Despite our many points of disagreement, we certainly agree on this. My faith is born of experience, and to deny my belief in God is to deny my own life experience. It simply is not possible.
Faith is the poetry of the soul.
It is not based on logic, reason, or rational thought–and that is just fine with me.
I do not confuse faith with belief in Christian doctrine or any particular religion. To me, one can have faith as a pagan, as an atheist, as an agnostic-whatever.
It is the construct in which you place that faith that people take issue with (I think). I have faith in a great, unknowable force within my life and on this Earth. Whether it’s name is Jesus, Vishnu, Buddha, Yaweh, Allah or SpongeBob is unkown to me (well, I’m fairly certain about SpongeBob NOT being it).
As a nominal Christian (and getting less as the minutes tick by), my construct for faith is the Triune God–but I am perfectly happy for others to have their own preferences. This is Unitarian of me, but maybe God puts on the face that each culture will best understand. And maybe we are really, really slow on the uptake.
No matter–I have faith that there is a spirit, force, presence of Good in this world.
I don’t need any “proof”; I don’t need any argument/debate/demonstrations of logical fallacies. Whole different part of the mind/brain continuum…
You’ve just substantiated my point.
Faith is a matter of perception. You experience the world in a way that I do not and visa versa. Our frame of reference is entirely different.
Also, what Liberal said above. I can’t deny what he percieves to be a personal truth. He can’t make me percieve an event in the very same fashion as he (or you) does.
We all draw certain conclusions from our perceptions of the world and are left to deal with these conclusions in our own way.
Faith is also dangerous. The sheep has faith that the shepherd loves and will look after it. Doesn’t mean there is no such thing as lamb kebabs. Faith can make us strong, but by faith we can fool ourselves as well.
Would faith be those things we do not know but none the less choose to believe for our own reasons? Or is faith things we do know, but have no means of showing how and why we do know them?
Yes, but can we truly control what conclusions we draw? Do you consciously decide what you believe to be true? I certainly don’t–if I don’t think that something is true, I can’t really convince myself that it is unless I see or experience further evidence.
My two cents:
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“Faith” is just “trust” in prettier clothing.
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Placing your faith/trust in people and things that have not proven their trustworthiness (faithworthiness?) is foolish.
How much faith do people have in their faith? The faith exists, of course. I too believe that there is good in people, but I still cut the cards. 
But for those of you with faith in a deity, does that faith extend to doing things you are queasy about if you are convinced that your God wants it?
To give one famous example: if God had told Abraham to give some of his flock to the needy, it would have tested Abraham’s faith very much, Abraham being a good man. God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, on the other hand, was a good test. Would your faith cause you to be ready to do the modern equivalent?
wouldn’t have test Abrahams faith. :smack:
I don’t think this follows. Faith and logic are not on different scales for this reason: faith, at least in any organized religion of which I am aware, demands or at least suggests that its adherents act in certain ways. In certain instances (and IME, many many many of them), these faith-driven actions are not what a rational, logical person who wishes to do good would choose. So regardless of how blue or tall faith is, it drives action amongst the faithful, and it does so on some occasions in ways that are harmful to the actor or others – harmful in absolute terms, and harmful relative to what the sincere good-seeking actor would do if his actions weren’t constrained by his faith. Ergo, if our goal is to help people, to alleviate suffering, anything along these lines, then we can’t pretend to solve the problem by claiming that faith and reason are not opposed, because they both drive action, and they drive it differently. We must, therefore, choose one which is superior, and it seems axiomatic to me that the one that has proof of its effectiveness and its bedrock is the one to choose, and not the one that is dependent on guesswork and for which we can never know whether we’re behaving properly.
–Cliffy
Perhaps the disjunct in thought here, what Spider Robinson described as “rupture,” lies in a variation in definition.
For most non-theists and even for many nominal theists, “faith” seems to have to do with assertion of existence. The key question is whether or not a God exists.
For most believers, however, the key question is not one of existence, but of reliability or trustworthiness – Can I “believe in” God in the sense of “Can I put my trust in Him, in His goodness promised to me?”
I am fairly confident that Oregon has a Governor. I “believe in” his existence; if I’m sufficiently motivated, I can Google up information about him, perhaps read his capsule biography. But I have no connection to him. I don’t live in Oregon; nothing he says or does has any bearing on my life whatsoever. If he keeled over dead and the state legislature decided to leave the position vacant until the next general election, it would make no difference whatever in my life.
The thing many people hear as faith is, “Oh, so you believe that Oregon has a governor?” But for the believer, it’s more a case of, “Hey, that’s my rich Uncle Jack who went into politics and got elected governor, who sends me a $1,000 check every Christmas, and whom I love and would grieve bitterly if he died.” It’s a personal relationship.
I cannot say to what extent people have had experiences like mine, Liberal’s, and Siege’s – but our assurance about God is not founded in an intellectual adherence to a proposition concerning His existence, but in a personal relationship. He’s not the Governor of the Universe; he’s our rich Uncle JHWH, whom we love (even if we can’t pronounce his name ;)).
Adn the points people have raised about the interfacing of reason and faith are quite valid. One reasons validly (or not so validly) from that initial non-rational position. My point was that it is one not arrived at on the basis of reason but rather of trust.
Daniel and rjung: I never chose to become the brother-in-spirit to Siege; it happened that we grew to care about each other as brother and sister. We’re confident of the caring and support of the other in our travails. Surely it would be wrong for me to put that trust in Maria Gonzalez Wolfschmidt of suburban Baltimore, whom I’ve never met and don’t even know if she exists. But it is not in error to put it in Siege, whom I do know and know I can trust.
Precisely that sort of assurance, non-rational at its base though rationally supportable, is the sort of thing we assert regarding our relationship with God.
polycarp said:
"For most non-theists and even for many nominal theists, “faith” seems to have to do with assertion of existence. The key question is whether or not a God exists.
For most believers, however, the key question is not one of existence, but of reliability or trustworthiness – Can I “believe in” God in the sense of “Can I put my trust in Him, in His goodness promised to me?”
ITA. You may disagree, but I don’t see that the God you mention must be a Christian one. For me, your statement rings true, although the focus of that faith may differ for us both.
I think faith is a complex thing, in the sense of having multiple parts. For most Christians, I believe, faith involves making both subjective and objective judgements about reality. Objective judgements are those such as “The universe was designed by an inteligent being,” “Jesus rose from the dead,” “Evolution by natural selection best explains the diverse forms of life,” “There is a 30% chance of rain tomorrow,” and “This fish was seasoned with rosemary.” These judgements are clearly not chosen, and are the result of concious or unconcious evaluation of a body of experiential evidence. Different people may come to different conclusions because they have recieved different evidence, or because they weigh the evidence differently, but they don’t consciously choose what to believe, at least directly.
Subjective judgements might also be thought of as aesthetic judgements. Consider the example of the aesthetic evaluation of a painting or a piece of music. Again, one clearly does not choose one’s aesthetic reaction to a painting. To some extent, one simply “gets it” or one doesn’t, and the judgement rendered is largely the result of evaluating the artistic product according to pre-existing concious and unconcious criteria (not unlike the evaluation of evidence in making objective judgements.) Unlike objective judgements, however, in making an aesthetic judgement, it is possible to choose to make an effort to appreciate the artwork: to understand the criteria used by others to form a positive judgement, and even to “step into” the viewpoint of such a person. Eventually, one may (or may not, depending partly, but perhaps not entirely, on one’s desire and effort to do so) come to value the criteria of this other viewpoint, and to adopt them as one’s own. Even though it isn’t possible simply to decide to enjoy opera, or to find Piccasso’s cubist painting beautiful, it is possible to make concious decisions that lead you toward seeing the beauty in such things.
I think this is the sort of judgement Polycarp is talking about when he talks about trusting God, or “believing in God” as opposed to “beliving God exists.” He is refering at least partly to seeing certain aesthetic qualities in the universe: a beauty, of the sort commonly attributed to great artists; a basic goodness to life and the world; a sense of purpose, etc. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive or even representative list. All Christians are aware of the problem of evil, and it plays a very great role in the aesthetic sense of many Christians; I only intend to illustrate the sort of judgements I mean by “subjective” and how they might also be seen as (at least analogous to) aesthetic judgements.
Nearly all Christians make objective judgements about matters of faith. (That I lack a definition of matters of faith at this point may make it appear I’m begging the question. I’m thinking here of any sort of objective judgement about the existance of God, the resurection of Jesus, the revelation of the Quran to Muhammed, etc.) Many, including Poly, claim that these judgements are secondary to various subjective judgements in at least two senses. Firstly, in the sense that these objective judgements are partially derivative of the subjective judgements, because the content of the subjective judgements forms part of the evidentiary set upon which their objective judgements are based. In the same way, one’s aesthetic judgement of one of Piccasso’s paintings might influence one’s objective beliefs (for example, that he composed the painting carefully and with delibertion). Secondly, in the sense that the objective judgements are of lesser importance. Poly and others have claimed (no cite) that if their objective judgements about the existance of God, the resurection of Jesus, the origins of Scripture, etc. were proven to them to be completely false, their faith, though altered, would survive, because these objective judgements to not form the essential contents of their faith. (I have my doubts about the accuracy of these predictions based on my own experience with questioning the objective elements of faith, but that is neither here nor there.)
It is worth noting that many contemprary philosophers argue that all objective judgements rely to some extent on subjectve ones, particularly in forming the criteria by which empirical evidence is weighed and evaluated. In science, judgements about which theory is “simpler” or more “elegant,” about how to handle discrepant data, about when one theory should be abandoned in favor of another, all have significant subjective elements, and attempts to form hard and fast rules about such things have generally failed. (The implications of all this for understanding science and epistemology in geeneral and whether the subjective judgements made in religion are similar to these are of course controversial.)
A few years ago, I went to a panel discussion at a con that purported to be about science vs. religion. I wound up sitting next to a (Conservative or Orthodox) Jew of my vague acquaintance, and we got to discussing various things; this eventually turned into a hallway discussion of theological principles and the Cohen Y chromosome research and other such things.
It came to pass that I noticed that I shared a theological principle with these folks, even though I was the token non-Jew in the conversation: What good is a god you can’t argue with? (I made this comment to a friend of mine more recently; he laughed and told a joke that went roughly as follows: several rabbis were arguing a point of Torah. One says, “If I am right, may it thunder!” and it thundered. One said, “Well, if I am right, may it hail!” and it hailed. The third opened the door, stuck his head out, and shouted, “You keep out of this!”.)
I have both not taken certain actions (suggested, not requested) and put off decisions on actions pending research and evaluation of whether those actions (requested, both directly and obliquely) were compatible with my existing obligations. My religion requires of me that I take the time to judge the impact of my choices and behave accordingly; that responsibility cannot be taken away from me by the petitionings or suggestions of man or god.
Actually, I recognize both definitions. And in fact, in doing so I recognize that believers often blend them together: I trust that god exists because I can trust him and why because I have faith that… etc.
Again, that’s fine and intelligible. I might have my doubts about whether the other end of that relationship exists (and indeed its very possible for human beings to have relationships with things that aren’t psychologically aware or even existing). But don’t you think that having a relationship with something inclines you to more often than not to assume that it is real, rather than its reality simply being a pre-condition for the relationship?
I often wonder why folks say the religious are illogical. I tend to disagree. Rather, I would say, they start with certain assumptions which they feel are self-evident, or are received from a tradition and taken a priori as valid; and from there, they proceed in about as logical a fashion as anyone else does, informed by their own set of “first principles”. I tend to think it’s the starting point that causes confusion in the external examiner, and if that starting point were fully understood, the subsequent and dependent actions would seem very logical indeed. I personally fail to see how humans can survive without logic; but I am not the least surprised to see them operate under false or dubious assumptions. The only point where logic may break down completely, as far as I can tell, is when those assumptions prove impervious to contrary data. In such a case, I’m not sure if the faithful is acting illogically, or alogically. In other words, I cannot tell if their thinking about a certain position is “faulty”, or if they have a default position in which they are not thinking at all.
Lilarian, there is actually a very similar story in the Talmud itself! I’ll let someone else retell it for you, though.
I composed my post before seeing Poly’s latest, but I think it confirms what I was getting at. Why I can spend hours uninterrupted composing a post like that, but can’t force myself to spend two minutes working on my Master’s paper that I need to receive my Masters in Theological Studies this spring, I can’t figure out! I hope what I wrote is both clear and helpful, but I won’t be convinced it’s either until someone lets me know.
I also had some questions for Polycarp about the idea of faith as trust, but I thought it best to place them in a seperate post. Here goes:
Poly, I’m curious about the sort of trust you mean. In the OP you wrote, “[Faith] is the feeling I have towards Jesus Christ, and His Father and the Holy Spirit. I know I can count on them – that whatever happens, they will make it work out well in the end for me.” I would like to know what you mean by that last part. In particular, I’d like to know whether this is the sort of claim I characterised above as “objective” or “subjective”–in other words, do you trust that you will experience certain things in this life or the next (freedom from exessive suffering, a sense of well-being, the love and support of family, etc.), or is it an claim that whatever you suffer, it is well in God’s eyes? The “for me” seems to suggest the former; it also makes me wonder about the extent to which you hold this faith on behalf of all people. For whom do you have faith that it will work out well in the end?
You have, if I’ve read you correctly, expressed ambivalence or agnosticism WRT continued personal conciousness in the afterlife. How do you reconcile this uncertainty with your trust in God and the sufferings of many in the present life?
I assume that your trust in God WRT the afterlife and the eschaton is based on experiences of things turning out well for you in this life. (I’m thinking of your heart attack in particular, which you’ve related in other threads.) How do you reconcile this personal experience with the experience of those who suffer, and who experience no redemption in this life? What leads you to expect God to treat us more graciously “in the end” than he has so far? (And if that isn’t a fair characterization of your faith, as I suspect it isn’t, why isn’t it and how would you amend it?)
I know, Poly, that your faith is neither narrow nor selfish. I fear that some of my questions may seem to imply that, and I worry that I’m typing past the real issues I want to ask you about, but I know you have a skill for looking past the questions asked to the real issue. Please don’t see these questions as intended to challenge you, but as an invitation and a request to help me “step into” your viewpoint. I hope (and believe) that this is in keeping with the discussion you intended here.
Loopydude’s description comes pretty close to my experience regarding religious faith.
I grew up in under circumstances that brought me to church every week (or several times a week) throughout my childhood and as a young adult, and I witnessed the effect of faith on others. (Fortunately, that effect generally seemed to be a good one in terms of loving behavior, etc.) But none of that rubbed off on me when it came to believing, as much as I sometimes deeply desired the comfort that others appeared to find. I just seem to be on a different wavelength.
For me, the problem of faith comes down to something along the lines of what Captain Amazing said: “You’ve formed beliefs about these people based on your experiences with them.” As far as I can tell, believers seem to have had some kind of experience on which to base a faith; what my Mormon friends would often describe as a burning in the breast, or others might experience as a thought appearing in one’s mind, or a sense of comfort, or a feeling that something read in a religious text is true, and so on. Not for me. I get nothing. No warm fuzzies, no voice, no thought, no sense of presence. Nada. At least nothing along the lines of the Christian “God.”
The closest I come to a spiritual experience is a feeling that there is something more behind nature – rocks, trees, lakes, birds, sunshine – than meets the eye or can be accounted for by the five senses. Some sort of immanent spiritual force. But that’s it. The idea of a transcendent god simply doesn’t compute based on my life experience. It’s just not there.
I must have been born without my “God module.” Which is fine, now that I have mostly gotten past the guilt of being a hard-hearted, stiff-necked unbeliever headed straight to hell for being consitutionally unable to buy what the Bible tells me is so.
Alan Smithee, for what it’s worth, your explanations make sense to me. (And I also wonder why I’m spending time posting instead of working on my dissertation!)
Here’s the part of religious faith that I have had the most difficulty with:
Despite years of effort and, often, strong desire, I have been unable to make the sort of subjective or aesthetic leap that would allow me to “step into” the viewpoint of a believer, even having good reasons in terms of family relations, social circumstances, and personal peace to give it a good try. Perhaps out of a sense of self-protection, I would argue that for some people desire has precious little to do with the ability to adopt the subjective position of a particular brand of faith, and that to make that attempt might cause more grief that it’s worth. For me, objective arguments from a secular or atheistic* point of view provide criteria from which to choose a more personally fulfilling viewpoint, a different faith that has little to do with most mainstream** religious belief systems.
*I use this word with fear and trembling, and hope that it does not lead the thread into an uproductive tangent on the definition of atheism
** More fear, more trembling
Well, being Jewish, that is the relationship with God I got when I went to my shul - which was the Reform side of Conservative. There seems to be a subtle difference between the Christian and Jewish approaches, though. The Jewish approach is that even if God said it, we get to argue about it. Look at Abraham negotiating with God over Sodom and Gomorrah. The Christian approach seems to be that you follow what God says, but that God didn’t really say what the simple interpretation of the Bible says he said - either through mistranslation, misinterpreation, or something.
I’d like to hear from those with less “liberal” views of things. In all of the above the person’s morals trump god’s - or at least a literal interpretation of god’s. It seems good to me - any god I want to be near would banish anyone who really thinks he would kill millions of babies in the flood.
As for Poly’s faith in the trustworthiness rather than the existence of god - well, you can’t trust in anything you don’t think exists, so I contend he has faith in both. And it seems that his trust is in god as a moral actor. Does someone who believes that God will dispatch the appropriate sinners to the appropriate section of hell have any less trust?
I tend towards the belief that “existence” is pretty much a red herring.
It may be that the entities I have interacted with are, as some people theorise, Jungian-style manifestations of communications from my subconscious, and the actions I take on the basis of that are my own communications back to the unconscious mind using similar methodology. In that case, “existence” is arguably false. (Does Hamlet “exist”?)
I can’t see that changing a thing; the actions in question would still produce the effects I wanted; the interactions with the manifestations-of-subconscious would still drive me to personal growth and development. I would still find the thought-structures fascinating and worthy of exploration, and the imagery beautiful. Further, I would have the same trust that I should follow through and persist; the posited fact that I falsely attributed the impulses to external rather than internal forces does not change the fact that the guidance has been good for me, good for my family, good for my community – which is, after all, the foundation of my trust in that guidance.