How did you loose your faith?

Excelsior

It was a confluence of many factors, personal experience being vital of course along with argument.

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

It was a confluence of many factors, personal experience being vital of course along with argument.

Personal spiritual experience? Would you say that reason alone could not have sustained you on this journey? If that's possible to answer.

robindch

Excelsior wrote:

Science explained everything. Matter was all there was and matter was all that mattered.

In that case, you didn't understand EO Wilson, or the Popperian view of science in general, for that matter. It's a common misconception amongst the religious that "scientists", whoever they be, through "science" explain everything. It's not like that. Rather, it's the case that some people consider themselves able to question everything. And that's got a lot to do with knowing where knowledge is shaky or unclear.

Excelsior wrote:

I was a smart kid and a pretty effective debater so in the natural course of teenagers, I got unreasonably cocky and believed that I had everything sorted out.

That's a view of yourself that seems consistent with how you present yourself on these forums. Perhaps you'd do better to question more and believe less -- while I recall you propounding the wisdom of your belief in christianity in virtually every post, I do not recall you asking very many questions. Or, alternatively, read the Plato that I believe you've never read. I think you'd find it interesting.

And, btw, I suspect that in ten, if not five, years' time, you'll reject christian beliefs as absurd. Same as I did, probably just a bit sooner than I did.

.

The Mad Hatter

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

I think the title should be changed to 'When did you lose your faith?'.

*The Mad Hatter's Seal of Endorsement*

Anyhow, don't think I mentioned this, but I was about eleven or twelve. Was sitting in an unspeakably boring mass in the friary in Sligo, looked up at the crucifix and wondered 'I've been told all this stuff since I could listen, but why should I believe it?'

And that was more or less it.

Excelsior

Sapien wrote:

Personal spiritual experience? Would you say that reason alone could not have sustained you on this journey? If that's possible to answer.

I don't think the journey could be taken by reason alone Sapien but I think it was all reasonable (not to open the can of worms from that other thread here )

The philosophical arguments presented by my friends were pretty potent to me, as were the considerations about the veracity of the text and a lot of the time was spent with them arguing that evolution's truth doesn't really bear all that much on the existence of the Biblical presentation of God. The actual Bible was key though. I had thought I knew it and read it and understood it. I read Leviticus first knowing that it was filled with nonsense and then my friends came and set into context and the idea of a Jubilee nation was one that certainly clashed with my ideas. Studying The Good Samaritan was another key event because I thought I knew what it was about. When I saw what Jesus was getting at it was like a door had opened. I don't want this to turn into a testimonial.

Robin, I know that science doesn't claim to explain everything and I alluded to in my post.

Me wrote:

had believed in science as a religion, atheism as a faith (I am not saying that all the atheists here are like me before I get attacked!)

Plato was actually along with Mills the first philosopher I got stuck into when I started my degree. I still have a well thumbed copy of the Republic over there on the shelves. I also have a wife doing a Phd in Aristotelian ethics so I have a reasonably good grasp of Plato. Whatever view of me you seem to have formed, I feel like I have gone on a pretty intense journey of investigation in the intervening 7/8 years as I have studied and practiced Christianity more and more. One of those lines of study that now seems to becoming dominant and maybe where I end up working is in the question of the Jewish roots of the New Testament writings. Your casual assertion that Platonic ideas have dominantly influenced the formation of Christianity is not borne out in the text or in the history of 2nd Temple Judaism.

If I make it to my 30th birthday still a Christian and we're both around here I'll have to ask you out for a pint to commiserate over not seeing the light.


Apologies for getting off topic.

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

The actual Bible was key though. I had thought I knew it and read it and understood it. I read Leviticus first knowing that it was filled with nonsense and then my friends came and set into context...

For when have you scheduled your education in the deeper meanings of the Koran by intelligent and affable sahibs? The Rigveda has a lot of really good stuff in there too.

1huge1

Going to school and them forcing everyone into the catholic way of thinking, drove me up the wall, I hated it and at that age (13ish) I would rebel at anything but then the more I looked into it I found it really was a load of crap (thats how I still feel)

Excelsior

I think I might know what you are getting at but its hard considering the condescending context-less one sentence response you gave my answer. You are suggesting I can't know Christianity is true if I haven't investigated all the other options with the same level of intensity.

Maybe then you can consider this Sapien: For when have you scheduled your education in the deeper meanings of the Koran by intelligent and affable sahibs? The Rigveda has a lot of really good stuff in there too. The Biblical texts are too easily discarded by people brought up in post-Christendom societies and yet is a profound collection. All of these need to be investigated before you embrace a sceptical secular humanism, surely?

(Alternatively, if you permit a crude analogy, I don't need to go to non-Euclidean geometry if I resolve my problems with simple differential equations. If truth is not relative, as you are so eager to declare, then sourcing all the supposed pathways is unnecessary (within your internal logic) once you have reached the destination).

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

I think I might know what you are getting at but its hard considering the condescending context-less one sentence response you gave my answer. You are suggesting I can't know Christianity is true if I haven't investigated all the other options with the same level of intensity.

Maybe then you can consider this Sapien: For when have you scheduled your education in the deeper meanings of the Koran by intelligent and affable sahibs? The Rigveda has a lot of really good stuff in there too. The Biblical texts are too easily discarded by people brought up in post-Christendom societies and yet is a profound collection. All of these need to be investigated before you embrace a sceptical secular humanism, surely?

No, I don't think they do, though I have to some degree. Not with sahibs or fakirs, but I have a decent lay of the landscape of the religions and mythologies of the human race all the same.

Scepticism and secularism stand in a different category to the ancient religions though, wouldn't you say? Scepticism is a simple concept, and secularism is a rejection of all religion. If you are suggesting that one should know everything there is to know about every religion before rejecting them, well, that's just silly. Perhaps you can tell me why you reject every religion but Christianity - and I imagine our answers would be similar. You think it highly unlikely that you would find anything in them that would convince you to believe something so very contrary to what you believe already, and are not prepared to devote years of your life to testing that assumption. And very reasonable that is. However you have already done that with one religion (something I, honestly, cannot understand - which will trouble me more than any argument you will ever be able to produce), whereas I have not. I group all religions together and decide that they are extremely unlikely to contain any special or paramount access to truth. You can't say that.

If one ancient text can give you such a sense of certainty, how do you know that another could not do the same given the same opportunity, or do even better - making your previous certainty seem hasty and false by comparison?

Excelsior wrote:

(Alternatively, if you permit a crude analogy, I don't need to go to non-Euclidean geometry if I resolve my problems with simple differential equations. If truth is not relative, as you are so eager to declare, then sourcing all the supposed pathways is unnecessary (within your internal logic) once you have reached the destination).

I don't understand your analogy really. What are the mathematical problems supposed to be analogous to? What is "the destination"?

Would you say that, had you befriended Muslims in college, studied the Koran, and become a devout Muslim yourself, you would be just as well off? Christianity isn't special, or more true?

Excelsior

Sapien wrote:

If you are suggesting that one should know everything there is to know about every religion before rejecting them, well, that's just silly.

Indeed. Agreed. But you didn't take the time to even suggest that in the post I was attempting a response to. Instead you simply suggested that to accept one is silly if you haven't an equal familiarity with all.

Then you go on to distinguish between Christianity as a religion from secularism as worldview (will that do?). But I feel fairly certain that Christianity and secularism are worldviews. You have embraced a worldview. I have embraced a worldview. We all embrace worldviews because we cannot escape yet remain thinking agents. To quote those long haired 90's rockers Pearl Jam, "Its evolution baby".

Now you can't conceive of a reasonable defence for my action in committing to Christianity, a religious worldview in a universe filled with religious worldviews. But as a point of interest, do you feel that secularism is the only non-religious worldview on offer? Do you feel you commited to it without some kind of epistemological gamble (granted mine might be higher)?

Sapien wrote:

If one ancient text can give you such a sense of certainty

Its not the Bible alone, you know? I think I have encountered God. Its also verified by a communal living. Its verified for me by a lot of different factors that come together.

Sapien wrote:

how do you know that another could not do the same given the same opportunity, or do even better - making your previous certainty seem hasty and false by comparison?

Well of course I don't. I'm not even closed to the possibility! Neither are you, I hope? I take this truth thing seriously, even if I am groundlessly accused of logical nihilism. Another poster weirdly suspects me to be ignorant of Plato but I try to take seriously his proposition that an unexamined life is not worth living. If Christ is not raised then I am the biggest fool of all. I want to know if I am deluded. I don't want to waste my time on fairy stories.

Sapien wrote:

Would you say that, had you befriended Muslims in college, studied the Koran, and become a devout Muslim yourself, you would be just as well off? Christianity isn't special, or more true?

Well I did befriend a fairly large number of Muslims students and we had plenty of great conversations about our respective faiths. I think Christianity is more special and is true. I am as utterly unconvinced by Islam as you would expect me to be. Living in suburban Dublin I don't really get a chance to interact with many other major faiths but I'd be open to dialogue everywhere I can get it.

So this is a thread about losing faith Sapien. I lost a faith in scientism. I have not lost any other faith I picked up along the way in my life yet so I posted on the loss of that scientism. We have now taken the thread utterly off topic with this gazing speculation on my navel. As pretty as it is, maybe it should be left there?

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

Indeed. Agreed. But you didn't take the time to even suggest that in the post I was attempting a response to. Instead you simply suggested that to accept one is silly if you haven't an equal familiarity with all.

That's one way of putting it. Another would be, that if you believe that one ancient holy book holds the key to truth, how can you resist not checking every other? You say that your intense study of the Bible led you to find something that changed your life. I'm saying that intense study of any sufficiently complicated, remote text will do the same, almost to the exclusion of the importance of what the text is actually about. Are you familiar with the Greek divinatory method of kledon?

Excelsior wrote:

Then you go on to distinguish between Christianity as a religion from secularism as worldview (will that do?). But I feel fairly certain that Christianity and secularism are worldviews. You have embraced a worldview. I have embraced a worldview. We all embrace worldviews because we cannot escape yet remain thinking agents. To quote those long haired 90's rockers Pearl Jam, "Its evolution baby".

Yes, yes, everything is a world view. A very shallow device, I must say. You can't quite argue that secularism is a religion, or that Christianity isn't, and you are unable to diffuse the connotations of unreason that the word religion carries, so we switch words to level the playing field.

I may have embraced a worldview, but the fact that you know that I am a secularist, an atheist and a sceptic, gives you precisely no idea what it might be. You know that I don't believe in a god, I believe in freedom of or from religion, and that I value doubt in processes or reason. These principles do not a worldview make.

I'm not sure what the term means for you. Do you suppose that all worldviews are equally reasonable? Can they be judged against each other?

Excelsior wrote:

Now you can't conceive of a reasonable defence for my action in committing to Christianity, a religious worldview in a universe filled with religious worldviews. But as a point of interest, do you feel that secularism is the only non-religious worldview on offer? Do you feel you commited to it without some kind of epistemological gamble (granted mine might be higher)?

I don't believe that secularism is a worldview. It can be an element of a worldview, and there is a kind of stock humanist consensus belief set that people call a secularist one, but that's wrong. A worldview that involves secularism would be something like Marxism, secularism alone isn't enough.

I really don't think I know what my worldview might be called, or if there are enough people on the planet who hold it to warrant naming it.

Excelsior wrote:

Its not the Bible alone, you know? I think I have encountered God. Its also verified by a communal living. Its verified for me by a lot of different factors that come together.

Excelsior wrote:

The actual Bible was key though.

Excelsior wrote:

Well of course I don't. I'm not even closed to the possibility! Neither are you, I hope? I take this truth thing seriously, even if I am groundlessly accused of logical nihilism. Another poster weirdly suspects me to be ignorant of Plato but I try to take seriously his proposition that an unexamined life is not worth living. If Christ is not raised then I am the biggest fool of all. I want to know if I am deluded. I don't want to waste my time on fairy stories.

Then I'm really confused. I took it that you believe that Christ is risen because you found spiritual meaning in the Bible so overwhelming, it was enough to prompt that leap of faith. If you believe that there may be similar meaning in other texts, then you may one day have to make a leap to believe that Mohammed is the Last Prophet. It all seems so haphazard.

In other words, if your experience of the Bible is enough to lead you to really believe in the divinity of Christ then yes, you actually do have to devote equal time to every other holy book on the planet. If it's not simply a matter of finding uplifting meaning to enrich your life, but about truth, then you have to compare them all. There's no getting away from it.

Excelsior wrote:

Well I did befriend a fairly large number of Muslims students and we had plenty of great conversations about our respective faiths. I think Christianity is more special and is true. I am as utterly unconvinced by Islam as you would expect me to be.

Not particularly meaningful though. It would be difficult for me to believe that you had any objectivity on the subject, or were really open to the possibility that Islam was the truth, given that Christianity gets eight years of your life, and Islam gets "plenty of great conversations" comparing it to your already avowed faith.

Excelsior wrote:

So this is a thread about losing faith Sapien. I lost a faith in scientism.

You can have no idea how much I hate that word. Well I never had faith in science. I never needed it. Perhaps you, as you suggest, had the wrong approach and didn't really get it. Perhaps you should give science a period of opportunity just as you should Islam.

Excelsior wrote:

. We have now taken the thread utterly off topic with this gazing speculation on my navel. As pretty as it is, maybe it should be left there?

No, I think nothing could be more germane to the thread topic than a discussion of what leads someone to believe.

Tar.Aldarion

'Faith in scientism' suggests you don't really understand how science works. Science is about not having faith in science. Unless you just refer to just not being able to refer to everything being possibly explained by Science. I am unfamiliar with 'Scientism'.

Are you one of the religious who stop 'believing' in all things 'sciency'?
I know a rather intelligent person that does not believe in gravity for instance.
He says everything in science happens not cecause of the laws of physics but becuase 'god does it' and it just so happens that things appear to be following rules.

Excelsior

[QUOTE-Tar]Unless you just refer to just not being able to refer to everything being possibly explained by Science. I am unfamiliar with 'Scientism'.[/QUOTE]

Oh Good God save me from people who can't even bother to read my posts. I am a pretty long term fixture round these parts Tar. Even if you just popped in and read a sentence of mine here, I feel you should know I have not in any way rejected science or the excellent explanations of how things happen that it provides as a method.

Scientism, whether or not Sapien hates it, is a word for the misappropriation of the scientific method to serve metaphysical purposes.

Studying any sufficiently complex text will not lead to the transformation of life, regardless of its content. You are simply stating things you believe here Sapien. There is nothing confusing, unless you wilfully want to present me as baffling, in me saying the the Biblical texts were the key part of a many-streamed "conversion experience". Furthermore, it boggles my mind how I can state that I am eager to be convinced of the truth, even if that means replacing the system that I currently hold to be true and be met with a response that goes along the lines of:

Sapien wrote:

If you believe that there may be similar meaning in other texts, then you may one day have to make a leap to believe that Mohammed is the Last Prophet. It all seems so haphazard.

You may also some day be convinced of the claims of Prophet. You must countenance this as a possibility if you are truly dedicated to the idea of pursuing truth. Its quite a distance from haphazard to say that I believe but I am open to being convinced otherwise. It seems to be the foundation stone of intellectual honesty.

Sapien wrote:

t would be difficult for me to believe that you had any objectivity

There is that axiomatic system through which you assess all phenomena again, or worldview if you prefer. There is no objectivity that I can achieve in any instance since I am by definition a subjective person. Your worldview leads you to believe in the myth of some kind of detachment but the fact of the matter is that all of these proposed answers to the Big Questions are self-involving. In accepting or even in denying any of the proffered answers you are commiting yourself to a position with epistemological consquences. I was endeavouring, frankly, to be as open to Islam being the truth in proportion to the quality of the arguments presented for it.

The rest of your argument just descends into nonsense. Forgetting that I am a Christian, my passion for the Biblical text transcends my Christian commitment, so to study the New Testament means by definition to not study other things that interest me- Islam, architecture, Ruby on rails and any other number of things. Your methodology for validating faith is designed, I fear, to be impossible to achieve.

Sapien wrote:

Perhaps you should give science a period of opportunity just as you should Islam.

I can't give science "an opportunity"! Nothing in my belief system has any difficulty with any scientific research or discovery. To confess to having lost faith in scientism no way indicates that I am any less fascinated and exhilirated by science as I was as a 16 year old. Its just now I don't unreasonably subscribe explanatory power to the method beyond its own bounds. I feel I have dealt with your Islam comment above. A buffet sampling of the meta-narratives the world's civilisations have to offer would be far from "objective", even if it were possible or adviseable.

nij

If you had a spiritual awakening from reading the Bible, you must only have read a small portion, as most of it is horrid nonsense. You speak of certain passages being taken out of context, but if you read the whole book, you'll find that knowledge of the context of those horrible passages puts them in no better a light. You shouldn't rely on what your Christian friends tell you - read it for yourself.

There's no getting around it - the Bible was written by primitive men, FOR primitive men, with the morals of that era. If the Bible is the word of God, then by what moral standard do we pick out the 'good' parts of the book today?

nij

To answer the question of the OP:

At around 8 or 9, I realised that the whole idea didn't make much sense, and that the only reason I ever heard about Jesus/God was that other people had told me about him, in the same way as they had told me about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Also, I noticed a distinct lack of answers to simple questions I had about god and the bible, many of which involved the word "why?".

Later on, when questioning more 'qualified' people on the subject, I learned what circular logic was. By the time I was in my mid-teens, I realised that not only did I have no reason to believe this character existed, but that everything I was ever told about him defied all logic.

I sort of assumed that god was just something you told kids, to install a default meaning and purpose to life, before they found their own. I also assumed that most reasonably intelligent adults where atheists too.

Tar.Aldarion

Excelsior wrote:

Oh Good God save me from people who can't even bother to read my posts. I am a pretty long term fixture round these parts Tar. Even if you just popped in and read a sentence of mine here, I feel you should know I have not in any way rejected science or the excellent explanations of how things happen that it provides as a method.

Scientism, whether or not Sapien hates it, is a word for the misappropriation of the scientific method to serve metaphysical purposes.

Yeah, sorry I did not read all of your posts, I don't have much time in work for that. Too much sweet software development to be done.

People can change their mind, that is why I asked if you had, you did go from one extreme to another, an Atheist to a Christian after all.
I question 'scientism' because, as I was skimming, you said you had faith in it but lost it. How can you have had faith in 'the misappropriation of the scientific method to serve metaphysical purposes.'? unless it meant the only meaning I had in mind that made sense; that it was the view that science held precedence over any religious view.
I could not think of a meaning for scientism that made sense in relation to having a faith about it.

Dades

nij wrote:

You shouldn't rely on what your Christian friends tell you - read it for yourself.

I don't think anyone here is relying on what their friends tell them...

On another note - perhaps we might keep on topic? I know that's unusual in A/A but this thread is quite a popular intro spot for newcomers, and it would be good to not overwhelm it with interesting but tangential discussions.

Son Goku

Can I ask, what makes scientism different from materialism?
I'm guessing the the difference is that the former is just an expanded upon version of the later that takes scientific discoveries into account.

Sapien

Excelsior wrote:

Studying any sufficiently complex text will not lead to the transformation of life, regardless of its content. You are simply stating things you believe here Sapien.

Aren't we all. Let me put it another way then - the intensity of the study of a religious text is more important in determining its effect on the student than its contents. Especially when it is very long, remote and often difficult to understand, generally requiring a degree of deciphering and further reading. No doubt you disagree.

Excelsior wrote:

There is nothing confusing, unless you wilfully want to present me as baffling, in me saying the the Biblical texts were the key part of a many-streamed "conversion experience".

No, but you said that the Bible was "key", which I took to mean necessary. That prompted me to ask you whether you were similarly familiar with other texts that form the bases of other peoples religious outlooks in the same way, or whether you thought you should be.

Excelsior wrote:

Furthermore, it boggles my mind how I can state that I am eager to be convinced of the truth, even if that means replacing the system that I currently hold to be true and be met with a response that goes along the lines of:

Sapien wrote:

If you believe that there may be similar meaning in other texts, then you may one day have to make a leap to believe that Mohammed is the Last Prophet. It all seems so haphazard.

You may also some day be convinced of the claims of Prophet. You must countenance this as a possibility if you are truly dedicated to the idea of pursuing truth. Its quite a distance from haphazard to say that I believe but I am open to being convinced otherwise. It seems to be the foundation stone of intellectual honesty.

Whether or not I am open to being convinced of the claims of the Prophet is not the question, rather whether I, or you, could be so convinced by the pertinent holy text. I don't know how you got the impression that I had a problem with your openness to change your mind, unless you only read the words you quote above and not in their context. My problem is that you have not given the Koran the same attention as you have given the Bible, and yet you ascribe special truth to the Bible, and reject similar claims about the Koran.

Actually, I do not believe that I could be convinced of the truth of the Koran by the Koran - and I'm not just saying that because I have read it and remain an infidel. In fact, if I were to be convinced of the prophethood of Mohammed, the book could have nothing to do with it - because for me it can contain nothing but narrative. I do not believe that the study of a holy book can reveal anything more than what its authors meant to say, and something about the history from which they wrote - therefore a curious scan is all I feel it can deserve. You, on the other hand, have found life-changing meaning in an ancient text that forms your conception of truth.

The haphazardness is in the fact that you appear to have settled on the first holy-book-inspired truth you stumbled across. What if you had not become Christian before meeting those Muslims? How can you commit yourself to a truth that you found so incidentally? Doesn't that "what if?" bother you? I could understand if it did not if you denied any objective truth, and thought we should each simply find a worldview that makes us comfortable and go with that. It was this assumption that lead me to call you a logical nihilist. But you say you are interested in truth in itself, more than any given worldview. I don't get it.

It would help me if you answered this:

Sapien wrote:

I'm not sure what the term [worldview] means for you. Do you suppose that all worldviews are equally reasonable? Can they be judged against each other?

You say that we are simply talking at each other across worldview boundaries; that the reasoning I attempt to apply to yours is simply an artifact of my own; that there is no deeper level of logic by which to judge ours against each other. Am I wrong? I asked you for a formula for judging truth claims after you rejected mine, and you gave nothing, so I'm assuming you believe there is none.

Why do we pick the worldviews we do? What can make us change from one to another?

Excelsior wrote:

There is that axiomatic system through which you assess all phenomena again, or worldview if you prefer.

I really don't.

Excelsior wrote:

Your worldview leads you to believe in the myth of some kind of detachment but the fact of the matter is that all of these proposed answers to the Big Questions are self-involving.

Amazing. My worldview leads me to believe in a myth, whereas yours provides you with facts. I hope you're being ironic. Is there such a thing as a worldview worldview, and if so, can I reject it?

Excelsior wrote:

In accepting or even in denying any of the proffered answers you are commiting yourself to a position with epistemological consquences.

Then we neither accept nor deny - we judge against each other according to certain characteristics that are self-evidently desirable in an answer. We will favour an answer that explains the evidence over one that would leads us to expect something other than what we see. We will continue to doubt every answer no matter how fully it explains what is observed. We will favour a simpler answer, ceteris paribus, over a more complicated one.

This is an approach to seeking truth and judging answers that is motivated only by epistemology, concerned only with epistemological consequences. When applied to empirical measurements, it is called science; when applied to numbers, it is called mathematics; when applied to everything else, it is called reason.

If I have a worldview it contains no answers, only means to judge other answers. It is a worldview that contains every other worldview. Ranked.

Excelsior wrote:

I was endeavouring, frankly, to be as open to Islam being the truth in proportion to the quality of the arguments presented for it.

My point was that your Christianity may be contingent on the order in which you met the Christians and then the Muslims. The fact that you found the Muslims unconvincing may have been because they were less adept in their exposition of their faith, but that you already had another faith was almost certainly the clincher.

Excelsior wrote:

The rest of your argument just descends into nonsense.

A little harsh, old man, I'm trying my best to inject some sense into this discussion - what exactly are you referring to?

Excelsior wrote:

Forgetting that I am a Christian, my passion for the Biblical text transcends my Christian commitment, so to study the New Testament means by definition to not study other things that interest me- Islam, architecture, Ruby on rails and any other number of things. Your methodology for validating faith is designed, I fear, to be impossible to achieve.

Because, I fear, validation of faith is impossible to achieve.

I don't understand the connection between your "passion for the Biblical text" and your "Christian commitment". Did one come before the other? Can you really say they are separate? You became interested in the Bible, and that lead you to become Christian, or you began to feel faith, and explored it in the text?

Studying the Bible and only the Bible is fine. But if you say that your knowledge of the Bible leads you to a conception of truth that defines your life, you cannot legitimately reject conceptions of the truth arrived at by similar knowledge of the Koran until you can match that knowledge of the Koran. You must recognise that your faith depends as much on what you don't know as on what you do know. In other words, you can't really believe.

Excelsior wrote:

To confess to having lost faith in scientism no way indicates that I am any less fascinated and exhilirated by science as I was as a 16 year old. Its just now I don't unreasonably subscribe explanatory power to the method beyond its own bounds.

Good. Though you say that as though somebody else does. Who could that possibly be, and what are they seeking to explain by science that they shouldn't?

Scofflaw

It seems one way to lose your faith is to be a religion reporter.

cordially,
Scofflaw