[javert]

Please see my response to cookiecaper.

You don't "blindly believe" the scientific facts/phenomena to which you refer. First, you have ample evidence to suggest that they exist. Second, they do not contradict anything else in reality that you are aware of. Third, you have reason to trust the process of cognition that led to those conclusions, i.e, the thought process and work of scientists that reference reality in their work and seek to prove things objectively.

Faith---which in common use (properly so) is equivalent to "religious faith" unless otherwise specified---breaks all of those rules.

[anon_for_this_1]

I, personally, have no _evidence_ that the big bang really happened. I have heard people tell me it's so. I've read books claiming it's so. I have to have faith in these books and these people. That's the essence of my argument -- very, very few of us have actual evidence. What we have is the words of others. In other words, there are only a small handful of people that have built a device that can measure background microwave radiation and devices to measure red-shift, etc. Those few people know what they have observed and can interpret that information. Everything else that is built on those observations (many more theories, etc) is based on a belief in those original few peoples' work. And we, the masses, then have to believe those secondary interpretations. Heck, I haven't even gotten the information from the data interpreters, but rather from other writers who have interpretted it further and written text books, blog posts, etc. So yeah, it's pretty close to blind faith since I'm so many steps away from the truth, and don't have the ability (currently, with my existing education) to truely know it anyway even if I could speak directly to one of those scientists that built the space probe. I'd STILL have to trust him when he showed me the raw data.