My apologies for entering the discussion late.
BB, here you are using the term 'faith' equivocally. I would be very interested in how many Christians here would consider their 'faith' in God to be as pedestrian as the trust we have that common events will occur consistently.
By reducing the Christian (or other religion's) concept of 'faith' to be equivalent with the 'faith' we have that our car will start in the morning is to rob it of all significance in the hearts and minds of spiritually centred people.
Instead of rendering religious faith to be equivalent with the common trust of repeatability, simply to enable you to claim science as just one more religion, perhaps you should separate the two and present scientific 'faith' for what it is - the observation that specific events produce specific effects consistently enough to be used in the prediction of future events/effects, and present religious 'faith' for what it is - the God given intuitional realization of his existence and power despite and beyond what the consistencies of the physical world provide?
I'm sure you didn't mean to make your and other Christian's faith as mundane as 'God does stuff often and reliably enough for us to believe in him'.
By reducing the Christian (or other religion's) concept of 'faith' to be equivalent with the 'faith' we have that our car will start in the morning is to rob it of all significance in the hearts and minds of spiritually centred people.
= = = =
Hogwash.
But perhaps avoidance or routine conscious ignorance of real Christian faith allows a certain amount of hogwash in one's thinking about it.
I say again . . . the specialness of Christian faith is THE ONE it's invested in. That makes all the difference. And that difference is more than sufficient for any measure or criteria seeking difference as meaningful or worth bothering about.
Life is life. Life in Christ--Resurrection Life is special . . . infinitely special . . . because of THE ONE it's IN.
Otherwise it's just life.
But, hey, even mundane faith is a lot better than the horror of even attempting to live life without faith--as impossible as that would be to go very far with.
FWIW b_sharp, I am using the word "faith" in precisely the same sense intended by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent, highly controversial Regensburg Inaugural Address. And I find the reaction I'm getting around here from certain quarters to this usage is eerily similar to the reaction the speech got from certain quarters of the Islamist world.
I'll stick by my usage as the fundamental one. Not least because the Pope does -- who is an extraordinarily brilliant metaphysician and epistemologist as well as superb theologian.
My use of the word "faith" is not "equivocal." It is essential.
In another post (to which I cannot seem to respond for whatever reason, since I "time out" on every attempt), PatrickHenry took issue with my assertion that Western science has roots in classical antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition. In essence, his argument went: the classical Greeks were the first scientists, but Judeo-Christianity is superfluous to science. If you don't mind I'll reply to him here.
I would only like to point out here that Christianity is a synthesis of both the patriarchs and prophets of Israel and the great Greek metaphysicians, principally Plato and Aristotle. The term Logos is a Greek word denoting both "word" and "reason." We find it in the very first line of the Gospel of Saint John: "In the beginning was the Logos; and the Logos was God, and was with God." For the great Greeks, man was "microcosm" -- an image or reflection of the Cosmos itself. Christianity upped the stakes to another category altogether: Man is made in the image of God Himself, the Way and Truth, Who expresses Himself as the Logos, as the reason, or intellect, that constitutes the order of universal reality. Intelligent beings made in his image are therefore able, via the gifts of reason and free will, to "penetrate the mysteries" of the universe.
It is this very Christian understanding that gives science its confidence in its ability to perform its task. That the universe is intelligible and therefore knowable owes preeminently to the divine Logos from which it received its origin. Both classical metaphysics and Christian theology regard the universe as shot thought with reason, as ordered by intellect from the beginning; therefore the universe is intelligible to intelligent beings.
There is absolutely no similar statement regarding the essential constitution of the universe emanating from Eastern cultures at all. And arguably, that is the reason why they could not produce science -- though their arts and literatures are pretty amazing.
In short, in the West, faith and reason are inseparable; and the acknowledgement of this is what has made Western culture and civilization so extraordinarily, even uniquely, successful....