Faith

"Faith" is like a rocket launcher: there are only very specific and limited circumstances under which it can justifiably be employed, and if you don't understand what these circumstances are, it's probably best that you don't use it at all.

Curiosity

Universe: Haha! Humans shall never land a large vehicle on Mars!
Humans: Yes we shall! We are teh awesumz!
Universe: You shall not! I shall cover Mars with an atmosphere, so that your vehicle will burn up on entry!
Humans: Nice try universe, but we shall put an awesumz Heat Shield on the front of our vehicle!
Universe: No matter! I will make the atmosphere so thin that it will not provide enough resistance to slow down your vehicle, causing it to crash into the surface and explode!
Humans: We shall attach an awesumz Giant Parachute to slow it down!
Universe: That will not be enough! Fools! The atmosphere is too thin to allow Giant Parachute to slow down the vehicle sufficiently for a safe landing!
Humans: No matter! We shall attach awesumz Giant Rockets to our vehicle, to slow the descent even more!
Universe: That will only kick up a giant cloud of dust, which will cover your vehicle when it lands! You cannot win!
Humans: We shall lower the vehicle from the Giant Rocket device using awesumz Giant Sky Crane! Bwahaha! We shall prevail!
Universe: It will never work! such a complex mechanism is bound to fail!
Humans: We shall hire many awesumz Super Smart Scientists, to build everything perfectly, and pay lots of awesumz Super Smart Computer Nerds lots of money to write lines and lines of code, ensuring that everything goes smoothly!
Universe: Bah! It will never work! My laws of physics are working against you, at every step!
Humans: We are Humans, and we are teh awesumz! Screw you universe, and your laws of physics too! We shall manipulate you to achieve our own desires! Nothing can stop us!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V_8Qk9K8ag&feature=player_embedded

Unity

http://flyobsession.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/antler-fly.jpg
See this fly? This is an antler fly. It is a fruit fly with antlers. It leads a very different life than this: http://www.animalpictures1.com/data/media/102/Pronghorn-6.jpg
This is a pronghorn. It is an ungulate with antlers. The antler fly and the pronghorn are very different species indeed. One flies around in the air and eats fruit, while the other walks around in a field and eats grass. Yet, remarkably, the males of these two species seem to have converged on almost identical projections sticking out of their heads. This situation should cause us to step back, and examine what the heck is really going on here. Apparently, evolving antlers on your head has very little to do with what you eat, or whether you walk around in fields or fly through the air. A cursory level of biological knowledge will alert you to the idea of sexual selection. Biologists can say with confidence that antlers are almost certainly a result of sexual selection, specifically intra-sexual selection. The details do not matter, at least for this illumination. What matters is that when it comes to sex, there are certain strategies that are employed by biological organisms. These strategies are not limited by phylogeny. As the antler fly and pronghorn demonstrate, identical strategies can be employed by species that are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, arising entirely through completely separate evolutionary lines.
Of what use is this information? Often I am told that human sexuality and romance have little or nothing to do with their animal equivilancies. When I evaluate human relationships using terminology and reasoning employed in the biological sciences, I am told it is inappropriate, that we are exceptions to these rules. Though I readily admit that there is much about us that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, (things like our cognitive capacity for language, symbolic thought, and our intimate grasp of certain physical phenomena that are rarely if ever exploited by other animals), there is also much that ties us inexorably to our less cognitively endowed brethren. Much of what unites us with other animals undoubtedly lies in our behaviors and adaptations that are directly involved in securing a mate. As such, please do not deride me when I talk about human relationships much like I would for the behaviors of a dog, or a mouse, or a housefly. We are, after all, animals, and denying this fact will in no way make it useless or meaningless to describe humans in such a way. Thinking about human relationships in evolutionary terms provides a clear lens into our own behavior, and offers us unique insights into ourselves that no other lens makes available. It may be taboo to talk about humans as merely a bunch of horny monkeys running around trying to impress each other and screw each other, but damnit, I'm going to do it, because it's so useful, and informative.

marbles

roots

What is 'belief?"

Belief: The subjective assessment of uncertainty, quantified by probability.

When asked whether I "believe" in something, I interpret the question as "to what extent is this thing likely to be true, based on available evidence, experience, anecdotes, or intuitions?" I would argue that what identifies a good scientist is the relative weighting of each of those 4 markers of probability, with empirical evidence being weighted much more heavily than the other 3, and usually in that order. If enough evidence is available, the other 3 markers tend to not even factor into the assessment of belief.
For a scientist, belief is an obligate condition, imposed by the unavoidably subjective interpretation of the available evidence. Assuming this is true, then the only reason that two scientifically minded individuals would disagree on a belief would be that they have been exposed to different evidence, or weighted the evidence differently. Reconciling their beliefs is then a simple matter of putting as much evidence on the table as possible for examination and criticism.