Purestambrosia: Your question and statement
What is wrong with faith? or hope or dreams or anything non-visceral – you make it sound like an abomination!
caused me to have a “double take”, because the common meaning for ‘visceral’ is
relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect.
Thereby, I read your question as:
“What is wrong with faith or hope or dreams or anything [intellectual]?
which is not what I expected you meant -- and apparently not what you meant.
My response to the question that you addressed to Trumble (although Trumble obviously needs no help from me, but by responding, I can address a question that, in another thread, you asked me but I chose to deflect) would include the following points.
1. All animals (including humans) make visceral decisions (e.g., to duck when a projectile is coming at their heads).
2. Humans surpass the rest of the animals (as far as we know) in our intellectual abilities; therefore, for our continued survival, it would seem to be wise to use our intellectual capabilities to their fullest extent.
3. As a part of our intellectual capabilities, we generate faith, hopes, and dreams (or maybe better than ‘dreams’, ‘goals’, since I’m quite sure that my German shepherd also dreams!). In addition, though (and importantly), we can use our intellectual capabilities to evaluate our faiths, hopes, and goals, e.g., to see if they’re logical, to estimate probabilities that our hopes and goals can be achieved, to evaluate the evidence supporting our faiths to determine if confidence in them is justified, and so on.
Thus, I agree with Trumble that there’s nothing “wrong” with faith, hopes, goals, or anything visceral [usual meaning, including “emotions”], but I would argue that we should then apply our non-visceral [intellectual] capabilities to evaluate them.
As per usual, Bertrand Russell said it better, in response to question similar to yours but emphasizing what we would normally call “blind faith”:
We may define ‘faith’ as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of ‘faith.’ We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions.
In particular, history shows that reliance on (visceral) emotion to “justify” faith (the “proof-by-pleasure fallacy”) has been especially damaging to the possibility of peace between people of different “faiths”, whether the people are within a single family or within different tribes or nations. And thus the singularly prophetic nature of the remark attributed to Jesus: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
And I would add (even though it may stir emotions) that my impression (derived from limited data) is that women and male homosexuals may be particularly vulnerable to the “proof-by-pleasure fallacy”, since they seem to have particularly sensitive emotions.
cheers.