Happy New Years!

[OrbWeaver]

You know that there are certain areas of the brain which focus on certain behaviours, so it's obvious that if someone had a ridiculosly high number of synapses or neurons in an area of the brain dealing with being good at maths, or languages or music (Mozart was also good at all of these things) then you're goign to be able to do it better than the average person.

 

That is only partially true. There are areas of the brain that tend to deal with certain abilities in a developed person, but this is not as fixed as you might think.

 

For example, in most people the left hemisphere deals with rational and deductive thought, as well as language. If you sustain an injury to the left hemisphere then you will almost certainly suffer a partial loss of these abilities. However, a hemiplegic who is born with only a functioning right hemisphere is still capable of developing language skills, as the right hemisphere takes over the duties that would normally arise in the left.

 

Similarly, the part of the brain that processes auditory information can learn to deal with visual information if it is reconnected so as to receive data from the eyes instead of the ears. It seems likely that instead of being a compartmentalised set of discrete processing units, the brain is in fact a giant network that can adapt its function on the basis of the information that is fed to it (although this ability does deteriorate with age).

[obscurus]

You're definitely wrong this time Obscurus, biologist or not.

Everyone is phyiscally different, we're don't all look identical, and likewise our brians are different and not all identical.

You know that there are certain areas of the brain which focus on certain behaviours, so it's obvious that if someone had a ridiculosly high number of synapses or neurons in an area of the brain dealing with being good at maths, or languages or music (Mozart was also good at all of these things) then you're goign to be able to do it better than the average person.

None of us know exactly how the brain works, or exactly what areas are used for musical creativity. It's more than the sum of its parts.

Countless thousands of kids were taught music at an ealy age in Mozart's day. Sure, some of them when on to be great pianists, some wrote a few decent tunes, but none of them did what Mozart did.

You can't tell me that the only difference is that Mozart put in a few extra hours piano practice than the next guy, and anyone can do it given enough effort, otherwsie the list of really great composers woudn't be so small.

As usual oDDity, you misinterpret what I am saying and turn it into an extreme viewpoint that I don't espouse.

 

I'm not saying genetics counts for nothing, or that all kids are born equal etc (@Sparhawk: I have three nieces and a bub on the way, so I know how different kids can be even at avery early age). Of course some people have brains with a different arrangement of neurones that facilitate learning certain things faster than is normal. What I am saying is that many people who are described as geniuses were actually just normal people who had lots of training at a very early age.

 

Maths, music and language are all inter-related, as they make overlapping use of the same areas of the brain. Music is mathematical, and closely linked to speech - the earliest, simplest and most ubiquitous form of music is song, which requires development of language and math skills. Good musicians are almost invariably good at maths and vice versa.

 

Mozart in my view was a very average composer who was simply hyped up due to his early success - it was a case of look at that kid playing the harpsichord, wow. As an adult his works are juvenile, formulaic and not really distinct from what most other composers of his day were doing (he plaigiarised a lot of other litle-known composers works - one thing he was very good at was being able to hear a performance and transcribe it accurately from memory, and he used this ability to rip off numerous other obscure composers) - he was simply more famous, and that is pretty typical of talented people. There were dozens of much beter composers who never achieved recogniton because people were infatuated with the kid playing the piano.

 

The list of really great composers depends entirely on which individual you ask to provide that list - combine them together and you have a pretty frickin large list. There are litteraly thousands of chinese and indian kids who are drilled though various arts at a very young age, quite relentlessly, and even the least naturally talented among them have profoundly brilliant technical ability and musicianship, even if they lack creativity or feeling.

 

And a person with a high degree of natural talent who does little to cultivate that talent can easily be eclipsed in ability by an individual with little natural ability but who practises a great deal and is dedicated.

 

Most kids, unless they have some form of mental deficiency, have the ability to become great musicians if exposed to music early. Music is a normal form of human expression, it is genetically encoded in most people to have the ability, all it usually takes, like most things, is practise, practise, practise.

 

People tend to exagerate the abilities of virtuosos, the gulf between the most gifted and the normal person is not that big, except in rare cases.

[obscurus]

Similarly, the part of the brain that processes auditory information can learn to deal with visual information if it is reconnected so as to receive data from the eyes instead of the ears. It seems likely that instead of being a compartmentalised set of discrete processing units, the brain is in fact a giant network that can adapt its function on the basis of the information that is fed to it (although this ability does deteriorate with age).

 

 

And this ability is greatest within the first five years of a child's life. The plasticity of the human brain to adapt should not be underestimated. Although there are genetic predispositions, instincts, and tendencies, they can be overwritten with practise to a surprisingly large degree. A person born Right handed can become ambidextrous or Left handed with practise (though it may never be comfortable for a left handed person to switch to the right hand, even if they can do it without difficulty).

 

A person who loses their hands in an accident can learn to play the piano with their toes if they work at it enough.

 

People in Western countries don't really understand what it means to practise - in Japan or China, there is a culture of 'practising perfection'. It is ingrained into people that they should practise something until they approach perfection, and they apply this philosphy to everyday life as much as special skills. People in Asia will often practise things until their hands bleed, and they pass out from hunger. This is perhaps why so many modern instrumental virtuosos come from China, compared to Europe or America.

 

Scandinavia also produces a large number of virtuoso musicians, perhaps it has something to do with long, dark winters where there is little else to do but play music.

[Zaccheus]

One thing I found quite fascinating is that deaf children, who grow up in an environment where sign-language is used a lot, will pick up sign-language in the same way that hearing kids will pick up speach.

Our brain seems to be a massive pattern recognition machine which will latch onto any patterns it can find.

 

Creationism (specifically the Judeo-Christian version) entails so many leaps of faith that it is difficult for me to see how a sane person could even contemplate something like Christianity being at all worthwhile.

I think you'll find that most christians don't simply believe in God because of what the bible says, but rather they believe what the bible says because they have had certain personal experiences which point them towards the conclusion that the bible is indeed correct. Otherwise you could pick up any book and make a decision to believe what it says. Christians may be strange but they are not stupid.

[obscurus]

One thing I found quite fascinating is that deaf children, who grow up in an environment where sign-language is used a lot, will pick up sign-language in the same way that hearing kids will pick up speach.

Our brain seems to be a massive pattern recognition machine which will latch onto any patterns it can find.

I think you'll find that most christians don't simply believe in God because of what the bible says, but rather they believe what the bible says because they have had certain personal experiences which point them towards the conclusion that the bible is indeed correct. Otherwise you could pick up any book and make a decision to believe what it says. Christians may be strange but they are not stupid.

 

That isn't quite right.

 

Such experiences are usually referred to as a schizophrenic delusional episode, or a hallucination, or at best a failure of the human pattern regognition system (we have a very high false positive rate when it comes to identifying patterns). People with such experiences who have never heard of the Bible don't automatically leap for the bible. People can interpret these delusions to believe that newspapers contain hidden messages from Ninghizhidda or some other being, they could attribute just about any document no matter how silly (eg Hubbard's Dianetics) as a work of divine inspiration.

 

People believe in the Biblical God almost allways because their parents forced them to go to Church on Sunday, and they were thoughroughly indoctrinated into the cult. Kids tend to believe their parents, and it never occurs to them that it might not be true unless they for some reason wind up questioning what they have been told.

 

Christians are stupid for failing to question things they were told. Most usually get so far as realising that the Easter Bunny is fictional, but unfortunately fail to engage their BS detector when it comes to fanciful stories about large boats and big floods, or political activists with a penchant for performing illusions claiming to have a divine parent.

[Zaccheus]

If you think that any experience of any higher beings can't be anything other than a malfunction of the brain, then I guess there's not much point in any further discussions about it.

[John D.]

People believe in the Biblical God almost allways because their parents forced them to go to Church on Sunday, and they were thoughroughly indoctrinated into the cult. Kids tend to believe their parents, and it never occurs to them that it might not be true unless they for some reason wind up questioning what they have been told.

Funny I wasnt forced to go to church by my parents at all.

[Napalm]

more of a technicallity then disagreement, but the whole big flood thing actually come up in quite a few places around the same time in history (I forget where I read this, but if I remember I'll refind the source), so technically it's possibel it was true :-p. That having been said I doubt there was any getting 2 of each animals invloved but hey...I don't confirm or deny it.

[obscurus]

more of a technicallity then disagreement, but the whole big flood thing actually come up in quite a few places around the same time in history (I forget where I read this, but if I remember I'll refind the source), so technically it's possibel it was true :-p. That having been said I doubt there was any getting 2 of each animals invloved but hey...I don't confirm or deny it.

 

 

The whole "flood thing" is the result of very old garbled stories from around 11,000 BCE, when the last ice age retreated, causing global sea level to rise dramatically (several tens of metres) in a relatively short period of time. While the rise was generally gradual, it was punctuated with occaisinal rapid spurts, and the climate change at the time would have caused increased rainfall in many parts of the world, and increased drought in others. In Australia, very few Aboriginal tribes have flood myths, except those who have lived near the sea, and Australia became much drier at the end of the last ice age, hence the lack of flood stories. The same for most of Africa - those cultures already living far inland have no flood myths, those that were disposessed by sea level rise do. An area of land the size of the USA in coastline disappeared under the sea in a period of a few hundred years. People living on the coastline retreated inland, and relayed tales of their lands being swallowed up by the sea, as they moved futher inland. Over many generations these stories naturally were embellished, mutated, evolved and diverged. None of the people who were already living inland when this sea level rise occured have retained any stories of floods, but the people that do have wildly varying stories, with the only common theme being rising water levels. Some flood myths involve rain, some don't.

 

Actually, in the biblical story of Noahs ark, God instructs Noah to gather "two of each beast that is unclean, and seven of each beast that is clean" (it might be the other way around, I'm quoting from memory). That is a hell of a lot of animals to pack into one little boat, considering there are an estimated 5 - 15 million species of animal, even considering that half of them are beetles. And then you have to consider that for most species, the minimum viable population size is >500. Some animals need several thousand individuals to survive. Then there is food - you need to feed these buggers, some animals consume their body weight in food each day, some have very particular diets.

Most non-fundamentalist Christians are reasonable enough to concede that Genesis is a mythological story, and didn't actually happen.

 

The story of Noah predates the Bible by several thousand years, it is found in the Sumerian myths in various forms, and these people were totally unrelated to the Semitic tribes that borrowed their mythology. It is probably based loosely on fact in the sense that some farmer noticed that the sea level was rising, and thought it might be worthwhile loading his cattle and other livestock into a boat in case it got hairy. He survives, has some kids, several thousand years later his offspring have proliferated and exagerated the story now distorted out of all proportion.

 

Zachaeus: "If you think that any experience of any higher beings can't be anything other than a malfunction of the brain, then I guess there's not much point in any further discussions about it."

 

I didn't say it couldn't be anything else, but that is the most liklely of all the possibilities. Many ancient societies did not recognise mental diseases like schizophrenia, instead, schizophrenics were (and still are in some societies) treated as people with a special conduit to God, or the spirit world. They didn't understand that when these people heard voices, or saw things that weren't there, that it was an error of their brain, they thought the voices were God, or spirits. Shamans, prophets, witchdoctors, priests throughout history have deliberatley induced visions (hallucinations) by starving themselves for days, weeks even, wandering around in the hot desert sun, consuming hallucinagenic compounds, and various other activities known to cause the brain to malfunction.

 

Now, it is possible, however unlikely, that when some people say they are hearing the voice of what they think is God, that they really are hearing something and it isn't their brain being wierd. But they have no way of determining the veracity of anything that voice tells them, so to simply believe a mysterious voice or a character in a strange dream is just stupid, especially if it tells you a fanciful story that can in no way be verified. The voice could be anything - a pixie sitting in their ear, a dimensional rift, who knows. So to then be so certain about it that you construct an elaborate belief system around it requires that you depart with a fairly large chunk of reason and sanity.

 

@ John D. : I would be curious to know what precipitated your religious epiphany, if it wasn't indoctrination as a child, or TV evangelists, or born-again cults knocking at your door. Why not Islam, or Rastafarianism? God apparently tells a lot of wildy different (not to mention contradictory) stories to different people, or so the people who claim to have spoken with him claim - on what do you base your version of belief?

 

Or did you just keep a childhood imaginary friend into adulthood?

 

Do you have any basis for your beliefs without reference to a Bible or Koran, or some other document? Can you follow your beliefs though a consistent line of reasoning, based soley on observations of the natural world? Did God speak to you personally? If you think He did, how do you know it wasn't an imposter (a Demonic spirit falsely claiming to be God, or a cheeky little Leprechaun trying to trick you, for example)?

 

If you want to claim extroadinary things, like imaginary friends killing their children and thus 'saving' the world, you had better have some pretty extroadinary evidence to back it up, and no, absence of evidence for evolution in the form of something you don't understand about it does not constitute evidence for your imaginary friend creating life. You can't rely on dubious anecdotes, like "my Grandma saw an angel and it told her to move to so and so, and it all turned out well..." You need positive evidence that stands on its own, and can be independently studied and verified by anyone (at least in principle) - you can't say, "well, gee I can't quite figure this out yet, science isn't advanced enough at the moment, or we may never know, so therefore God did it!". It is a patent abuse of reason, and a cop out.

Edited January 9, 2006 by obscurus

[sparhawk]

Most non-fundamentalist Christians are reasonable enough to concede that Genesis is a mythological story, and didn't actually happen.

 

I think that the stories from the bible actually happened, but certainly not verbatim. I rather think that it is a mixture of storytelling to try to explain how things happened (like the Genesis) and stories about actual events that were blow out of proprotion to make a better story (like the flood). Nowadays we have a lot verifications, but back then nothing such was possible. And still if you see a movie from some events the movies are also made to make a better movie, not to make a more true report. Did the events on the Titanic happen as it was protrayed in the last big block buster? Certainly not, but it makes a good story. Just as an example. And in a few hundred years, the 'actual and accurate' reports will be totally forgotten, but movies will still be around, telling the same story again and again, and each time a little bit different, but always with a small core of truth.

[obscurus]

Yes, a lot of the events described in the Bible may have happened - after all the Bible is a hodge-podge of documents cobbled together - it is a bit like walking into a library and taking random samples of books and compiling them into a new book. You get a bit of history, a bit of fiction, lots of lists, genealogies, laws etc.

 

A fictional novel can refer to actual historical events, but that doesn't make the main plot of the work of fiction true. People with no knowledge of science might misinterpret a mirage as a vision, interpret a mentaly ill person as an angel, connect events that aren't connect.

 

People draw on actual events and embellish and exagerate them for the sake of making a point, or telling a story and making it more dramatic.

 

The story of Dvaid v. Goliath is a good case in point: the point of the story is an allegory used to inspire young warriors that the weak can triumph over the strong if they are brave and smart. It doesn't matter whether there actually was such a battle, or if the characters were real or not, it is the concept of the story that matters. There might have been a faily average guy named david, who possibly did manage to kill a bloke named Goliath, who happened to be six feet tall (which would have been very tall for that time and place), and whose size was later grossly exaggerated for the sake of the story.

 

there is no reason to assume that the writers of the Bible were any more truthful or virtuous than anyone else living today - they would have lied, exaggerated, misled, dsisembled, imagined and deceived as much as any modern tabloid magazine or news media program for the sake of a good story, or to control people's behaviour.

 

Bottom of the line: don't believe everything you read.

[Domarius]

I saw a cool documentry once that had a theory how the sea could have parted for moses - something to do with their being a sand bank in the river, and when the tide was just right, and wind was just right, the sandbank became visible.

 

Anyway I just find that stuff interesting.

[Maximius]

Dont forget the many intentional revisions the Bible has undergone. I forget all the examples but here was the Council of Nicea that made major changes for one thing. If its the word of God, He has decided to speak in a rather haphazard, meandering, sometimes contradictory way.

[obscurus]

Have a look here, for example: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim...radictions.html

 

http://www.atheists.org/christianity/contradictions.html

 

http://www.evilbible.com/

 

 

the most marked contradicitons are between the Old and New Testaments. In the old testament, god is a mean old bastard will smite anyone who even slightly irritates him, in the New he is all forgiveness and love, and turn the other cheek etc. The personality shift is stark and obvious, yet most Christians seem oblivious to it.

I can patiently tolerate and respect someone who has doubts about the likelihood of evolution, or relativity, or plate tectonics, becasue doubt is a very healthy thing, and it is a dangerous thing for anything to go undoubted. But I have nothing but pity and contempt for anyone who seriously believes that somehting as ridiculously contradictory as the Bible is the word of god.

 

Some classics:

 

"... I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." -- Genesis 32:30

 

"No man hath seen God at any time..."-- John 1:18

 

"... with God all things are possible." -- Matthew 19:26

 

"...The LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." -- Judges 1:19

 

"...thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. " -- Exodus 21:23-25

 

"...ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." -- Matthew 5:39

 

"...he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. " -- Job 7:9

 

"...the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth...." -- John 5:28-29

 

... God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.

- James 1:13

 

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt

Abraham.

- Genesis 22:1

[Domarius]

So it seems the real reason behind the requirement of unconditional faith is because none of it would hold up to scrutiny

 

I love south park - Kyle questions how "nice" god is when he gets cancer or something, and there is one scene where he quotes a story about a conversation between god and the devil, and the devil challenges god's ways and god says "No I shall show you they do love me, look at the power of unconditional faith" and then picked a man who had done many good things and been rewarded with a good life - and burned his house down, killed all his family, and gave him leprosy. But all throughout it the man kept his faith and accepted all this as god's will. And god said unto the devil "See?"

 

Kyle says "God is a bastard. Why would he destroy an innocent man's life just to prove a stupid point?"

[obscurus]

When I was about 10 years old or so, I decided to actually read the Bible from cover to cover, to see for myself what it was all about. I was utterly horrified by the time I got to the end of it, that anyone could seriously a) worship a god that was that evil and believe that a word of the contradictory, absurd load of bollocks that it was.

 

South Park is great. They take that line in the sand that you shouldn't cross, and jump right over it, and tear apart all of the preconceptions people have about what is good and bad in the world. They strip morality bare and expose the lies that cover her up. Fantastic show, as is the Simpsons. Masterpieces of social introspection.

[Domarius]

Yeah, for all the bad stigma associated with South Park (amonst people who don't actually watch it) the guys behind it are actually pretty perceptive and intelligent - I have a very intellectual friend who does not like toilet humor but loves South Park for the reasons you just mentioned.

 

Hey, on that site you linked to, I actually found the part of the Bible that Kyle referred to;

"A good man obtaineth favour of the LORD..." -- Proverbs 12:2

 

Now consider the case of Job. After commissioning Satan to ruin Job financially and to slaughter his shepherds and children to win a petty bet with Satan. God asked Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause." -- Job 2:3

 

I tried to read the entire bible once, when I was in my early teens. I got as far as some bit that went something along the lines of "I am a woman, I shal do everything my husband says without question" "I am a man, I will tell the woman what is right and wrong" etc. a sort of dialogue between the two that went something like that. Always against any sort of bigotry, especially chouvinism, and never moreso than in my teens, I put the book down in disgust and never looked at it since.

[OrbWeaver]

I am always horrified by what people will accept as "God's will" while still insisting on believing that God is good and loves them. When that woman was stabbed in Surrey (Abigail something-or-other) and ended up paraplegic, she regained some movement in her hand and said "God is doing wonderful things".

 

God clearly had no problem with letting her get stabbed in the neck, but it's oh-so-generous of him to give her back a tiny bit of muscle movement.

[Zaccheus]

Some classics:

I love these kinds of contradictions. Most are very easy to counter - some are not.

 

This is just off the top of my head, but I see no real problems with the passages you quoted:

 

"... I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." -- Genesis 32:30

 

"No man hath seen God at any time..."-- John 1:18

It does not say that Jacob had seen God face to face, only that Jacob SAID he had.

 

"... with God all things are possible." -- Matthew 19:26

 

"...The LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." -- Judges 1:19

The text is from the King James Version, a rather poor translation by todays standards. Even the New King James Version (and other, much better, translations) read "and they drove out", making it clear that it was 'Judah' (the tribe) who could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley. See also http://www.aboutbibleprophecy.com/q16.htm .

 

"...thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. " -- Exodus 21:23-25

 

"...ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." -- Matthew 5:39

I understand An-eye-for-an-eye to mean: If someone does you wrong, do not wipe out the whole clan, only demand retribution according to the damage you have suffered. That is justice. Jesus sais, if you want to be perfect, you can go beyond what the law says and demand no retribution at all.

 

"...he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. " -- Job 7:9

 

"...the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth...." -- John 5:28-29

Again, Job 7:9 is a quote, so all the bible is saying is that Job had made a certain comment: Those who have died don't normally go back to the life they had lived before they died. John 5:28-29 does not contradict that.

 

... God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.

- James 1:13

 

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham.

- Genesis 22:1

Language is full of phrases where the same word is used for different things.

 

The passage in James talks about people doing stuff they should not be doing. Genesis 22:1 is clearly talking about Abraham doing something which God told him to do, to see if he would in fact do it. Now I have no idea why the King James Version translates this as tempting, as 'testing' would be a far better english word to use here and modern translations do so, but I think it is pretty clear that we are talking about two different concepts here anyway.

 

There are tons of websites which aim to find contradictions in the bible, and tons of websites which then debunk the 'contradictions'. The whole thing reminds me of the moon-landing-hoax-conspiracy websites vs debunking websites sometimes.

 

The most interesting questions I have come accross arise out of comparing Matthew and Luke regarding the birth and childhood of Jesus.

[Zaccheus]

In the old testament, god is a mean old bastard will smite anyone who even slightly irritates him, in the New he is all forgiveness and love, and turn the other cheek etc. The personality shift is stark and obvious, yet most Christians seem oblivious to it.

The whole old testament is full of passages where God is said to be patient and forgiving towards the Israelites. And God gets angry in the new testament too.

[oDDity]

Who cares, even if the bible didn't contradict itself once, the whole thing comes down to whether you believe certain people in the distant past had direct contact with some universal entity responsible for creating everything, and it told them certain facts about how we all should live our lives.

As far as I'm concerned, they either made it all up, or genuinely believed their own delusions.

 

A question I often like to ask of christians is this:

Considering your belief system is based entirely on believing that you know what god wants, and you only know this through other people, who claim god has told them what he wants, I want to know what your criteria are for beleiving someone when they say they've been in direct contact with god, and god has told them how you should live your life. Do you beleive anyone who claims god has told them things?

If not, then how do you decide if the person is genuine or not?

[Zaccheus]

That's a good question, one I ask myself very often actually.

 

Let me put it this way. Many people claim many things. It's nice to say that scientific research is verifyable, and on the whole I agree, but in praxis that does not help much because I myself cannot repeat any of the experiments which scientists claim to have conducted. Somewhere down the line, you have to make a judgement yourself. Who do you trust, what is the likelyhood of falseness, etc. Like I said above, most christians have had some kind of experience (or experiences) which strongly suggest that there is indeed something trustworthy about the bible. Otherwise we really wouldn't bother.

[oDDity]

No, they haven't experiences which strongly suggest anything, they have had experiences which they attribute to some divine entity for no good reason.

It's all so vague and meaningless as to be laughable when someone says they've had an 'experience' whch they claim had 'something' to do with 'god'.

[sparhawk]

The scientific process is pretty well defined. I can only argue for physics and math here. Math especially resides on some basic definitions like 1+1 = 2. All the other rules are derived from this. None of the derived rules are arbitry, maybe not in higher math, but at least in the normal numberspace this is certainly true. You can follow it down from there if you want. You don believe that 23/9=2.5555... ? You can easily test it for yourself based on the above formula of 1+1=2. From these basic operations also follows some of the higher operation like square and root and you can easily derive them from yourself. This is already a pretty good foundation. You can even derive matrix operation step by step this way, but it would be very cumbersome. Still you can do it. You can proof a lot of this stuff on your own, you just need some time. In fact I did this once in a limited way for a schoolproject in programming, and I have a book about 3D math where these basics are pretty good exlpained from the ground up. It all follows the same rules.

In physics it is pretty much the same. You can easily proof the 'small' things for yourself. Formulas like speed and velocity can easily be proofen. If you get a physics textbookyou can see for yourself that it also builds up on each other step by step and no step is hidden from you. This is not really surprising because physics relies heavily on math anyway.

What this means though is, that you indeed can verify a lot on your own, without anybody interfering with it. So when I come to the bigger steps, the leap of faith is pretty small because I can verify all the steps below and see wether they are correct. Therefore I can accept that higher claims may also be correct, by assuming that the same process is followed.

This is exactly the problem that you have with god, though, because there are no such step by step verifications. You can either believe it or don't, thatś why it is called faith and not proof.

This should not be confused with blind faith in scientists though, because scientists are only human and make errors or intentionaly are faking evidence. The scientific process is verifiable by itś very definition though.

[oDDity]

You don't need any faith in science, it is proven by it's many results and successes, which we all have full access to, particularly the technology.

I couldn't make my own computer from scratch, using all the basic elements that it's constructed from, and all advanced scientific principals behind it, but I beleive the science behind it is 100% accurate, because other people have used that science to build computers, and I use the result every day..

No faith is necessary.