Faith and Reason

I think addressing only one essential question about the relationship between faith, rationality and knowledge would not do this topic justice. It is important to understand that yes, faith can be a way of knowledge, but that knowledge, does not necessarily mean truth. Faith is blindly accepting something for what it is, without evidence to support it; and there is still a difference between religious faith (to build your life around something baseless), and having faith in your friend to help you with math homework, for example. Reason and faith are completely incompatible because their very premises are incompatible with each other. Faith calls you to question the very foundations of logic and rationality, and you should do this without questioning, something that you would never do in your life. If I came to class and asked my classmates to have faith in me because I am the new Messiah, nobody would, yet I have the same amount of evidence as Jesus and Mohammed had.  Honestly, it is already absurd that faith is included as a way of finding the truth, because it is the most inefficient and lengthy way of finding it, not depending on human actions, but on a time frame. To address the question of religious scientists it is time to call upon the words of Lawrence Krauss, who said, when asked about this very topic: "You can be anything and be religious, you can be a gardner, a pedophile, anything!", to which the mediator of the debate said, "Mr. Krauss there is a very big difference between being religious and being a pedophile", to which he receive the monumental answer of "Not for the Catholic Church it's not". This exchange gives across a few important points. Firstly, unfortunately in the West religion can coexist with anything. Secondly, and more importantly, believing in the teachings of religion- which do contradict science- make one an ineffective scientist. Believing in god and science is just not compatible. Another weakness of faith is that it promises hope, a false hope. As Albert Camus explores through the Myth of Sisyphus, only through the embrace of the situation on earth will one achieve meaning, not by having false hopes of improvement. Because religious faith has this nature of illusion of an "afterlife", it is used to control people, as Marx said, as "opium". When people have a strong belief they will do anything to prove that they do, and to continue having it. The issue with religious faith, is that it is baseless, and that people still use it as an extremely important foundation for their lives, which, in any other case, would require some sort of proof or evidence before believing anything.