I don’t know enough about them to determine whether they fit my personal criteria of “Actively held, completely believed, system of beliefs involving supernatural entities or supernatural forces”; sorry.
Honestly, I can’t think of a grey area - which is what makes it a good definition! 
Pardon me for being mislead by you using, you know, Marx’s own expression. Silly me.
…and which of those three definitions do you think is appropriate for a discussion of religion? Let me guess - the only one of the three that *doesn’t *mention **religion **in its definition.
Unbelievable. Just un-fucking-believable. You just have no clue how to debate in good faith, do you? Ironic, that.
I didn’t say the other two were irrelevant. I was falsifying a hypothesis. Someone said that faith isn’t a synonym for trust, and that definition shows that it is. Religious people use Trust and Faith interchangeably in that context. ‘Trust in God.’, ‘Have Faith in God.’, ‘Trust in God’s plan.’
It’s not me that is selectively redefining words, it’s you and your cohort. The vast majority of English speaking people on the planet use the words as synonyms. There are very few words that are strict synonyms with one another. There are other contexts and nuances to words in general.
The only thing with this is that it’s rank dishonesty to claim that faith and trust are not synonyms when they are.
So two dictionaries agree with me in their FIRST DEFINITION.
I am not disagreeing with you that trust can be a synonym for faith. I am disagreeing with you that it is a synonym in this context. It is mere semantic masturbation to divorce meaning from context. You are being disingenuous when you suggest that it is, in fact, the first meaning that is relevant and not the second, in a discussion about religion.
BTW, as you can see in the second definition list, , it is synonymous with faith. But I’m sure you’ll have a semantic dodge for that, too.
I’m not doing that. But simply put it’s not grammatically incorrect to say, “I have faith in science.”
So if you’ll agree that they can be synonyms we don’t need to have this argument.
Can we cut to the chase for a moment? Is there a serious argument that the “faith” one has that the sun will rise tomorrow is equivalent to the “faith” one has in the existence of God, because these concepts have a pretty large gap between them.
In order to alleviate charges of prevarication and endless dictionary cites, I propose “sun-faith” be used to describe “faith” in experiences which have been repeated many times before and can be reasonably expected to occur again (i.e. the sun will rise again, the relationship one has with one’s spouse will continue at least through the near future, the car will start when you turn its key) versus “God-faith”, to describe the “faith” one has in things one has never personally experienced, but in which they believe anyway.
Seems to me if the suggestion is rejected and no similar alternative put in place, we should probably dispense with using the word “faith” altogether, since its vagueness creates more problems than it solves.
I will not agree that the faith in “faith in science” is synonymous with the faith in “faith in God”, no.
I am saying that the word isn’t a different word. The context changes the meaning, but the context of this tangent was in relation to people saying that ‘faith’ is something that applies to other people who are idiots, and not their enlightened selves. We can have the arguments, but I’m not going to play the game that faith has this definition that implies idiocy on the part of the person who has faith.
Past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance. So yes, we have faith that the Sun will come up. The idea of a monotheistic God may very well be taken from the Sun as Religious metaphors are filled with references to ‘light’. And you are making a big assumption that God faith is faith in things one has never personally experienced. Something being inexplicable is not the same thing as it being unexperienced. Now you as an atheist might choose to debate the veracity of claims of religious experience, but something was experienced in many cases.
Only for you. That’s because you like anyone else wants your ideological sentiment to be the baseline norm. For most of the English speaking people in hte world, faith has a stable meaning.
I didn’t say that. Faith in science is faith in science. Faith in God is faith in God. The word is grammatically correct in both instances. The object that one places faith in alters the context. We don’t need to selectively redefine the word faith in order to debate altered context.
Then you shouldn’t do so.
I am using it the way the vast majority of English speakers use it. The way the Dictionary defines it. Two separate dictionaries in fact. The Oxford English Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus does. If you find those two sources faulty somehow well that’s another debate. For now I am going with the definitions provided by two of the most commonly used sources.
Yes, you did:
which of the many definitions?
No, I didn’t. But stick with that misquotation if you must.
I said that faith and trust can be synonyms.
I am using ALL the definitions of the word faith. It is you and your cohort that wishes for me to use only the second definition.
No, we’d like you to not act like the different definitions are interchangeable.
But I’m with you on the faith (in science) = trust (in science) issue. OK, we can agree. But I’ll still argue that this is not the same faith in “faith in God”
Well then you’d like me not to act like the me in your strawman argument. Which is fine, as I wasn’t acting like that to begin with.
Faith = Trust Just as faith in science is not faith in God, neither is trust in science the same as trust in God.
Dude - it’s not a strawman to say you were insisting faith=trust - without any further distinction. Which is the same as saying “faith always equals trust”. Which it quite clearly doesn’t, by your own dictionary trawlling. Sometimes, it equals religious belief, dogma, worship.
You were the one who insisted that we were using the word wrong. This is not a strawman. You were actually pulling some bizarre hybrid beast of argumentum ad verecundiam et populum out of your ass - asserting (sans citation) how most theists define faith, while denigrating atheists’ use of another legitimate definition because we are allegedly not qualified to have an opinion.
All it amounts to is special pleading by you as to why we should hamstring ourselves in this debate by using your definitions in the face of all evidence. Even you citations disprove your stance, but you refuse to see it. “There are none so blind…” indeed.
Umm, isn’t that exactly what we’ve been arguing?
You’re making this awfully personal. I’m just suggesting two alternate forms of the word “faith” to distinguish two quite different uses of the word “faith”. Using “trust” for actual experiences and “faith” for nonexperiences.
Err, that is to say, using “trust” for actual experiences and “faith” for nonexperiences may be an effective solution.
To try and hammer in the goalposts a little - it is my (perhaps incorrect) understanding that the difference is that trust/faith in science is for the most part undisputably well justified faith, and that the faith in speculated religious entities is for the most part not. In your opinion, is my understanding?
Myself and perhaps others prefer to use the shorthand of “trust” to mean “undisputably justified” trust, and “faith” to mean “arguably not well justified” faith. Dictionary attacks against this distinction don’t change the fact that such a distinction exists.