfectly acceptable to come up with an alternate explanation for the 'false memory' phenomenon (one of which was that memory was being overwritten, another was that people were just susceptible to swallowing alternative explanations, etc, etc) or other such memory nuances, even explanations that are based purely on conjecture from observed occurrences. Why? Because we accept that we don't have all the answers yet and hope that we will. And that's great.

However, when it comes to religion, there is a very large amount of confirmation bias running unchecked. Scientists aren't setting out to find proof of god or even entertaining the thought from the get-go. At least in the Bible's defense, it seems to be highly accurate as far as history goes but no farther, apparently. I would love it, if such a clear bias didn't shine through nearly everything but as such, I'll just sit in my corner.

Right, I'm not denying that the couch moved. And I'm not trying to support creationism, Christianity, or religion. I'm just saying "what actually caused the couch to be in a new place" is a complicated question.

You wrote a post that is literally three times the length of the essay I need to write for one of my take-home finals...

I generally don't view such as making much of a difference. All of those approaches rely on the same core foundation, and all of them carry the insistence that the core foundation is sacrosanct. The structures that are then built on those foundations differs from approach to approach, with some of them being more subject to debunking via logic/reason than others due to reliance on foundations other than faith. However, I view attacks on that as a waste of time, because even if you win, they'll always just retreat to the foundations.

What you describe is modern science, which is the dominant system of the objective sphere, due to it... well being by far the most successful at handling business in it. Meanwhile, I formally define all stuff outside that sphere as being philosophy. Where science concerns itself with testable objective aspects of reality, philosophies are concerned itself with untestable subjective aspects of reality. Those are complementary spheres of thought, but they are also mutually exclusive when it comes to proofs. The statement "1+1=2" can't be used to prove "the purpose of life is to eat cupcakes" and vice versa.

Anyways, my point is if you want to use the "faith is untestable and thus not subject to science, therefore I don't need to scientifically justify it" argument, that means you are acknowledging that faith is not in science's sphere of influence, and is thus not usable as proof for anything empirical.

Something like a resurrection is not a philosophical claim. It is a empirical claim about an purported event in the objectively existent world. It is therefore subject to demands of evidence and justification. If you use faith as part of that evidence and justification, you are in turn obligated to provide evidence and justification for it.

Observations about the objective existence of the table, such as the first two perspectives, are within the objective sphere that science dominates. Observations about the subjective meaning of the table, such as the third perspective, is within the subjective sphere that philosophies hang out in.

Of course not. Science and philosophy complement each other. Religion is merely a philosophy that generally has an aggressive stance where it makes incursions into science's domain and insists on using subjective beliefs as foundation for empirical conclusions about objective reality.

Modern science has indeed been highly successful in handling matters in the objective sphere. Meanwhile, religion's incursions into the same sphere have not had the same luck. Religion has been used to make predictions about empirical reality, with predictably miserable results.

I generally view the anthropic principle as the ultimate watermark for both spheres. Systems of operation that trend towards nonexistence tend to not exist, and vice versa.

I'll hold you to that.

Unfortunately, that revision isn't really workable, but I'll address stuff as it comes.

First off, during the "Dark Ages", the most favorable environment to science was Islam, to the point that there were people insisting that understanding of empirical reality was necessary in order to form a proper relationship with Allah, albeit not quite in those words.

Second off, I see where you are going with this, and its a common mistake that involves conflating similar yet critically different concepts:

Unproven=/=Untestable. Science's postulates are unproven. For that matter, one of the postulates states that it is impossible to prove or disprove them, or anything else with certainty. However, science does not require certainty, only statistical significance. That statistical significance is found through testing. All of science's postulates are testable. Religious faith is not testable, and it is this failure that excludes it from modern science. It can make claims in the objective sphere anyways, but its pretty clear that by this point modern science has dominated that sphere.

Following the least false=/=Believing to be true. Failure to recognize this distinction is the number one best way to massively piss of atheists, as that failure is then used to make the "atheism and science are just like religion". Failure to recognize it is failure to recognize burden of proof, which pretty much precludes effective functioning in the objective sphere. You could do it anyway, but the anthropic principle would make short work of you.

If your observation is not empirically testable, than it is of no interest to modern science, and thus the objective sphere, and is not usable as proof for anything in it. Your observation qualifies as subjective and thus qualifies for the other sphere. You can use it to prove philosophical points and that's about it.

Faith is, as Darth_Yuthura put it, believing in something in the absence of evidence, or even in the spite of evidence. This is acceptable if and only if you are using faith to draw conclusions about the subjective philosophical sphere. However, using an untestable non-empirical tool to make declarative conclusions about objective empirical reality is quite unacceptable and definitively an epistemic bludgeon.

Following the least false=/=Believing to be true. Science and atheism do the former, religion does the latter.

Unproven=/=Untestable. Scientific postulates are unproven, but supported with statistical significance. Religious faith is untestable. Using it as a basis for evidence is on exactly the same level as using the flying spaghetti monster or the invisible pink unicorn as a basis for empirical claims, IE zero if you don't want to run afoul of the anthropic principle. Yet society views god as acceptable and the flying spaghetti monster as not.

As for why this is a problem? People have goals rooted in subjective reality, but which use objective reality as the playing field. Society is basically an agreement of people to coordinate to the best of their ability on the objective field so that they can all mutually complete their goals. Modern science has been consistently shown to be the most effective understanding of that field, providing the best context needed for people to complete their goals. However, religious people barge in and insist on using their faith as a basis for conclusions about empirical reality, even when doing so is counterproductive.

Its 3:52 in the morning. Damn you and damn my lack of self-discipline. Sadly, that's still 10 minutes better than last night.

The answer is: It doesn't. If faith got a free pass then this thread would have never been started for the sole reason of trolling people who have faith, and if it got a pass then it would be a very short and respectful thread instead of what has already been posted here and will continue in the same manner.