from post 16
Faith is a belief, conviction, held without the support of evidence, sometimes held even in the face of evidence to the contrary....
....Like believing that the material universe is eternal.
Science makes no such claim. It's not known whether time had a beginning or not. There are several models, nothing is resolved.
I didn’t say science made that claim. The scientific evidence most plausibly infers that it is not eternal. I was challenging your desperate belief that it is still reasonable to believe that it could be eternal. Thus it is a belief you hold against the evidence.
....Like believing that all explanations must be natural explanations.
That is the experience, where once angels or nature spirits were used to explain natural physical processes, we now have natural explanations. If there is a need for a supernatural explanations, this needs a very good reason.
I do not deny your asserted history. I deny that you can with certainty extend from that history to that conclusion that only natural explanations exist. Similarly junk DNA did not junk evolution.
In context here…if nature began than how can its cause or explanation be natural?
.....Like preaching that the Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.
A provisional position based on the above, there are physical explanations where once gods and nature spirits were used.
But that position clearly rests on the assumption that the universe has always existed. Which is a position believed against the ever increasing evidence to the contrary. Think about the history of your belief. Over the past hundred years your belief in an eternal universe is a disappearing gap. With all the evidence we have now it is actually unreasonable to hold out hope for that position.
.....Like teaching that the universe can create itself out of nothing.
Nobody is 'preaching' these things.
Where have you been?
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. Stephen Hawking.
But as you suggested let’s look at Krauss….
Virtual particles appear and disappear out of quantum fluctuations, under the right conditions virtual particles can become actual particles.
Nobody is preaching that Universe did in fact begin from a quantum fluctuation. Nobody knows.
Krauss was. His sermon was call “A Universe From Nothing.” It is yet another failed model adding to the strentgh of my position.
.....Like believing the Christian faith is not based on evidence.
Where is this evidence?
Specifically with regards to the universe beginning to exist.
CMB, second law of thermodynamics, GTR, temp ripples in the CMB seeding galaxies, redshift, all of the spacetime theorems specifically the BGV theorem, observed time dilation in gamma-ray bursts, SBBM, the decay times of distant supernova light intensity, H-He abundance, inflation, etc.
From an atheistic cosmologist….
"It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning." - Alexander Vilenkin
.....Like believing that faith does not have a place in your worldview.
You may be redefining or extending the definition of faith into the area of justified assumptions and beliefs based on verifiable evidence, ie, we know how the physical world behaves, its rules and principles, because we have direct and verifiable experience with these things.
That is not faith.
I suspect that you hope to use the word faith as a blanket term in order to justify beliefs that clearly do require faith.
It is you that is extending the notion that all faith is blind faith. Even Keith and Steve recognize the distinction.
So if I have good reasons to believe God exists, even supported by science and evidence,
then............
What is it I have if it is not a reasonable faith?
Because....
I certainly don’t believe it blindly.
But my real point there was to expose the faith of your position…..
Faith is a belief, conviction, held without the support of evidence, sometimes held even in the face of evidence to the contrary....
….Even in the face of all the evidence we have to the contrary you still hold to a position that denies that the most plausible inference is that universe began to exist. That is a position of skepticism so severe that it stands against the evidence. It appears to be a volitional blind faith. And that was my point.