Faith, Imitation, and Imagination Faith, what people personally believe, exists independently of whether or not people share with others. It can be confidence in something that is not seen, such as a promise and an engagement; it can be a belief that has not been proven, for example, a religious belief shared by a group of people who work together to provide support for going deeper into their similar faith. In “God, Science, and Imagination”,Wendell Berry indicates that fundamentalists of both religion and science do not adequately understand or respect imagination, which, when properly defined, is a way of knowing as much as science or religion is. Susan Blackmore, the author of “Strange Creatures”, asserts that it is the ability to imitate
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People naturally tend to imitate others. Take Christians for example. Their imitation ability allows them to get the religious knowledge from their parents, their peers, their teacher and so on, increasing the possibility that they have confidence in the existence of God. Blackmore elaborates a meme, which is everything that is passed from person to person, by analogy with a gene. “Their propagation by jumping from brain to brain, likened them to parasites infecting a host, treated them as physically realized living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will gang together in groups just as genes do”(Blackmore, p36). From memes point of view, human brains, where memes are stored, are just physical hosts indispensable for memes to be passed on by imitation. In other words, memes make use of human bodies as their carriers to spread in the crowds, influence human behaviors, and shape the way they think. Based on Blackmore’s theory, the spread of religion or the dissemination of the nonexistence of God can be regarded as the consequences of memes’ desire to be passed on. As a powerful meme, religion is spread by believers who are enthusiastic to share their knowledge with others. Similarly, the idea that God does not exist is a meme as well. Berry criticizes Professor Weinberg, who believe in the nonexistence of God, for using a language that presents belief as knowledge. “As a fundamentalist of science, like the fundamentalists of religion, he is clearly evangelizing, hoping to convert or at least to disturb those who disagree with him”(Berry p21). Like the missionaries, Professor Weinberg grants the authority to his own opinions and try to convert his opponents. As a physicist, he does not use the scientific procedure to prove the nonexistence of the God, but simply writes an article assuming the unknowable things with the absolute confidence. There is no objective evidence on either the existence or the
People naturally tend to imitate others. Take Christians for example. Their imitation ability allows them to get the religious knowledge from their parents, their peers, their teacher and so on, increasing the possibility that they have confidence in the existence of God. Blackmore elaborates a meme, which is everything that is passed from person to person, by analogy with a gene. “Their propagation by jumping from brain to brain, likened them to parasites infecting a host, treated them as physically realized living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will gang together in groups just as genes do”(Blackmore, p36). From memes point of view, human brains, where memes are stored, are just physical hosts indispensable for memes to be passed on by imitation. In other words, memes make use of human bodies as their carriers to spread in the crowds, influence human behaviors, and shape the way they think. Based on Blackmore’s theory, the spread of religion or the dissemination of the nonexistence of God can be regarded as the consequences of memes’ desire to be passed on. As a powerful meme, religion is spread by believers who are enthusiastic to share their knowledge with others. Similarly, the idea that God does not exist is a meme as well. Berry criticizes Professor Weinberg, who believe in the nonexistence of God, for using a language that presents belief as knowledge. “As a fundamentalist of science, like the fundamentalists of religion, he is clearly evangelizing, hoping to convert or at least to disturb those who disagree with him”(Berry p21). Like the missionaries, Professor Weinberg grants the authority to his own opinions and try to convert his opponents. As a physicist, he does not use the scientific procedure to prove the nonexistence of the God, but simply writes an article assuming the unknowable things with the absolute confidence. There is no objective evidence on either the existence or the