This is one of the classic arguments that seems to come up regularly here.
Faith, for me, is confidence in a Person who is powerful enough to do what needs doing and loving enough to want to. It does not consist in intellectual assent to the proposition that such a Person exists or in what characteristics that Person might have, nor in how He manifests Himself to humanity at large or to me in particular. It’s a value judgment on a relationship.
I admit to enjoying debating “proofs of God” as an intellectual discipline, in the same way Gaudere enjoys taking the other side. This may, BTW, be one reason we get along so well: we both approach it as an enjoyable recreation, not a Conversion Project. Only once, when I suggested that God would lead me to what He wanted me to investigate, did it get asperious; and that was, I believe, because I could not adequately draw the distinction between my own intellectual curiosity and His purposes for me.
There are basic assumptions that one “takes on faith” in a quite different sense of the word. It is, for example, an entirely plausible and non-disprovable assumption that the stars are the embers of the fiery breath of an otherwise imperceptible dragon of galactic size. We assume otherwise on the basis that nuclear fusion and gravity as observed here are assumed to work on large, stellar-weight gaseous masses elsewhere in the universe in the same way as they do on Earth on much smaller quantities of gas. The genericization of this equivalence, the “Cosmological Principle,” that what happens here and now will happen then and there, differences of size, speed, and so on being taken into account, is an assumption. It’s an entirely reasonable one, but at bottom it’s an act of faith. Jerry Pournelle once noted that it is a totally reasonable conclusion from the work of Stephen Hawking that Cthulhu might emerge from a decaying black hole. To be sure, the probability may be quite low, but the laws of physics permit it to happen.
hansel’s observation about the conditionality of “beliefs about” as opposed to “beliefs in” is pretty on target, to my way of thinking. I would not, however, suggest that holding to a dogma despite doubt, contrary evidence, and so on, is “unconditional faith” – it’s intellectual stupidity, IMHO. Dogmas are the formulae by which the entity in whom one has faith is defined. When they become dysfunctional, they are either discarded or, more commonly, reinterpreted. Our worldview being substantially different from late-Roman-period Greek theologians or medieval Scholastic philosophers, our dogmas are different, although we may use the same language to define them (tradition, not equivalence of meaning).
Evidence for God is quite prevalent. It depends, however, on how you evaluate it. For the typical Christian, the life and work of Jesus, as interpreted by Paul and the four Evangelists, provides adequate evidence. For the agnostic or atheist, the grounds for doubting the accuracy of their reportage or their interpretation of what they report outweigh the pros, and therefore the evidence is inadequate. To the Christian, too, the world as it exists serves as proof of God’s power and benevolence, with the obvious points that some things seen as negatives of that goodness (e.g., wasps laying eggs in paralyzed, living caterpillars who will be consumed by the wasp larvae) do exist. The person, however, who makes that argument and then swats a mosquito is contradicting himself unknowingly. Ahimsa needs to be modified by the idea that this world, created or not, is one in which care for oneself is an issue, and the responsibility of the self. That picture can be as easily seen as maternal love practiced by Mrs. Wasp as a demonstration of “mysterious ways” – it all depends on perspective.
If I had my druthers, I’d make “I believe that” and “I have faith that” into solecisms on a par with “different than” or “irregardless.” They obscure the nature of faith and belief by suggesting it to be a subrational form of knowledge, rather than an expression of a relationship.
