Nice try.  Really.  And you've helped zero in on one of the vague areas of defining things like 'faith'.   So, its like 'hope' when you have wishes and desires for the future.  Well thats just what such desires are - 'hope' that you can and will effect something that you want.  But is that really what faith is all about?  Wishing for the best, wishing that things you don't want to happen won't?  Where does the agent in the sky come in?    The world is complicated and diffuse.  We have huge areas where we cannot know enough to be sure of what may happen.... wonderful people like Minghella can die after a normal routine op, and Zack Dunlap can live.   I don't attribute either of these things to divine intervention, just to lack of adequate knowledge of physical things.  And we can find out more about those things and improve the treatment of both sorts of cases.   The 'faith' that I am sure you will now accuse me of is in fact an arguable induction from past progress - medical science has progressed since the Dark Ages (even more so since the Book was written), there is no good reason to assume now that it will not continue to.  We are talking knowledge here - epistemological issues, in technical parlance.

However, if you believe that a god can change the constantly observed physical relationships within the world, then you have to have 'faith' that it won't change them at some time that is inconvenient to you.  This isn't a knowledge issue, its about your understanding of the contents of reality and supra-reality.  It is a metaphysical issue.  Your faith is very different to that which you are trying to foist on non-theists.

No Patton.  Your 'faith' one thing.  My 'faith' is not the same animal..... in the end, your faith is about closed books, mysticism and stagnation; mine is about investigation, discovery and knowledge.   Its strange that you seem to realsie there is a difference, yet insist on obscuring it.... you claim "I do the best I can to describe Faith to one who has never had it....."  then claim that my 'faith' is similar to yours.   They aren't the same thing, so don't try to foist your malformed concept onto me.

"How would you describe the Mona Lisa to someone who has never seen it?"   Well by comparisons with what they HAVE seen ... which is what I think you are attempting, by assuming that I have some sort of analogous experience.   But to someone who has NEVER seen?   There are ways.  No-one has ever seen an electron, an up-quark, a boson.  Or experineced one in any direct way.   Yet most (yourself and like excepted) base their understanding of the world on their existence, and some have a very good appreciation of what they 'are like'.  But you need to step away from the direct to the indirect means of examination...  which is when your faith starts to become unintelligible and irrational, and my 'faith' still has some warrant.

And religion will never predict anything useful about reality...science etc. does - all the time.

If something is useful in a scientific sense it must predict something about reality that would not be true otherwise. E.g. newtonian physics predicts objects should behave in a certain way, if they don't the theory is wrong.

Religion doesn't do that - it is unfalsifiable.

You use science.  You use the 'rules' for anaesthesia that have been established by science to carry out your job.   (I say rules rather than laws because as yet (so far as I know) the precise causal sequences for anaesthesia are not known.... maybe the Bible can explain it to us - over to you)

You use religion to predict the future.  You judge that someone is a 'sinner' and use that judgement to 'predict' they will be 'outcast in this life' and damned forever in 'the next'.   

One works....

1)  All applicable to a given situation apply to the given situation.  Thats why they are the rules for that situation.

2) Apologies....  it therefore should have read...

"You predict that sinners will be damned forever, if they do not repent before their last breath in this life".

3)  BTW If I may be allowed to fall into your style... an onion is not the same size as a fire engine.  Igneous rocks have no aqueous humor.  And cows only use integral, not differential, calculus.  Gnomic 'preacher talk' don't make or win arguments.

I think we are playing fast and loose with the idea of prediction here.  Predictions are based on 'rules' or 'laws' that extrapolate from a source of knowledge. Any generalisation - an inductive move from cases known to ALL such cases, or a deductive move from the logic of a theory - involves predictions: that there will be no exception to the law in the given circumstances.  Thus "if any sinner does not repent, he will spend eternity in hell" is as much a prediction as "Callum Stephenson will spend eternity in hell".  Its just that the first is more wide ranging than the second.   

Predictive rules/laws do not need to be practicable.  Laplace's dictum was a statement of principle not of epistemological practicality:  it seems that you agree - IF we" knew the relationship (cumulative data) one sinner has with God versus the next" then we could predict.

Making a prediction like this would be futile.


Perhaps then a little less pithiness, or at least some attempt to explain what is being analogised, and how it may help.  Of course, analogies always run the risk of being attacked in the detail of their similarities, rather than the spirit of the point being made.


WADR this doesn't coincide with my understanding of the proselytising religions.  The meme wants to replicate.  Or in your parlance possibly, 'become fishers of men', 'go out and save souls'....   your belief must therefore triumph over others.   If you are not trying to achieve something, why then do you argue/discuss in this forum?  (Sincere question)

I think that you don't read.... I said 'we are playing'.   Secondly, I am sure that you are aware of my opinions on the laziness and inappropriateness of using dictionary definitions when it comes to examining controversial or vaguely understood ideas.   To simply cite current usage (of which there are considerably more than the limited DDs you have cut) is no examination.  As an analogy, if we simply accepted Newtonian ideas of gravity, Fresnels view of optics, even Maxwellian models of atoms, there would be no quantum science....    Indeeed it is the over-reliance on 'authority' and testimony that informs my activities here in arguing against the opinions that a primitive 3,000 year old worldview tries to impose.   I have little to complain about the principles (not the metaphysics) behind most of christian moral codes: but the flat-earth thinking of those who find dualism an explanation of anything just appalls me.

Sincerely, that is why I present my opinions here.   Thanks for your sincere answer.