Posted by 64bowtie on November 11, 2004, at 13:54:18
In reply to Re: Why is faith not definable??? » 64bowtie, posted by rayww on November 10, 2004, at 23:21:24
> So......you don't think animals have faith. Where does instinct come from? >
<<< As I have posted in the past, instinct is from the process portion of the DNA chain molecules of every living thing. Process Genes make up about 70% of the chain molecule. Originally thought to be "junk" genes, tremendous progress has shed new light that a great amount of behavior can be biased by this process region. Free-Will for humans perhaps originates in this region. God did a good job of laying us out so we could persevere in this hostile environment. I see no connection to faith and instinct other than my faith that instincts work, ...good.
> If you're not a cat how do you know they don't have faith??? I don't know how it feels to be a cat, but I know cats have feelings, and if they are capable of having feelings, why aren't they also capable of faith?
><<< An intellctual "faith" can be induced. Cats do use their litter box when we induce the message consistently over time. Biblical use of faith as a concept requires that faith is an "inside-job", induced faith doesn't measure up to the Biblical use of faith for connection to that literary supreme being. I suspect that many children are abused yearly in the name of induction of faith. We as human adults can do so much better than that.
About cats, I draw the line at the fact cats don't teach each other abstractions. Mankind does. Please be clear, I am not saying feelings are only abstract. I do guarantee, however, any memory of a faith-initiated happenning that is connected to a feeling, can only be an abstraction of the experience.
History is never more than the abstract. Cats don't teach history to each other, but we do. Good teaching is a mix both inductive and deductive processes. It has been proven that higher primates are capable of deductive decision making. They don't teach each other strategy in the abstract. Our faith shines brightest when we trust the strategy to work in both the abstract and in real-time the same way.
I have faith that we are better off being able to distinguish what happenned then from what is happenning right now.
Rod
poster:64bowtie
thread:408646
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/faith/20040914/msgs/414607.html