Mr CS Lewis defines faith in a different way. He thinks of faith as continuing a belief in something you know to be true, in the face of emotional trials.
For instance, if I go into major surgery, I might be perfectly scared of what might happen when I’m under the knife, so much so that I become irrational and think about stopping the procedure. I then remember that my doctors are professionals, have had years of training, are prepared for any contingency, and have performed many operations of my type without a hitch.
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The problem is thast those “other definitions” of faith are simply things like hope, trust and confidence being renamed as “faith” by theists.I do hope for the best in any situation and I do trust my mother because past experience/onservation tells me she is trustworthy.However I do not have “faith” in anything and I do not see how “faith” is of any value.I could define atheism as “not worshipping Vishnu” but if christians started adopting the label “atheist”, as per my usage of the word it would only serve to make communication more difficult.
*It doesn’t. Most Christians (I dare say) believe that Jesus was the only one with perfect faith. He didn’t go waving his hand around. He seemed rather reserved and quite introspective. During his trial, he didn’t spout, “I believe in myself!!! May I bless me!!!” But, the book of James says that faith without works is dead. This means that you can have faith and not do anything, but you ain’t giving faith much to live on. I think that rather than requiring these folks you speak of to do their loud obnoxious ravings, faith causes them to do these deeds of their own accord.
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That’s nice and all but it does not have any relevance to the OP.I am not expressing some distaste for “hand waving” or proselytisation here.I am asking those who hold to the idea that “faith” is as valid or superior even to reason.In other words they claim faith is a methodology of sorts by which we can discern truth adn yet they are unable to describe how this works or point to any specific knowledge gained through “faith” (and not reason).
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If God was a someone that could be known, as opposed to a mythological construct or concep/ideal then he would be measurable by the same standards with which we measure other independently existing things.As it stands God is “knowable” in the same way that Huck Finn or Mack Bolan are knowable.
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It is not a matter of me drawing an unwarranted inference from their actions.When you announce that you feel sorry for sopmeone for not being like you(because they are black, jewish, atheist or whatever) and tell them you will pray for them, the implication is clear.The theist is saying that the thing which makes them different(skin color, lack of belief, belief in a different God etc.) is an unfortunate flaw and they need the prayer of the theist to overcome this.
It is bigoted.
I simply lack a belief that any gods DO exist.I will go so far as to say that if the universe does indeed operate as it appears to operate…if the universe DOES in fact have constraints(and therefore is knowable) then I think God is as unlikely a prospect as there is.I do not say “God does not and cannot exist” but I also do not say “Wile E. Coyote cannot be a real coyote who defies gravity adn orders Rube Goldbergian devices from A.C.M.E. to hunt roadrunners with”.The likelihood of either of these to be true is about the same as far as I can tell.
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The problem is thast those “other definitions” of faith are simply things like hope, trust and confidence being renamed as “faith” by theists.I do hope for the best in any situation and I do trust my mother because past experience/onservation tells me she is trustworthy.However I do not have “faith” in anything and I do not see how “faith” is of any value.I could define atheism as “not worshipping Vishnu” but if christians started adopting the label “atheist”, as per my usage of the word it would only serve to make communication more difficult.
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That’s nice and all but it does not have any relevance to the OP.I am not expressing some distaste for “hand waving” or proselytisation here.I am asking those who hold to the idea that “faith” is as valid or superior even to reason.In other words they claim faith is a methodology of sorts by which we can discern truth adn yet they are unable to describe how this works or point to any specific knowledge gained through “faith” (and not reason).
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If God was a someone that could be known, as opposed to a mythological construct or concep/ideal then he would be measurable by the same standards with which we measure other independently existing things.As it stands God is “knowable” in the same way that Huck Finn or Mack Bolan are knowable.
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It is not a matter of me drawing an unwarranted inference from their actions.When you announce that you feel sorry for sopmeone for not being like you(because they are black, jewish, atheist or whatever) and tell them you will pray for them, the implication is clear.The theist is saying that the thing which makes them different(skin color, lack of belief, belief in a different God etc.) is an unfortunate flaw and they need the prayer of the theist to overcome this.
It is bigoted.
I simply lack a belief that any gods DO exist.I will go so far as to say that if the universe does indeed operate as it appears to operate…if the universe DOES in fact have constraints(and therefore is knowable) then I think God is as unlikely a prospect as there is.I do not say “God does not and cannot exist” but I also do not say “Wile E. Coyote cannot be a real coyote who defies gravity adn orders Rube Goldbergian devices from A.C.M.E. to hunt roadrunners with”.The likelihood of either of these to be true is about the same as far as I can tell.
You are talking about confidence and hope.We already have words to cover those and if faith is just another word for those concepts then doesn’t that make faith rather meaningless?
I myself have confidence ina professionally trained surgeon to fix me up but it requires no “faith” or presupposition of spirituality.
And presumably your confidence/hope wouldn’t blind you to the possibility that something will go seriously wrong, not to mention the very real prices you’ll pay for any kind of surgery.
Working yourself into a state of absolute certainty that nothing of any kind will go wrong is as deeply irrational as convincing yourself that something will go wrong and cancelling a (presumably) needed surgery.
GodlessSkeptic, I think that you are using circular logic. Kinds of faith have been pointed out but you say they aren’t faith because you don’t have it. “It can’t be faith because I don’t have faith and I have it. I can find another word for it so it can’t be faith.” No arguing about this with someone who defines faith as something (s)he cannot possibly have.
I disagree. Huck Finn (as your example) was written by Samuel Clemens as a fictional character who no one claims to have a personal relationship with. God was written in many different books over the course of human history and many claim to have personal relationships with God. If God were the product of one 19th century book, I would be more skeptical too. The fictional character analogy doesn’t hold. Same with Wyle E. Coyote.
If you want to look at belief in God logically, fine. If I experience something to be true, I tend to believe it. In my experience, this is a proof of the existence of God, because I experience God. You disagree. This offers three possibilities on how you see Theists.
You think they’re lying about experiencing God.
You think they’re crazy.
If they are honest and lucid, you think they’re mistaken about what they experienced.
I’m going to assume that you don’t think so little of Theists to believe they are maliciously lying or all off their knockers. Most of the Atheists I’ve met think the third sounds about right. Here’s an example of something that I don’t think can be explained through science. Why do humans have free will? Why are humans able to do things they know to be wrong and detrimental. No other animal can do this. It actually makes little sense why evolution would give it to us. It would be like writing a line of code into a computer program giving it the opportunity to do things less than perfectly. Elephants can’t choose to remain abstinent, as far as I know. Humans are the only ones with a conflict as to what to do. Is it a product of being just really smart animals? Maybe, but why did we survive? You’d think that if the hunter guy in some early tribe/pack of humans one day decided not to hunt because he was tired or lazy, the lioness who had no choice would certainly prevail. Free will is a contradiction to evolution, and cannot be explained through science.
For the record, I believe firmly in evolution, so don’t try to discredit me with that line.
As for the bigotedness of someone praying for you because they want to “save your soul,” it still isn’t bigoted. They are trying to help you, so I can’t see how you can construe that to them being bigoted against you. Condescending? Maybe. Bigoted? No. You must be thet one infering the bigotedness, because (I hope) they aren’t implying it.
Jonmarzie, I agree with you almost completely; I’d like to respond to your last paragraph, though.
As a non-Christian theist, I tend to get irritated by people doing the whole save-your-soul spiel, and there are times when I do consider it bigoted. This is for the very simple reason that behaving as such towards me can very easily come across as a fundamental lack of respect for my own beliefs, religious and otherwise.
When I’m in a good mood, I’ll consider that sort of thing to be entertainingly wasted effort; when I’m in a bad mood, I’ll get irritated at being nonconsentually dragged into someone else’s faith.
Lilairen, as a Lutheran in a place where Baptists outnumber us, I have also been asked if I “knew” Jesus. I know how it feels to an extent, although I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to convert to another religion. Someone has asked me to “convert” to atheism, though. They said I was too smart for religion. I was just trying to point out that they weren’t trying to be mean. It is condescending most of the time, though.
Strawman.I do not hold the position you attribute to me above.You are quite simply misunderstanding what I am saying.If you want to call hope “faith”(just as some refer to the universe itself as “God”) then youa re entitled to and I am not arguing against you being able to do that.I simply call hope, “hope” so as not to muddy the waters when discussing the very specific(even if not well defined) concept of “faith” that many theists posit.
The faith I am talking about in the OP is the faith which certain theists tell me is a methodology by which they are able to conclude that God’s existence is verifiable and more or less certain.They claim that not all that is knowable can be known through rationality and those things which are not knowable through rationality are knowable through this mysterious, nebulous concept they call “faith”.
My question is: Can theists describe the methdo by which they employ faith to arive at sound conclusions and give me some examples of verifiable knowledge which could not be had through reason?Can anyone demonstrate any consistency of this “faith”?
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But this is because you have proceeded from the presupposition that God is not fictional and is by default more rational than believing in other characters which seem to be the product of man’s imagination.If you were raised in a culture where belief in Huck Finn and his teachings were stressed and coupled with promise of eternal reward in an afterlife and/or possibly the threat of damnation then you would be defending “Finnism” right now adn saying that the comparison to “silly God-belief” is not valid.
Rationally, belief in God is no more substantiated than belief that Wile E. Coyote chases down Roadrunners on rocket skates and is able to ignore gravity so long as he is unaware that there is no solid ground beneath him.
We simply have more emotional investment in God-belief.
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I think you are oversimplifying the matter.The human belief mechanism is a very powerful thing.We do not need actual evidence of an actual event to FIND “evidence” that the event happened.NOI memebers are firmly convinced that a giant alien spacecraft is hovering over America right now waiting to destroy the white man even though NASA astronaughts can confirm that no such thing exists.
You do not have to be crazy or stupid to believe a falsehood or commit errors in thinking.It comes quite naturally to ALL humans.
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Why must there be a “why”?There are many explanations on both sides of the free will vs. derterminism debate but I will point out to you that free will and omniscience are incompatible.If God knows all then he could never have made ANY decisions himself(of course, not all theists believe in the all-knowing God).
In any case “I don’t know” is also a perfectly valid answer and if we do not know something that does not mean that “God” is the default answer.
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Because morality is subjective.Because different people are raised differently in different environments.Because we are humans.If God exists then why do we have such awful writers as John Grisham?
Two can play teh non sequitor game.
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Wrong.Nonhuman animals not only developed moral codes before we did(dinosaurs for example) but they have, individually, been breaking those codes for a lot longer as well.
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You have a misunderstanding of how evolution operates.There is no “goal” of evolution…no “end” to which it strives towards.Creatures who survive are better able to reproduce and pass along their genes(thus propagating the traits which enabled them to survive) than ones who do not(obviously).Creatures which do not develope or adhere to social “laws” adn such are much less likely to survive.Evolution did not give us faulty wiring anymore than it set out to gives humans eyes which are upside down and backwards and horribly inefficient.
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The great irony is that religious/superstitious/magical thinking is probably an evoltuionary trait which HELPED us to survive.Fearing that evil spirits roamed the night kept men from wandering around near tar pits and predators dens in the darkness.
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There is no contradiction between free will and evolution.Your misconception is a common one.Also, many scientists and philosophers have offered rational explanations of free will(most recently Daniel Dennet) but even if they are all way off the mark that does not imply God any more than it implies the Snozzwoggler is responsible.
It IS bigoted because they ASSUME that atheism is inferior in the same way that certain types of racists(the classic “Guilty white liberal”) will assume that minorities need handouts or to be treated like they are not as capable as whites of earning good grades and such.
For the purpose of this discussion, I would define “faith” as: “the claim of knowledge that has been acquired by a means other than reason, or beyond that which is rationally known.”
Yes, there are other definitions, but they are synonymous with “confidence,” “hope,” etc., and are irrelevent to this discussion.
Many people have a tendency to treat faith as something which is somehow “above” or “higher than” or “greater than” reason, as if a rational person is some sort of concrete-bound neanderthal; and only the superior, enlightened ones can comprehend the higher matters of faith.
This is what I distinctly infer when someone says he’ll “pray for me.” The implication is that, since I’m incapable of such a lofty thing as “faith,” some more evolved person has to do the praying for me, as if for a small child. I find this patronizing, condescending and insulting.
In fact, it’s our ability to reason that is our most distinctly human characteristic. It’s the other (“lower,” if you will) animals whose knowledge is based on instinct or non-self-conscious, non-volitional learning. The higher up the evolutionary ladder, the closer the animal comes to learning by reason; the farther down that ladder, the more their knowledge resembles faith.
The way I use the term, it means that I put full confidence and trust in a God whom I have learned does exist and does love and care about me.
Or at least those are your assertions.
But those are based on my experiences, the validity that I give to testimony about His doings, including much of the Bible, etc.
Or at least that part of the bible that agrees with your preconceived notions.
In the absence of that which causes you to grow that confidence within yourself (and according to the testimony of Christianity since Paul, it’s His gift, not a DIY project of your own), there is no reason why you ought to have such faith.
I agree that there is no reason why one should have faith. And if we accept the notion that faith is a gift from god that you can’t get on your own (and it seems that you Polycarp are admitting you accept this) then the next question is why does god love you enough to give his gift to you, and not love GodlessSkeptic enough to share this gift with him. Why will god punish GodlessSkeptic for not having the gift that god himself withheld? Last why would you Polycarp worship such an unfair god?
The bizarre stuff that some folks come up with is in fact founded on their meaning to faith – a believer who trusts the Bible as “God’s inerrant Word” will therefore be forced by his own premises to reject anything that appears to contradict what it says.
I agree. Much like the believer who asserts that the Christian god is good and loving is forced by his own premises to reject anything in the bible which contradicts this notion (quite a lot BTW), by coming up with all sorts of bizarre post hoc rationalizations as to why. Sound like anyone we know?
panache45, you aren’t seriously comparing animal fight/flight/feed/fu…procreate to that of choosing to believe in something, are you? It appears to me that Atheists are just as condescending toward the faithful as they claim the other side to be. I’d venture to say that the lower down the evolutionary ladder, the more the thought processes look like reason and less like faith. There just is no decision phaze in non-human animals. It goes from “Living is good,” to “Eating makes me live” to “I eat.” There is no “I might not eat.” phase.
That is exactly my point. Why would evolution give us the opportunity to destroy ourselves when it makes sense for it to favor those species who don’t even think of not going on.
So? I never made the claim that free will proved God’s existence. I said,
Vague assertions that other folks have thought it out don’t impress me enough to change my claim either.
Did I ever say there was a goal or end to evolution? I’m not misunderstanding evolution. I know all about survival of the fittest and all that jazz. Random mutations diversify the gene pool and whichever mutation is an advantage gradually becomes the norm because of the carrier’s increased survival ability.
If you gave me a cite or even a specific example, I might be able to believe this a tad more. How did the dinos have a moral code? Do you have any proof of indecision in the dino world?
…to you. Not to me.
Clemens said he wrote the character of Huck Finn. I have no reason to believe that Huck Finn was divinely inspired when no one says it is. On the other hand, no one claims to have thought up God. When you can varify the start of one literary character, like Huck Finn, it makes it easy to know he isn’t real. Can you point to the literary beginning of God? The Huck Finn argument is really weak.
I disagree. I think it is our ability to choose that makes us human. Any beast can learn why something happens. Lab rats reason that they get zapped if they eat the cheese on the left (for example). The thing that seperates us is that we don’t have to rely on instinct. Animals always follow instinct. Humans don’t.
Yes, our “ability to choose” is unique. Assuming normal intelligence in that lab rat, it has no choice about learning which cheese to eat. The research scientists knows that he can rely on the rat’s instincts, or built-in wiring, to teach the rat. And the rat will learn; it has no choice.
But unlike the rat, our consciousness doesn’t work automatically. Every second of our lives, we have the choice to think or not to think, to be aware of the facts of reality or not. Our reasoning power takes a conscious effort, and without that effort we revert to the level of that rat - reacting passively to whatever stimuli we encounter. The “active” reasoning that we are capable of is qualitatively different from the “passive” thought processes of the rat.
Faith by definition can’t be totally rational. Taking something “on faith” means not only are you accepting something that hasn’t been proven, it’s something that can’t be proven, only accepted. Belief in God is the ulitame un-provable thing, and because of this I sympatihize with your atheism, even though I don’t subscribe to it.
Actually, I’m a firm believer, an Orthodox Jew. You asked for a non-Christian theist to offer rationale for your issues.
I pray quietly, in whispers, so I can hear myself but not disturb others. God can hear me without the yelling. It’s one of the advantages of being God. In public Orthodox Jewish devotion, one person does pray out loud, but that’s for the benifit of the people, not God.
Despite my faith, I don’t talk down to atheists OR tell them I’m praying for them. That’s kind of insulting. I understand why it seems to be a pet peeve of yours. In fact, I’m NOT praying for them, at least not any more specifically than I pray for the rest of the world, and that’s for general, not spirtiual, welfare.
As to your question about “reinvigoration”: Of course a spiritual counsellor should help out hose who are having doubts and want to be helped. That’s actually about religion. But as for the other kinds of demonstrations of faith you described, I think they’re supid. Religion shouldn’t be about making your point to the world. True faith doesn’t need to be campaigned for. If you feel compelled to shout to be noticed, it’s because there’s nothing to notice besides the shouting.
Incidentally, you mentioned the 9th circuit decision about the pledge of allegiance, which I supported, despite my belief in God. i can talk to and about God on my own time. It should have nothing to do with federally mandated speeches. See the case Engel v. Vitale for legal precedent. But anyway, those people you mentioned who demonstrated by saying the pledge in groups were doing so not because of their faith that the pledge should mention god, but to make a point. This sort of thing is, as I’ve said, silly.
Anyway, you asked for rationale, but in general, my views on the things you described are probably the same as yours. I don’t think they truly have anything to do with faith.
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AGAIN, you are assuming that evolution has some goal to which it aspires.Evolution does not even aspire towards SURVIVAL of any given species.Adaptions/mutations are just as likely(if not more so) to kill a species off than to grant an advantage.It just happens that advantages lead to survival which leads to passing along one’s genes and so on and so on…
You are thinking of evolution as being directed towards some end.As if it is deciding to do this or that for some species benefit.
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Go back and read what you wrote in the context in which you wrote the reply.What was the point of saying this if not to prop up a “Science cannot answer all questions” strawman?
I only noted that there are many rational thinkers who have posited rational explanations for free will since your initial challenge in this thread was that free will must have come from God.
Clearly you do not understand the subject as evidenced by your posts and the fact that you seem to think evolution is encapsulated by “Survival of the fittest”, which is at BEST a gross oversimplification.
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Much better(it’s a bit more complex than that but I won’t nitpick).SO why did you drag evolkution into this anyway?If you do not think it has anyything to do with God, prayers, faith etc. then why try and lure me into a bait-and-switch debate?
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Paleontologists and biologists have found that many dinosaurs suffered broken bones which, if they had been left to deal with on their own would have lead to their deaths.However they did not die from these injuries.The bones had completely healed(allowing them to die from other causes) which means they were cared for by other members of the pack.
Even a cursory study of the nonhuman animals today will reveal moral codes strinkingly similar to our own.
I will dig up some sites with more specific information for you if you find this to be too incredible to believe.
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This made no sense.I think you misread what I wrote or perhaps I was not clear.
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Okay then replace Huck Finn with Zeus and answer the question(rather than dancing around the question) please.What rational justification exists for believing that Yahweh exists but not Zeus?
I was just trying to point out that they weren’t trying to be mean. It is condescending most of the time, though.