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Prescribed Title Essay

Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of using faith as a basis for knowledge in religion and in one area of knowledge from the TOK diagram.

Word Count: 1600

Francisco Herrera 2/16/2012

Herrera

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Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of using faith as a basis for knowledge in religion and in one area of knowledge from the TOK diagram. The idea of faith is to trust in what one has perceived to be morally or reasonably correct. With this idea in mind, one can understand how believers of Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, etc., make their decisions in life based on what their religion, or faith, allows them to claim as right, or morally correct. They go on about their lives by worshiping or putting faith in what they believe in as a guide to having an ideal lifestyle. The problem is not all faith is put into religion. Even theories in natural sciences have religious aspects within them that many people claim to be knowledge, thus making many fall under a fallacious, yet scientific, umbrella. So then I came to ask, what constitutes the difference between religion and natural sciences? If religion is putting faith into what one has came to perceive as being right, then how is natural science not a religion? Scientists, or most people that I have came across in my life, seem to willingly believe in all of these claims made in science books. As I delve into this idea I began to realize that people make their decisions on what to put their faith in by whatever appeals to them the most, whether by the amount of the evidence and/or the quality of such evidence. Ultimately, ones reasons to having faith is dependent on the substantial evidence for the claim that the faith imposes, the emotional ties that enables one to have faith in such, or a combination of both in order to have a sense of knowing what is right in life. Consequently, the strengths and weaknesses of using faith as a basis for knowledge depends on what people are appealed to by the most and find to be most valid for themselves which intrinsically depends on their logic and intuition within their reasoning. Natural sciences have concrete evidence whose concreteness derives from the control that one has over the ability of causing such to reappear in this world in order to prove their claims. For example, whenever I am able to repeat the results of my investigations for my Chemistry Internal Assessments, but to rather enhance the conclusions I draw from them, I purposefully attempt to become more and more concrete as I further increase the preciseness and accuracy of my data gathering methods, thus, increasing the concreteness of my evidence meaning more will probably come to believe and trust, have faith, in my results because they see how experienced and trustworthy I can be. In other words, others place their faith in me for the reason that I have been able to perceive what seems to be validly correct in my qualitative and quantitative observations with mathematics as a way to further ensure the beliefs of what I have been able to form from my perceptions originating from the conduction of my experiments. Now, even though Ive been able to carry out some sort of sophisticated process, e.g., scientific method or line regression statistics, or the realization of seemingly direct correlations, my seemingly concrete evidence could still cause me to be wrong because, possibly, my conclusion may be, in the end, not necessarily true due to my ignorance in the subject when compared to a licensed chemist. An example of a false conclusion but with convincing evidence would be when the trend lines of two or more events seem to coincide with one another. Hypothetically, even though one would claim since the quantitative reoccurrence of falling stars is following the same trend line as that of jailing outlaws in Honolulu, Hawaii, that they consequently directly depend on one another, another can obviously dictate the falseness of such an observation even though sophisticated statistical processes have been used to help prove the idea of how they correlate, but if one has faith in their work and reasons to this as being true, when others can reassuringly testify against such with performed 2

Herrera

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Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of using faith as a basis for knowledge in religion and in one area of knowledge from the TOK diagram. counterarguments, it is because this observer lacks the knowledge, or the experience with various perceptions of the world, to say that it is just chance or some error in his data or processes meaning that his level of logic and depth of intuition are lesser than those that argumentatively disproved his claim. But, for those who wouldve had faith in my work would be because they have seen and came to understand my work ethics, have come to trust my ways of concluding and forming logical reasons, and have less experience within the subject that I have been experimenting with than I do. Essentially, faith derives from the trust in either the more knowledgeable or more experienced. Its considered to be knowledge once one develops faith in their own data gathering methods after accepting and realizing their limitations, which allows them to become more logical by creating counterarguments within their own work and work to disprove them in order to see the extent of their own conclusion in whatever the case, experiment, etc., especially after setting the basis for a particular knowledge on someone elses work and putting faith in their results. In the case of reasoning, faith causes one to most likely become less accurate in their presumed knowledge when one resorts to forming a basis on someone elses conclusion because one has not perceived the process for himself and does not actually know if the one who he is taking the conclusion from has realized and embedded his limitations into his conclusion, or claim. The limitations on one will always be there for humans, but what humans claim to know will always be advancing and, in turn, evolving the general intellect of the people because humans work to discover and eventually run into aspired scientific revolutions causing there to be more claims for one to actually experience and form their own knowledge from. The depth of these limitations are relative to the more intelligent and knowledgeable ones, e.g., professionals, specialists, etc., where one who is very limited would be considered more immature in their thought processes due to the minimal amounts of exposure to the certain subjects that pertain to the situation. In other words, the lesser the experience, the weaker the intuition and the lesser developed logic. One needs to perceive for himself to actually understand and claim something as knowledge, which is where faiths weakest factor lies. Faith develops from trust in others experiences. That is why natural sciences are typically explained with ways of experiencing and experimenting their claims to measure their validity, which, in the end, it seems wise and generally okay to have faith in natural sciences as long as limitations are set to whatever the claims may be and one experiences the science for himself to more fully understand and comprehend the world by grasping their own perceptive knowledge. Evidently, religion contradicts the idea of knowledge; the only knowledge found in religion is the knowing of its limitations and the manners in which it evokes emotion through its moral system. Succinctly, it is an emotionally driven belief system. It spins off the experiences of the so-called wise people and their experienced ways of going through the processes that their religion has to offer and having the religion itself deeply analyzed and known, which, thus, enables them to be more widely trusted when teaching these beliefs that built off of beliefs to others. Another problem with religion is the problem found within its validity. Other than highly probable misinterpretations due to languages dependence on perceptive meaning, especially when of different eras due to language being highly susceptible to changes in its meaning over time, religion encompasses the emotions of its followers by defining morals for them and providing emotional evidence 3

Herrera

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Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of using faith as a basis for knowledge in religion and in one area of knowledge from the TOK diagram. for its hermeneutics and other religious claims. But, to have faith in a religion is usually a decision that is actually more so instilled into one, typically by those who have intimate connections to him, and is left to be, usually because of the emotional ties that one has to that religious influencer. Emotion thwarts logical reasoning and lets fear initiate a more emotional one because of its manipulative potency over the conscious, decisive factor of the human mind. The value of what one has perceived as so important before, changes with emotions being involved in the equation. So, by having faith as a basis for knowledge in a religion, one will be accepting towards the limitations that religion imposes on one, find it right in their mind, and will denounce, or more plainly, reject anything that contradicts the believed-in religions claims, e.g., my Catholic ways cause my rejection of accepting any scientific theories, that define the creation of humanity, as true because I believe the Catholic god is the creator, but even though I have no concrete evidence for it, I have faith in this religion because I fear the idea of being created from dirt, descended to hell, and have also been influenced by Catholic parents to be as so. So what does constitute the difference between science and religion? Natural sciences consist of claims that can be proven and seen in the real world with ways to turn beliefs into perceived knowledge through experience in real time; religion has grandiose explanations and reasons for whatever is initially perceived in relation to the believed-in religion. In the end, both subjects affect one another and are both ways of how one is trying to explain the universes enigmas. Conclusively, the weaknesses and strengths of faith in these subject matters depend on the efficiency of the validation for both the religion and natural science.