Religious faith is the demand that assertions of religious dogma be accepted uncritically. As such, it is inherently presuppositionalist -- it decides what is true in advance.

This is less stridently true the further you stray from authoritarian / literalist / fundamentalist religion, but ultimately you cannot provide answers for the Great Questions (or any other questions) based on speculation and intuitive rumination. The religious are not content to leave unanswered questions be, they have to answer them some way or other. Hilarity ensues.

Sure, science doesn't address everything, and isn't even very interested in things it either wasn't designed to address or hasn't progressed far enough to address. But that's not a license to by-guess-and-by-golly make up explanations for what we don't know, either.

@mordant

“The religious are not content to leave unanswered questions be, they have to answer them some way or other.”

IMO you are over-generalizing and you miss the whole thrust of the religious impulse. It is true that many religious organizations set forth creeds to be believed, but not all do even that. It is true that some of those creeds are silly and untrue, but do those creeds purport to explain reality? No they do not. All they do in general is to point to the mystery and grandeur of reality. Where they speak of God, it is only an expression of reverence for what is. Religious people know that they can not understand reality rationally—they are interested in religious experience, not shallow reductionist explanations.

Half of all scientists have some sort of God concept and they see no conflict between science and religion. It is just their opinion, as valid and worthy as your opinion on the subject. Beliefs and opinions are nothing but emotional value judgments.

@WilliamFleming I grant you that religious faith is self-diluting itself out of a job. Unitarian Universalists for example qualify as a religion of the post-Christian variety, and they not only subscribe to no creed, but are explicitly non-creedal; they regard themselves as "covenantal" and accept people with all religious beliefs, including no religious beliefs (though I'd argue that their particular Shibboleth is a certain kind of liberal politics, such that they've simply substituted political dogma for religious dogma). Buddhists and Taoists are religious but have no actual deity in their belief system (although they have plenty of supernatural beings and cosmologies).

So the open question is, what is the true core of religious faith, and what groups are true to it? I'd submit that religious faith is not a vague, floating awe of the transcendent, it is a set of dogmas that demand fealty on penalty of ostracism from the group (and all it implies, including, in many cases, eternal perdition). You are arguing basically the inverse, that it's a love of reality as mysterious and grandiose, and religious fundamentalism is a perversion of that. I see kum-by-yah religion as a perversion (a happy one, by my lights) of what religion really is, taken to its "logical" conclusion.

Besides, that the universe is mysterious and grand and awesome is just another dogma, really, and as you point out yourself, an elevation of personal experience and subjective opinions over supposedly "shallow" alternatives -- itself another dogma.

@mordant

I think that awareness of the universe as mysterious, grand, and awesome is not a dogma, rather it is an experience, founded in conscious awareness. If I express such sentiments I am speaking only of myself. My personal experiences belong to me and are not subject to debate.

What IS subject to debate is the idea that science explains reality. Reality can not be explained.

I belonged to a Unitarian Church for a few years, and you have described them perfectly. They have substituted political dogma for religious dogma.

I agree that there is “a true core of religious faith”. In other words, most Christian organizations prescribe certain beliefs and most of those beliefs are unbelievable and inane. My opinion is that religion is not organizations and that it does not consist of belief but experience. The religious concept only makes sense on an individual level—you can not force someone to have a religious experience. Individual people are primary and organizations follow.

@WilliamFleming If you embrace personal experience for yourself alone then that's no problemo to me. There are just precious few religious people who understand that concept in my experience, specifically, "my experience applies only to myself".

Reality can indeed be explained, just not perfectly or 100%. Reality is pretty darned big; one wouldn't expect it to ever by rendered fully explicable, especially to small, limited beings such as ourselves.

But any progress that has been made in explaining reality has come from science. I am not aware of even one instance where religion invented or innovated something or corrected a factual error in science.

One can certainly decide what one's personal, subjective experiences mean for themselves, and decide to give that primacy over science, at least when the two conflict. I don't personally do that. And ironically, that is one of the few hold-overs from my fundagelical daze, because we were, someone anomalously, taught not to trust the more subjective kinds of personal experience as a reliable source of information. That was mostly aimed at keeping people from getting involved in the charismatic movement or other things we regarded as "extreme", such as televangelists and other Svengali-like leaders, and I think there was considerable merit in that. Stick to the scriptures (with the approved hermeneutic, of course) and it doesn't matter how you feel or what you find mentally [un]attractive. The problem I encountered was that the scriptures were as worthless a source of information about reality as we fancied personal experience to be; science has proven way better for my purposes anyway.

@mordant

The trouble with trying to explain reality is that our frame of reference is nothing but an illusion. You can explain away all day but if you are explaining things in terms of space, time, and matter your explanation is worthless. Science is good at making observations about relationships within the physical world and creating mathematical models that mirror those relationships. Science is a valuable tool for humanity but it can not say why things are as they are. Ultimate reality is unknown and unknowable IMO. A religious experience might give you appreciation for life as a conscious entity but it will not furnish you with understanding. Our role is one of ignorance and darkness but it is a dazzling darkness, lit wit awe and joy.

I was brought up in a Baptist Church, and it was sort of like what you describe. The Bible was supposed to be the ultimate and absolute authority—the word of God. That of course is a ridiculous idea and a main reason I opted out. In my case, I felt the presence of a baby somewhere in all that bath water, and I have tried to hold onto that baby.

Imbued with a sense of ignorance as I am, I do not argue for the existence of a god, What I know is that Ultimate Reality lies beyond the world of our senses, and conscious awareness of Ultimate Reality is a mighty fine thing.