1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
Science is not something you have faith in. The entire point of science is allowing your beliefs to change when presented with evidence. That's the exact opposite of "complete trust". If anything, the only thing you need to have faith in is in the validity of your own experience - and that's a philosophical dilemma, not a scientific one.
Doing science means knowing we're probably wrong and will learn something new tomorrow - but we're probably at least a little bit right and that will have made our lives better until now.
Follow the philosophical tree a little deeper and see if you can prove the foundation.
If you mean the foundations of the scientific method, e.g. things like trusting your perception of the world (to some extent), that indeed crosses over from science into philosophy. But that does not invalidate the scientific method, not does it mean all of science is faith-based; it just means we had to make some assumptions to be able to accomplish anything at all. Those assumptions are still something we can and should question, we just don't have any good way of testing them.
If I remember correctly, he uses the ancient city of Rome as a symbol of the pre-Abrahamic, natural han ethic. Power is good, sex is good, wealth is good, strength is good, competence is good.
This contrasts with the Jerusalem ethic where an almighty god is worshipped, not perched on a mountain or a cloud, but while nailed to a cross. So now self-sacrifice is good, and the whole story revolves around the weak, the poor, the downtrodden.
We’re still in the Jerusalem phase, despite having replaced the church with the state. Perhaps one day, in a few millennia, the wheel will turn back around.
It’s a good book!
Christianity, including its ethics, obviously also had sources and influences. Both in its inception and as it has changed, fractured and adapted to its surroundings over time. And if you truly think that Jesus invented helping the poor and acting righteous, I can only recommend you read about religions. Both those that influenced Christianity and those that never came into contact with it.
Ah yes, that's most of Ecclesiastes. Everything is meaningless. King Solomon sometimes comes across as a bit of whinger, but then what do you expect if you're ultra-rich and bored and questioning the meaning of it all.
I agree that many aspects of Christianity have precedent. The one rather novel thing that it introduced was the concept of a God who would voluntarily suffer excruciating punishment so that we wouldn't have to.
