Abraxas,
He's notorious (for grammatical (convulsions) chopped into ) paratheses but he's Wes and I adore him.
Wes, we love you! Wes is loved.
Dragons and angels are also infinitely tantalizing and forever unattainable, and they could hardly be considered teases.
Of course they are teases; faith makes them so.
Anything faith-based is a tease becuase it requires the believing its tenet outside of experience.
Lazy reason made magic our of religion and a sky-daddy out of God and the rest of the crew to be logical patch-ups to this quagmire.
You are right in that anything faith-based is a tease because it requires the believing its tenet outside of experience. But there is one thing to keep in mind: To have faith in science, this faith is your doing. To have faith on God, this faith is God's doing.
The electron is tease in so far that I cannot see the little bugger but yet have to believe he is there.
And when I can see him (if ever) I cannot see his momentum.
HAVE TO BELIEVE? No way. You don't have to believe that there are electrons. Nobody is pointing a gun to your head or a knife to your throat, threatening to kill you or mutilate you horridly if you don't believe in the existence of the electron.
You only have to believe so if you want to believe the scientific belief system so far, which is made of other beliefs like that anyway.
I love Wes, but I love Quine too:
From Quine's "Two dogmas of empiricism":
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.
I will repeat this until everyone understands it and applies it.
Hah!