What is "beliefs"

Usage examples of "beliefs".

In this view, our subjective sense of making choices, intentionally pursuing our desires, and acting on the basis of our beliefs is illusory in the sense that our actions are in reality simply products of our brains in interaction with the environment.

This range of statistics indicates that a significant minority of people in the West simply dismiss scientific knowledge and another significant minority simply dismiss religious beliefs, but a majority of people in the modern West are caught up in the conflict between science and religion.

If we are to hold religious beliefs and to accept scientific progress, how are we to draw the line between the domains of these two views?

Moreover, much of the secular education I received asserted that scientific progress had from the beginning been only impeded by religion and that religious beliefs had on the whole been discredited by scientific knowledge.

However, the notion that the principles of scientific materialism, unlike traditional religious beliefs, are evidently true to all open-minded, intelligent people is nothing more than propaganda.

The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible.

As I will show in the next chapter, the articles of faith of scientific materialism are largely rooted in the philosophical and religious beliefs of ancient Greece and of Judaism and Christianity.

According to this pioneer in the sociology of religion, religious beliefs are representations that express the nature of sacred things and the .

Traditionally, human communities gain access to the sacred, or ideal, world by means of religious beliefs and practices.

Much as religious fundamentalism presents only an idealized caricature of the history of its own beliefs, so does scientism present the history of science as a unswerving march toward Truth, in which earlier errors are systematically replaced with facts.

For scientific materialism to emerge from the womb of medieval theology and appear as a dominant force in European society, these beliefs and experiences acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church and Renaissance organic philosophy had to be refuted.

They recognized that such animistic beliefs concerning matter could imply that the death of the human body implies the disappearance of the soul.

Thus, he argued, Christian beliefs should be regarded as safe and even strengthened in the hands of natural philosophers.

Christianity was utterly secure and that its beliefs were safe, and even strengthened, under the care of the proponents of the new mechanical philosophy, history has proven this true only insofar as one identifies Christianity with the specific theological creed of scientific materialism.

To what extent are expectations and beliefs structuring purportedly objective, scientific observations, let alone theorizing, as a whole?