Recently I was talking to someone who believed that faith was something we take for granted in life because it’s so commonly used, we have faith that the sun will rise, faith that the chair we sit down on will hold us (unless you’re paranoid and check the legs everytime you sit down), etc etc.
I disagreed because I always thought faith had to be something which you believed in unconditionally, 100%. I don’t believe that the next chair I will sit on will not give out for some reason, but I won’t check it’s sturdyness before I sit.
My question is, how much do you think we use faith in our everyday lives (not neccisarily in a religious context), for things like friendships, or uh…Yeah, chairs. What can I say I have a one tracked mind. Or are their different types of faith?
The faith you use in everyday life to not be worried about chairs or bridges collapsing isn’t the same as religious Faith. Everyday life faith is more a weighing of the risks. Chairs and bridges do collapse once in awhile but they are relatively rare occurrences so you don’t bother yourself much about them. The alternative is to never leave your house and even then you can’t entirely avoid some level of faith (e.g. your house won’t just fall down).
Faith in the religious sense is a different creature entirely. Religious faith has you believing something with absolutely no foundation in fact. You can have faith in a bridge because there are sound engineering principles (and ultimately physical principles) for their staying up. You have Faith in God because you choose to in the absence of any fundamental principle of nature that would necessarily lead you to believe in God.
I think it depends on what you mean by faith. I think a good definition would be belief in something you have not seen. By this definition we all do a myriad of things each day which require faith. Some would define faith as believing in something outside of reason or logic. By that definition most of us do very few things that require faith.
I think faith has more to do with trust.
When you use it in religious sense it is, usually, also to do with trust.
You dare cross the bridge either because you have faith in the skills of the engineers or because you have faith in God, meaning that he will help you cross it safely.
.539 g./person? (adult, slightly less for infants and children)
Everything we do is predicated on some sort of faith/belief.
for instance:
a) the sun will raise tomorrow
b) you will be around to experience it.
if not, why do you have foodstuffs on hand?
Religious faith - very little, thankfully. Those who make a point of inflicting their faith on others are a real pain (but it CAN be amusing to jerk their chains…)
Would you say that your use of money approaches the level of religious faith? You woke up this morning believing 100% that, say, the piece of paper with Abraham Lincoln’s picture on it can be given in exchange for a Whopper Jr. with Cheese Meal. But it’s only a piece of paper. There is no “fact” to support this belief, except the common delusion that you share with the employees of Burger King.
Faith is sort of like luck. Do I have faith that some asshole will not slam into my vehicle on a freeway, or is it just luck (or bad luck)? Statistics.
We must differentiate between faith and logic. I have sat in my chair many times, and it has supported me. It is therefore logical to assume that the next time I sit in my chair, it will support me. The same is true of the sun rising, my car starting, being alive, etc. This is not faith, but logic.
Not exactly. It is reasonable to assume that your chair will still support you, but it is not absolutely logical – not unless you can guarantee that the chair has not suffered enough damage or mechanical fatigue to make any difference.
I’ve found that people who dismiss faith often put too much stock in logic – not realizing that what appears “logical” often isn’t.
On a minute-to-minute and day-to-day basis, I pretty much take the following things for granted, although as a neo-Gnostic pseudo-Wiccan I do try to haul them out and call them into question now and then –
a) The world I have constructed in my head via my interpretations of the flow of sensory information since I came into existence is largely consistent with the one that other people have constructed in their heads. A statement which assumes that I have accurately determined that other people do in fact exist, and that I do as well.
b ) The world I have constructed in my head, etc., is largely consistent with the physical / temporal world surrounding me in the sense that if I make predictions based on it they are sufficiently reliable for me to rely on it and plan on it. Furthermore, when I hit exceptions that surprise me momentarily, I can usually depend on my “library” of experiences with similar exceptions to guide me and help determine my conduct in pursuit of a predictable outcome.
c) The “interpreter” in my own head that is busily correlating sensory input with prior experiences is doing so on a reliable basis, even if I don’t fully comprehend the mechanism. Because what understandings I do have point towards an emotional appreciation of order (Robert Pirsig’s classical Quality, if you want a reference), I value feelings as pre-conceptual interpretations of the world around me and what various sensory input might mean – all of which is a fancy way of saying I trust my gut and ascribe to the phenomenon called “gut feelings” a respectable degree of epistemological validity, i.e., it ain’t just supersition.
d) In keeping with the above, I recognize and appreciate processes of knowing things that are not consistent with deterministic logic. I do, as it turns out, use the word “God” (inconsistently, but sometimes) to describe part of what is meaning and knowledge. The farther that such processes depart from standard ways of checking the validity of my impressions of what is Truth about World (other people indicating they perceive things identically; rational analysis based on repeatable testing can confirm observations; reasons for arriving at a given conclusion can be derived from principles I ascribe to; etc), the more I feel it is necessary to acknowledge to myself that this particular “faith” could be lunacy, but if the gut says it is real and valid I try to split my mind into a skeptical self and a believing self; I give the believing self free reign but all challenges from the skeptical self must be dealt with honestly, and in all conversations with others I have to give voice to my skepticisms if I am going to give voice to beliefs of this nature, even if they end up sounding like disclaimers in small print by the time I’m done.