>And there's the rub; to say science doesn’t have all the answers is a cop-out. It is the scientific way to diminish the fact that in the final analysis we still have to believe. The short version is simply - I believe something until proven false. Then I shall create a new belief. Hence the scientist is a believer.

Does not equal faith. Credo quia absurdum est never becomes a part of it. "I believe" is, in this case, "I hold as truth until further".

I've heard a few religious propagandists using this to put an equal sign between science and religion from time to time. It's old already. I'm not sure if you fell for it, or embraced it, or are just trying it out here to see what response you'll get.

>Nietzsche, for example and amongst others, questions the very structure of knowledge that one is so convinced of and shows that it has no solid foundation at all. The very foundation of scientific inquiry, that there is a reality “out there” than can be understood and revealed without the interpretation or interference of the observer, is itself questionable.

Mathematics and logic seem to have no solid foundation at all, or they can be founded in several ways... but that still doesn't invalidate the tight fit of all that with reality. That unfounded mathematics somehow manages to fit reality over and over again; purely theoretical things in it, years after they were invented/found (I don't know which goes here), are applied to reality, and the reality complies. This duality between the knowledge and reality, or observer and experiment, actor and object, may just be an abstraction used in the process of gaining that knowledge, a part of the method.

>The proof you demand of faith dismisses the basis on which faith occurs. You want to dismiss the foundation of faith (which is a spiritual experience) and demand that it be explained on the foundation of science (which is a physical experience). The two are not compatible. It is not that one is right and the other wrong but that the experience of the one is at a level of intuition or insight and the other is at the level of the thinking intellect, which is based on language. Sages throughout all time, from the east to the west, have said that these things cannot be conveyed in words, in language, and yet the thinking man insists that if it cannot be done then it must be fake.

If it cannot be conveyed in words, why do they still try to get new believers then, using words? And use semi-logic at that. And, yes, BTW, keep classifying all non-believers as having no spiritual life whatsoever.

I fully accept that if one has rich mental life, at some point they'll have their brain working in the background and coming up, seemingly unprovoked, with some insight of varying magnitude. If that was quantifiable, some of those would surely qualify as spiritual enlightenment, far beyond the individual's verbal skills. Now which of these would be a basis for a religion, or would fit into an existing religion, is a matter of earthly affairs - whether the ideas gained by such enlightenment would be channeled through art, science, entertainment, religion, and whether it would be a new form of one of those or it would join an existing one.

What one experiences during such a mental event is probably not always possible to fit into one's knowledge and logic, but it can change a person, and one may trust that inner event over the rest of their knowledge. I'd say they gained faith into what they learned that way. I don't, however, see how this can be transferable, how can they cause anyone else to have the same mental event, i.e. how can a religion be made out of it, without some serious intellectual mumbo-jumbo, where the recipient rescinds their own logic and knowledge, and convinces himself that he had the same kind of mental event.

IOW, one's spiritual experience is, IMO, strictly personal, is an insight into the functioning of the universe. Whether one gains faith (or deeper understanding or just a passing fascination with an idea) into what they learned then is a personal matter. When such a person starts canvassing disciples, I have some doubts. When disciples start canvassing disciples, that's when I stop trusting their sincerity and think they are just another expansionist hierarchy, bent on gaining power.