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Without omniscience, faith is inescapable.
Explanation
Some have never forgiven God for this situation.
Even for those who only accept that which can be empirically verified, empiricism itself demands faith. You must decide the answers to questions like the following before you accept any data:
- How do you know your senses are trustworthy?
- How do you know that language or communication actually exists?
- What does it mean to mean something?
- What is real? What does the word “real” even mean?
- How do you know that which you read is real?
- How do you know your memory represents actual history?
Obviously, we would be nuts if we did not trust our senses and to have reasonable answers to the questions above, but answering those questions still implies some amount of choice on your part. Psychosis, a basic denial or confusion about what is real, does happen and it can be a choice to deny reality and choose psychosis instead. It is just basic honesty to admit that this is, in fact, a choice. It does not become less of a choice if you refuse to admit that it is.
You can say that the Christian God offers a cop-out to Christians: if some observation or situation cannot be explained, we often explain it by saying “God did it.” In a sense, it is not wrong to say this is a cop-out.
However, is it really any less of a cop-out, if some observation or situation cannot be explained, to say “current science does not have an explanation yet” or “we have not yet come up with a means to test a hypothesis on this situation yet.” You are taking it on faith that it can be known someday once we develop a more complete or useful physics.
And everyone still has the problem at some point of being unable to go back any further in our understanding. Perhaps we can, with science, explain the exact origin of the universe after the first few nanoseconds, but sooner or later, we can’t go back further. Even if you can go back to the moment of beginning and say Heisenberg Uncertainty explains the origin of energy in the universe, it still doesn’t tell you why energy exists at all or what it is. You’re either left just accepting that the beginning is unknowable or accepting some oracle that tells you “God did it.”
You simply can’t reason yourself into knowledge of everything.
You must accept some things on faith.
That truth feels brutal to some, but it is just as much a fundamental part of reality as the existence of action and energy.