Why you believe what you believe I

[brownjenkins]

Originally Posted by Elfhelm

brownie, I can ask one.

You seem to accept the world we experience as reality, but you are also aware that what you are responding to is a construct built out of selective perception in your own head. How do you know it isn't an illusion? Is it possible that one day you'll turn around and see the shapes casting the shadows on the cave wall and they won't be anything like what you thought? Could this whole life be just a big test, or a riddle, or a game? What I'm ultimately asking is, aren't people of science also making statements of faith when they talk about "the world" even though they know that their brains only get a highly distilled and infinitesimally small samping of the world, if it even exists at all?

very good point! yes and no, i would say

we ultimately do not know if this is all an illusion, or a test, or a game... so in this way, all we express is nothing more than "conjecture"

that said, we do notice consistancies, i.e. gravity... and we try our best to formulate theories that predict future events around these consistancies... this does not mean that gravity might just cease to exist next week... but for the moment, we are pretty safe in accepting that it will

this does not apply to god or the creation of the universe, since there is nothing in the first case, and very little in the second case, to observe directly in order to formulate consistancies

theory based on theory based on theory, as opposed the theory based upon observable and repeatable "reality"