Believer: How do I prove that I saw it, it was last night, it’s gone now.
Skeptic: How do you know it was a UFO?
Believer: I know what I saw.
Skeptic: How do you know what you saw was a UFO?
Believer: It was there man, I saw it.
This sort of exchange happens constantly. What people fail to point out or ignore is that the definition of a UFO is Unidentified Flying Object. So any flying object I see that is unidentified is by definition a UFO. Yet regularly you will have people think they are being skeptical by arguing some sort of lofty ‘fact based’ argument trying to make their opponent look dumb. It occurs on this board with remarkable regularity. I’ve made the argument many times, that the problem comes down to how people define things.
I would not disagree that anyone who believes the bible just because is a nutter. If someone claims to have had a revelation, I would be just as much of a nutter to claim that they didn’t.
I think you misunderstood my point. I don’t for a minute think these people are being intentionally deceptive. People often don’t know the real reasons they do or think things, so if they are offered up a positive sounding reason, “faith”, they happily and sincerely accept it. I’m just saying that if we look for the real reason they believe, it is that they have trusted people who have given them religious views. “Rationalization” to me implies that you convince yourself that you have a better reason for what you do (or in this case believe) than what the real reason may be.
That’s a rather curious definition of rationalization. But even so. We’re talking about people who specifically refer to faith as the reason for their belief, right? Ufo sighters don’t reference faith. Crazed racists don’t cite faith as the reason for their beliefs. No, the persons who reference faith explicitly are persons who are deliberately believing without available or sufficient proof, and know that that’s why they believe.
I still think that when a person says that they believe because of faith, the vast majority of the time faith is the actual process by which these people arrive at their beliefs. Which is to say, they decide to believe it more, full stop.
I also think that when people have other reasons that they themselves don’t realize, they don’t use the term faith. They “have a feeling”, or “just know”, or something like that. They don’t call it faith.
We hold many beliefs in our brains:[ul]There is a tree in my yard.
[li]The leaves of the tree will turn orange this fall.[/li][li]The tree is very beautiful.[/li]Squirrels waving a magic wand caused the tree to grow there.[/ul]How the beliefs got there is hard to say and doesn’t really matter. We label some of them facts, some opinions, and others faith. One’s perception of the objective truth value and supporting evidence only influences which label we apply, but they’re all beliefs. Faith is a kind of belief. Whether it arises from delusion, deception, tradition, induction, or revelation doesn’t change the belief itself - only how it might cohere with your other beliefs (or the beliefs of others).
No one has faith without reason of some kind. How would they know what to have faith in without some reason for it? Sure, I have faith the world will become peaceful tomorrow. There is still a reason for that statement that is meaningful to me even if it isn’t probable. It is as MSWAS says.
No matter how much, or how hard, faith is belittled on this board, there is always a reason for it. Those with religious beliefs to a person has a reason for believing. Most have some personal experience with spiritual things that bolster their faith. They have seen prayer work, lives changed, and peace come to many. Faith is real, it is ok, actually it is necessary to live a peaceful life.
Please not another “let’s bash faith thread” on the board.
:rolleyes: Yes, of course. No one would use faith to, say, assert that God created the universe, or that someone was hit by lightning because he got God/Zeus/Og the Sky Bunny mad at him.
A person doesn’t have to get too detailed in his/her beliefs before they cannot be explained solely by common experiences. Even that there is one God rather than several is hard to justify by experience, much less that accepting Jesus is necessary to be saved or that Mohammed is God’s messenger or that homosexuality is a sin. If somebody doesn’t go beyond what might be justified by the feeling that they have a soul or some such, even though they might attend church socially, I’m willing to consider that belief based on (weak) evidence. But any “faith” beyond that seems to come from believing what we are told or wishful thinking.
It seems to me, when pressed to explain why they hold religious beliefs, it is common for people so say it is because they have faith or their beliefs are based on faith. I agree that it doesn’t adequately explain anything.
For myself, I’d be satisfied if everyone reacted to all stories, tales, and assertions with a healthy dollop of incredulity. Not that they would reject every secondhand assertion, mind you, but they’d at least consider whether the thing was likely and whether the source was any good before leaping whole-hog into belief.
I don’t think you could call the results a theology, though. (Heck, I think that mostly they wouldn’t be all that original or unique.)
I’d like whatever theology people have to be as true as possible. If people simply make up their own, it will probably be wrong. Unfortunately, if they listen to others, given the wide variance in religious beliefs around the world and over time, they’re likely to pick the wrong one. It’s good to listen to what other people have to say, but then examine various points of view, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back them up. If nothing is clearly correct, it’s fine to be in doubt.
Right, but faith didn’t implant the belief in their head. Either, God, experience, their parents, their priest, their bible or something of the like introduced them to the concept. I am not a big fan of reducing faith simply to ‘belief’. I think it is an amalgam of belief and trust. The faith is a property of being. A state of self ‘I am faithful’. A state of ownership, ‘I have faith’. A reason is an explanation of why it happened. Faith can be a reason for one’s actions, but not for one’s belief. One cannot be faithful to a belief prior to the receipt of that belief.
(Not directed at me, but fits my response as well, so: )
I don’t think that persons of faith -any of the persons of faith I’ve known, exercise much doubt at all about their religions. About other things, yes. About their religions, no.
By the standard of the way the universe actually is, independent of what I or anybody else happens to think.
Some have a healthy degree of doubt. Some don’t. I’m not making a claim about how many are in each category, but there are certainly some people who are quite convinced of things that are wrong, and this can be a serious problem.
If faith is not a brain mechanism, what is it? Where does it happen? Where is it stored? Don’t you consider rationalization to be a brain mechanism? (I prefer the term brain state but mechanism works too.)
Understanding faith as an instance of belief, an idea, a neurological expression, brain mechanism, or whatever is very consistent with Darwinian evolution. A child with some faith in adult judgement is more likely to survive than one who must learn of all dangers firsthand. (I think this example came from Dawkins.)
Don’t confuse truth value with evidence. Faith in something objectively true is just as much faith as that in something objectively false. Neither belief is supported by evidence.
Can faith exist without an object? Sometimes, the way you use faith, it seems you are saying faith can exist without it having to be faith in something. I don’t get that.
Perhaps millenia of anyone insufficiently fervent about the local superstitions being ostracized or killed. A form of selective breeding for irrationality.
Would you apply this reasoning to other, more falsifiable articles of religious faith? If I suddenly experienced an inexplicable yet overwhelmingly powerful flash of insight which convinced me that, say, concentrated prayer would definitely expedite the recovery of any sick person, would you consider me a nutter? Or would you consider yourself a nutter for considering the possibility that I might be a nutter?
I think faith is just a word, a meme if you will, that survives and is useful in the propagation of religion due in large part to its vagueness and sense of mystery. I am saying that when people invoke faith in a discussion, often what is really going on under the hood is that they have believed something people told them. Believing what you are told is actually quite valid as a brain mechanism and is useful for survival in most cases. Rationalization might be the product of brain mechanisms but I’m not ready to try to figure that out here.
I agree, as long as we actually equate faith with believing what people say. At least to me, that wasn’t usually what I thought of when people talked of faith.
When people use the word, it normally applies to some belief they have. I agree that it needs some object. Sorry if I was confusing.
It might be helpful if I add some context as to why this seems important to me. As an atheist I am concerned about the fact that debates on religion typically get nowhere. I suspect that part of the reason is that all of us have some deep down reasons for what we believe but the actual details we argue about don’t involve these reasons. As a result, no matter how we do in the debate, our inner opinions aren’t affected. Often an atheist will demand evidence for why a theist believes what he does and will be told that he has faith. The atheist is likely to consider him an idiot because this is not a valid reason while the theist thinks the atheist has no heart because he doesn’t have faith.
Perhaps the real reason the theist believes what he does is because it is inconceivable to him that his fine caring intelligent parents and his wonderful supremely confident minister and much of the rest of his culture could be dead wrong. This could be debated, but may not come up in the argument. If we recognize faith as really being belief in certain authorities, the subject will be on the table as it should be.
We need to also recognize that the religion package typically comes with some additional memes: we should be proud of using faith as a reason for belief, people who believe our religion are favored by God, people who don’t believe are misguided or possibly evil, and of course our particular holy book has God’s seal of approval. If an atheist hope to make a case to a theist, he or she must address the fact that the validity of all these claims are only as good as the authorities who make them.
