You're right. If I have evidence that suggests that in fact I won't achieve those things I desire to do, that it is in fact just wishful thinking and self deception, then I don't actually have any faith in anything at all, including myself.

Faith is a belief in something with no evidence to support that belief, that's why believing it requires faith. I don't feel like that about anything.

Not necessarily I don't think.

Consider that you wish to climb Everest and you train for it but yet you don't know that you will be able to complete it. Until you have succeeded or failed you can't know whether you can do it or not, surely believing you can do it there constitutes faith without deception.

You can have faith in your ability to do something without having done it or knowing that you can?

If a mechanical cause is eternal then so is its effect. For instance, if water and cold exist eternally then ice won't come into being, but always exist. Cold can't decide after a certain amount of time to begin causing ice. The analogy is that if the universe is the effect of a mechanical cause which is eternal then the universe would also be eternal - the mechanistic cause of the universe can't decide to NOW create the universe.

Why would I not know if I could complete it? If I'm a good mountaineer and have done the appropriate training then I'd know one way or the other and I'd have no need for faith. In this context, faith would be quite dangerous. If I had reason to doubt that I could do it, then telling myself that I can would be no more than a desire, it wouldn't be a fact.

There's a huge leap between 'confident that I can do it, with good reason' and 'I don't know but I think I can do it'. I'm not capable of that leap because it would be based on nothing more than wishful thinking. Anyone who attempted the climb, based on faith in their abilities rather than hard evidence of what they can do, would be a fool IMO.

You got to love this idiot Lawrence Krauss. In his ''God'' he states that the universe come out of nothing . But in his book he is saying the opposite contradicting the name of his book. Ofc if he writes it in his book he well be the clown of science circles and modern physics.
How can you even consider listening to this phony scientist. His only agenda is to fight and destroy religion ,because of his personal hate for God and theists.

Well that doesn't help.

That isn't faith (belief without evidence either way). That is overconfidence (belief contrary to evidence of one's abilities).

And what is overconfidence if it isn't a belief unsupported by evidence?

In any case, I've come to agree, I never require faith.

I think you like absolutes

As in "A value or principle regarded as universally valid or viewed without relation to other things."?

Maybe, who doesn't?

because I tend to think a lot of the questions we have are relative, which I think you agree with given previous discussions so I don't know that I'm actually right when I say you like absolutes.

I think it leads to some difficult positions.

sorry for that

This is pretty lol, but let's drill down. You suggest consciousness as being an intractable problem on materialism but which, if any, of these other areas of neuroscience do you think are intractable on materialism?

- Explaining sense perception
- Explaining how memories are formed
- Finding effective treatments for mental illnesses
- Explaining cognition

For each intractable field (including consciousness), demonstrate what alternative model would be more productive. Be explicit. If materialism can't explain how LSD affects consciousness (for example) show the formal model for how it works on dualism. If we can't know "what it is like to be a bat" on materialism, show how we can on dualism.

Cos, you know, it seems like mind-body dualism is a degenerative research programme, with precisely zero successful applications since Descartes formalized it over 400 years ago. Conversely, neuroscience has had many big successes that, prima facie, should be impossible on dualism. So you have to claim that all the stuff we've explained is somehow congruent with both dualism and materialism, and only what has yet to be explained can never be explained on materialism. How convenient!

Your argument seems equivalent to being dismissive of number theory just because the Goldbach Conjecture has not yet been proven/disproven. We are not tempted to say that mathematicians simply have "faith" in arithmetic, and mathematicians would be right to ignore people who claimed that their completely unsuccessful system of mystical mathematics should be given credibility on that basis.

Bottom line, perhaps materialist, reductionist neuroscience won't be able to explain consciousness. But until you can propose a model that works or make testable predictions or DO anything, you are merely joining the long line of now-sheepish folks who declared that X phenomena can't be explained naturalistically. Show me that it works, and how it works, and you'll be allowed to sit at the table, until then, its hard to even get up the energy to deign to reply.

I don't think dualism works, either. But immaterialists aren't dualists; they reject dualism.

Could we assert a metaphysical cause with a condition that the effect is only brought about by there being nothing material? This triggers the effect of creating the universe but since the condition is satisfied any further effects won't occur.

Yes. You can also assert that the universe popped up out of nothing for no reason. What counts in arguments about ultimate truth is plausibility.