Re: Religion - Logic or Faith
**I **can hardly add anything better to what brother Psyah is coming up with, however since this thread is all about “logic” and since I have seen posts with some what inappropriate interpretation of logic, I felt I can add my two pennies just by defining a few terms.
All rational knowledge is either material or formal: the material knowledge considers some object; the latter is concerned only with the form of the understanding and of the reason itself, and with the universal laws of thought in general without distinction of its objects.
Formal philosophy is called logic. Material philosophy, however, has to do with determinate objects and the laws to which they are subject, is again twofold; for these laws are either laws of nature or of freedom. The science of the former is physics, that of the latter, ethics; they are also called natural philosophy and moral philosophy respectively.
Logic cannot have any empirical part; that is, a part in which the universal and necessary laws of thought should rest on grounds taken from experience; otherwise it would not be logic, i.e., a canon for the understanding or the reason, valid for all thought, and capable of demonstration.
Natural and moral philosophy, on the contrary, can each have their empirical part, since the former has to determine the laws of nature as an object of experience; the latter the laws of the human will, so far as it is affected by nature: the former, however, being laws according to which everything does happen; the latter, laws according to which everything ought to happen. Ethics, however, must also consider the conditions under which what ought to happen frequently does not.
We may call all philosophy empirical, so far as it is based on grounds of experience: on the other band, that which delivers its doctrines from a priori principles alone we may call pure philosophy. When the latter is merely formal it is logic; if it is restricted to definite objects of the understanding it is metaphysic.
Since “logic” draws its strength, primarily, from the use of language, and language as it stands today is incapable of defining and elaborating all parts of “faith” in its entirety, there will be a time when language supported by relative empirical part would be in a position to find“logic” behind faith in its entirety.
Religion stems out form a belief on the existence a supreme being, visibly unimaginable, materially unintelligible, eternal in its existence, omnipotent and omniscient. One who believes in that Supreme Being can not establish a belief based on material “logic”, it is only certitude, which infuses logic to believe all that “faith or religion” comes with.