• Peruvian_Skies@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Believing implies doing it blindly

    No, it does not. That’s exactly where you’re wrong.

    I believe that there’s a black hole in the center of the Milky Way. I don’t know enough about astrophysics to deeply analyze and understand all the evidence for myself. I can’t check all the math, I don’t have access to all the telescopes used to collect the relevant data to personally make sure that they were properly calibrated and I don’t understand the signal processing that was done on that data well enough to veto it myself. But I do know that other people have that knowledge and access to the equipment, and I understand and trust in the scientific method and peer review processes that led to that conclusion. And I understand the simplified explanations that were given to me about gravitation and so on that support the finding, and they are compatible with the rest of what I was taught. I believe in it, with good reason. It is not a blind belief. But it is a belief.

    Now, if I believed without any evidence that three thousand years ago, before people knew what schizophrenia was, some sheepherder was somehow granted knowledge of the future by a mysterious force claiming to have created the Universe, and from there believed in said claim, that would be very blind indeed. That’s faith. It’s completely different.