is it necessary to discard faith and hope utterly if one is an atheist?
Faith, I'd say yes, there must be no faith because faith is prejudice. No one would accept a scientific study in which someone declared "I'm going to prove this drug does this"--it's biased.
Hope, on the other hand, can be said to involve the unknown. I can say I *don't* know the true nature of the mind, and that I *hope* brain death doesn't involve what we know as the mind simply vanishing, and though I may prefer a certain answer to my question, I'm not assuming it's true. If I had faith that consciousness existed independently of the brain, I would be prejudicially rejecting the equally likely possibility that it didn't.
My icon sort of illustrates this idea of hope with acknowledgment of preference.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-07-29 02:20 pm (UTC)Faith, I'd say yes, there must be no faith because faith is prejudice. No one would accept a scientific study in which someone declared "I'm going to prove this drug does this"--it's biased.
Hope, on the other hand, can be said to involve the unknown. I can say I *don't* know the true nature of the mind, and that I *hope* brain death doesn't involve what we know as the mind simply vanishing, and though I may prefer a certain answer to my question, I'm not assuming it's true. If I had faith that consciousness existed independently of the brain, I would be prejudicially rejecting the equally likely possibility that it didn't.
My icon sort of illustrates this idea of hope with acknowledgment of preference.