I think that the quote you think so horrible when referring to Faith is actually quite apt for appreciation of kinds of Beauty. For example, To those who can appreciate the beauty of [a well executed bunt], no explanation is necessary. To those who cannot, no explanation is possible. You could replace the bracketed text with anything which you consider Beautiful, and I think it would hold: a elegant piece of code, an obscure genre of song, or even a mathematical formula.
(I do, however, agree it is horribly misapplied to Faith)
My instinct says you're on to something there, which is tricky, because Beauty is a transcendental. The transcendentals are all convertible with each other: where there is Beauty, there is also Truth and Goodness, and so on. So it seems like Beauty should be explicable in terms of Truth? And thus we... shouldn't feel this paradox?
I dunno. I haven't studied aesthetic philosophy *at all* and so what I just wrote is probably well-known as a stupid pleb error.
I am not an expert on this, and don't claim to be. However, it seems to me that there is a wide disparity between the objective Beauty of a thing and the ability of most observers to appreciate that Beauty.
For example, a segment of code may be the most elegant code ever written, but to a hypothetical Russian fisherman who not only has never worked with computers but also can't speak/read English will not be able to recognize its Beauty. That doesn't change the Beauty that is actually there. Our guy just can't recognize it.
Faith is one (among several) means of acquiring and retaining justified beliefs.
Another means is direct data. For example, if you punch me in the mouth, I don't hold the belief that you punched me in the mouth because of earned trust in some external authority (faith). I hold the belief that you punched me in the mouth because of direct experience!
I suppose we do, in a sense, put faith in our own senses (which could, in principle, be deceiving us some or all of the time), but this doesn't seem like a useful sense of the word for the purposes of this discussion.
I think that the quote you think so horrible when referring to Faith is actually quite apt for appreciation of kinds of Beauty. For example, To those who can appreciate the beauty of [a well executed bunt], no explanation is necessary. To those who cannot, no explanation is possible. You could replace the bracketed text with anything which you consider Beautiful, and I think it would hold: a elegant piece of code, an obscure genre of song, or even a mathematical formula.
(I do, however, agree it is horribly misapplied to Faith)
My instinct says you're on to something there, which is tricky, because Beauty is a transcendental. The transcendentals are all convertible with each other: where there is Beauty, there is also Truth and Goodness, and so on. So it seems like Beauty should be explicable in terms of Truth? And thus we... shouldn't feel this paradox?
I dunno. I haven't studied aesthetic philosophy *at all* and so what I just wrote is probably well-known as a stupid pleb error.
I am not an expert on this, and don't claim to be. However, it seems to me that there is a wide disparity between the objective Beauty of a thing and the ability of most observers to appreciate that Beauty.
For example, a segment of code may be the most elegant code ever written, but to a hypothetical Russian fisherman who not only has never worked with computers but also can't speak/read English will not be able to recognize its Beauty. That doesn't change the Beauty that is actually there. Our guy just can't recognize it.
What is your distinction between "Faith" and "Belief"?
Faith is one (among several) means of acquiring and retaining justified beliefs.
Another means is direct data. For example, if you punch me in the mouth, I don't hold the belief that you punched me in the mouth because of earned trust in some external authority (faith). I hold the belief that you punched me in the mouth because of direct experience!
I suppose we do, in a sense, put faith in our own senses (which could, in principle, be deceiving us some or all of the time), but this doesn't seem like a useful sense of the word for the purposes of this discussion.