This question is an offshoot of the miracles thread, but I’ve wondered about this for a long time. What is “faith” as it pertains to religious conviction?
Doesn’t faith just mean choosing to “beleive” something you actually don’t beleive? If I see no reason to beleive in God, for instance, but I decide to “have faith,” aren’t I just declaring that I’ll beleive anyway?
That seems disingenuous, as if you’re pretending you beleive when you really don’t. You want to beleive, even though you don’t, so you just say you do.
I ask because this faith issue is always thrown around as the ultimate response to people who say there is no logical reason to believe in God or that there is no proof of God’s existence. “You just have to have faith.”
(This question is posted with serious intent, and I don’t necessarily contend that there is no God. I would have to rely on faith to beleive, since every bit of logic in me says the question is, at best, unanswerable.)
– Greg, Atlanta
Personally, and I know I am going to get it for this, but all faith is ultimately based on some degree of evidence.
For some the evidence is simple (this doesn’t mean they are simple). For example, my parents believed in God, since I respect my parent and do not think they are fools it makes sense to me to believe.
For others it is somewhat more complex. A friend of mine lived an immoral life (in her view). A friend of her’s asked her to go to church, and to pray, listen and learn. She wanted to change her life and was desperate so she went. She told me later that she felt so filled with strength that she felt she could really change her life, and she has.
But, IMO, all faith is based on evidence.
But that seems totally contradictory. If faith is based on evidence, it’s not faith. It’s belief based on evidence. Isn’t that a totally different concept?
I don’t have to have faith that the sun rises in the east, because I see it every day. If you want me to believe that God makes it happen, that requires faith.
– Greg, Atlanta
(Could just be semantics here, but my original post refers to the type of faith that one uses INSTEAD of relying on evidence.)
I don’t think there is such a thing. It is like StrTrk777 (Jeffery)'s question to me about oxygen. If you start to stripe away layers of faith eventually you get to something that resembles evidence. If you strip away the evidence you eventually get to an axiom (which amusingly enough you could call faith). How is that for a vicious circle? 
Faith is believing something without absolute proof.
Notice I said absolute. By this I mean demonstrable, scientific proof. Examples of non-absolute proof (but a form of proof nonetheless) are anectodal evidence, eyewitness testimony, and pure logic.
Faith can be based on proof. There are different degrees of faith necessary to believe in different things; some things require a small leap of faith, and some require a big leap (e.g., if there is no proof at all).
As long as the proof is not absolute, and the person in question believes that statement/comcept to be true, it is faith. Once there is absolute proof, the matter is no longer a matter of faith.
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@schicktech.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
First, one of the definitions in my dictionary says “belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.”
Now, I believe faith is pretty much what this definition gives. I do not have proof that God exists. I have the bible but it could have been faked. I have my experiences in life, but they could be just experiences. I believe not because I have proof of God, but because he feels real to me. In your post you question how one can have faith unless one does not believe and how can one believe unless one has faith. To me it is not a matter of not believing being necessary for faith, but the fact that I could be wrong. As you say, you do not have faith that the sun will apear in the morning, because it alway does. The proof is the sun rising every morning. Faith is when you believe without any proof.
I hope this makes sense.
Jeffery
Much of what we learn & come to believe we accept by faith! I believe the Earth to be round. I heard much evidence that it is, but without actually circuling it, making careful measurements, I accept it as fact by faith! I believe that man has visited the Moon, but can’t prove it. I have heard that the Moon trips were faked, I can’t prove nor disprove it! However, there are many things we KNOW through personal observation & testing. If one can’t personally prove an idea we must rely on faith! As a “nonbeliever”, I am accused of being “faithless”. My faith in my belief is as strong, if not stronger than that of the “faithful”
Zymurgist
There seems to be a difference between religious faith and secular faith though. I believe the earth is round, but if someone comes up with more compelling evidence that the earth is square, I’ll change my mind. Many of the religious people I know say they would believe in God no matter what the evidence.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Well, many of us have actually discussed this at some length in prior threads, but here’s my two cents (again). GREG says:
Faith is belief – specifically, it’s belief in the absence of absolute proof, as CMKELLER said. If you don’t believe, then you obviously don’t have faith, and saying you do is not enough to make it so, anymore than saying anything else that is not true serves to make it true. Those of us who have faith believe in religious principles that we recognize cannot be proven, at least in this world, with the tools we have now. We believe anyway, and that is what is called faith. You say:
It takes no faith to acknowledge that the sun rose today, and every day before this; it takes some degree of faith (albeit small) to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. You may be confident that it will; you may predict it will; but you don’t know that it will. GAUDERE says:
I disagree with this. As I’ve said before, my personal faith does not require me to ignore the evidence placed before me, or to refrain from using the brains and sense God gave me. If someone presented me with demonstrable evidence that God does not exist, I suppose I’d have to accept it; I just can’t imagine what such evidence might be. I continue to believe in God as a matter of faith precisely because His existence cannot be disproven.
Your statement that you can’t think of any way that would prove that God does not exist…does that mean that you think there is a test that would prove that God doesn’t exists, you just haven’t thought of it? Or that there is in fact no way to prove/disprove it?
Neither can it be proven, with the evidence we have on hand. I think it could be proven, if, say, we could get God to come down and we could run some tests. There is evidence both for and against both sides. If you think the weight of the evidence is on one side you believe that side; the fact that God cannot be either proven or disproven cannot weigh in on this; it seems to be neutral, I think.
And I wasn’t saying that you would believe in God in spite of any evidence; just some people I know.
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
Excellent food for thought, folks. Thanks for the input.
Based on your explanations, it seems a lot of the faithful among you would not approve of someone saying “You just have to have faith” in response to my saying I don’t believe. It seems you are saying faith is something that you cannot choose to have or do, rather it is the product of realizing that you feel it in your soul or that it makes sense for you to overlook some points of logic. That’s easier for me to understand, but it’s not the way it’s been posed to me by people trying to save my soul. (God bless 'em.) They seemed to take a simpler approach: “Nevermind all that thinking, just have faith. Just say you beleive.”
Am I understanding you correctly?
– Greg, Atlanta
Yes, but you have to keep in mind that Straight Dopers are not representative of the general population. We tend to be more critally-thinking folks. 
Greg, for the most part I do agree with what you are saying.
It is not enough to just have faith, as you cannot have faith if you do not believe.
For me, my belief is based on my personal experience and the feeling that God is real. While God might come down and show himself and prove that he is real, I do not believe there is an acceptable proof that he does not exist. So without an ability to have an absolute proof, I go with my belief in the bible being of God and my belief in what he has done in my life.
Jeffery
GAUDERE asks –
It means I personally can’t imagine how it could be proven or disproven, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say unequivocally it couldn’t be proven – I just don’t see how.
GREG says:
Must quibble ever so slightly – I don’t think that faith requires me to overlook any point of logic. I don’t believe God can be logically proven or disproven, but I don’t see my faith as inherently illogical. Extra-logical, yes; illogical, no.
Must quibble ever so slightly:
I decided to drag this comatose equine up front, since the subject has come up a couple of times recently. Anyone got any additional definition to add? Believers, is your faith conditioned on some grounds, or is that simply post hoc rationalizing of a feeling? For those who claim atheism, does understanding why believers have faith make their point of view make more sense?
Faith: “Informed” hope.
I hope there is a God, so that my belief is not held in vain. Its informed for some of the reasons Jeffrey said (personal experiences, etc). Somewhere the weight of the “informed” stuff (I guess that’d be information) is so great that I pass faith (Believing there’s a God, without “proof”) and become convinced that my belief is not held in vain.
That make sense??
Jai Pey
Poly, since you were so kind as to drag this thread out of limbo (as opposed to heaven, hell, or purgatory ;)), it occurs to me that I might actually have a useful analogy to toss into the discussion.
First, let me say that I’m with Jeffery on this: I’ve had roughly three decades’ worth of internal experiences or sensations that I’ve interpreted as interaction with God. (I won’t go into details here; I’ve already done some of that on another thread.) I don’t interpret this as a choice to believe; something’s happened to me, and continues to happen; to me, it has a life of its own and rejects other interpretations.
So I don’t see it as ‘faith’; I feel like I’m trusting in experience in the same manner that I trust that normal household objects will always fall toward the earth’s center when I drop them. The obvious difference is that everybody shares my experience with gravity; not everyone has had similar religious experiences, and not everyone who has had such experiences interprets them in the way I do.
Now, the analogy: something equally internal, unprovable, and having nothing to do with God.
Ever fallen in love? Ever been infatuated with someone? Is there a qualitative difference between the two?
No, I don’t mean to start a debate over that here. My point is simply that, in my experience, there’s a profound qualitative difference between being ‘in love’ and being infatuated. I’m sure that many others would agree with me on the basis of their experiences, but many people would disagree, on the basis of their experiences.
We can compare experiences, but, compared to believers’ apparent experiences with the divine, the ‘evidence’ one way or the other is equally internal, invisible, and non-exportable (i.e. I can tell you about it, but I can’t open up my insides and say, ‘here’s what my experience looks like’ in a way that allows you to examine it in the same manner I can).
Without getting into the discussion itself, what would reasonable round rules be for a discussion of infatuation v. ‘in love’? And how would they compare with reasonable ground rules for a discussion involving believers and nonbelievers about experiences of God, such as the thread I linked to above?
Polycarp asked:
I’d like to start by saying that faith does make sense. Especially to the person who has it, but perhaps even more so to one who doesn’t (that is, the benefits are obvious). That said, I’m still not sure I understand why believers have faith. Though this helps:
Gravity is a good analogy in that it’s obectively experienced. But to use emotions as a basis for comparison to faith gets tricky. (Especially if you’re talking about love specifically - there are posters here who believe God is the source of all love.)
The emotion:faith analogy breaks down in the same manner as the experience:faith analogy. That is, although emotions are subjectively experienced (“equally internal, invisible, and non-exportable”), the fact is they are experienced by everybody (with the exception of those who have been the victim of some types of brain trauma). Although definitions may vary somewhat regarding what is or is not classified as “love,” or “hate,” or “envy,” we can all identify having had those feelings. Some of them result in demonstrable, quantifiable actions towards others which supports their existence within one.
Emotions, though subjectively experienced, are nonetheless damn-near universally experienced. If you tell me you are in love, I can empathize with that emotion by recalling my own experience. I don’t need external proof of your emotions to believe you.
But when you tell me you believe in God, I have no basis for comparison. When you relate your subjective experiences, and explain how you believe those experiences form your relationship with God, that’s where your faith is. And the interpretation of those experiences can only be subjective.
So we return to the definition of faith as suggested: belief without absolute proof. And to finally answer Polycarp, I can acknowledge that people of faith have subjective experience of what is perceived to be God, and that their faith follows from experience. It has always made sense to me, even if I have never believed it myself.
Sum Ergo Cogito
Thanks for the excellent response, Quixotic. Actually, I have problems with the ‘belief without absolute proof’ definition that Chaim suggested: the bulk of what we ‘know’ in the physical sciences hasn’t been, and can’t be, absolutely proved. However, it would be a misnomer to characterize your outlook or mine toward, say, the theory of relativity as one of ‘faith,’ so we’d need a definition that made that distinction.
I can verify all that is known so far about relativity, if I’m sufficiently intelligent and motivated. But no matter how much you learn about my experience with God, there’s no guarantee that you will be able to verify that for yourself in any way. A definition of faith needs to deal with this element of subjectivity.
On another note:
The analogy I’m drawing isn’t ‘believing is to nonbelieving as having fallen in love is to not having fallen in love’. Rather, it’s ‘believing is to nonbelieving as having experienced falling in love as qualitatively different from infatuation is to not having experienced it as qualitatively different from infatuation’.
If essentially everybody has experienced infatuation and falling in love as different things entirely, then I’d agree that my analogy breaks down.
I have always understood faith to be the belief of something that hasn’t been indicated to you.
Faith is a person’s devotion to something that has yet to be proved.
Some folks, when discussing religious faith say “there has been proof”, but just think. If someone uses the word faith in a non-religious sense it’s always indicating something that is unproven.
For example, if someone says “I have faith she’ll come around and love me” obviously they have no proof, they are believing in something simply on hope. Just a painful optimism.
To quote Oscar Wilde:
“A religion dies once it is proven true, science is the record of dead religions”
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully–as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.