[QUOTE=Scylla]
I think faith is one of the most important aspects of humanity. I’ll bet it’s hardwired into us by evolution as a compensation for the detrimental effects of our intelligence, and it is a huge benefit.
Think about it. From a rational standpoint life is futile and we’re all fucked, so why bother?
Faith. Faith let’s you act when your intelligence would otherwise dictate that you shouldn’t bother. It gives you the will to act on something doubtful as if it were true.
I read this great book called Deep Survival, who lives who dies and why It’s pretty clear from reading that book that in a survival situation the people that had faith they’d make it had a much better chance than those people who did not.
It’s a weird kind of faith, too. It’s not a denial of the facts, because the other trait these survivors had in common is that they were realists and able to rationally asess in a no nonsense way the seriousness of their situations.
You see the problem?
Your plane crashes in the middle of Alaska half way up a mountain 300 miles from anywhere. You are off course so nobody knows where to look for you. You have two broken legs, one broken arm and a concussion. You have no food, no survival gear, insufficient clothing, and it’s 30 degrees below zero outside and a blizzard is coming in. Oh, and a very hungry looking grizzly bear is sniffing around.
What do you do?
You’re pretty fucked aren’t you? Looking at it intelligently, anything you do is going to be absolutely futile and lead to nothing but prolonged pain and suffering. The most rational choice here is just to give up and go to sleep and die with a little dignity. Your intelligence let’s you die.
This, I guess is why we have faith. We’ve evolved into it. Take the same situation, let the guy understand it completely, except fill his being with the absolute knowledge that he’s going to survive, that he’s going to be ok. Now that he knows he’s going to be ok, he better get around to doing all that stuff he’s supposed to.
He whittles a crossbow out of the propellor, shoots the bear with it, splints his legs with the bones, builds a heat source from the carbureator and fuel, sews himself a suit out of the bearskin, makes some crutches out of a used tampon, a bobblehead doll and two old soda cans… and walks home.
If he actually tried to think about doing all those things from a rational standpoint, he’d have to laugh. He’s got no chance.
So, evolution doesn’t let you think about it rationally. It gives you faith, and you walk home.
Of course, lots of people have faith and still get eaten by the bear, but some of them make it.
It’s a very religious feeling, and I’ve had it. It’s when you know you are going to do something that you know you can’t.
On my first fifty mile run, I had a complete breakdown around mile 38. Fell, couldn’t get up, absolutely done, active hallucinations, lots of pain, the whole deal. Then, I knew I would finish and I got up and finished.
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(This seems to be the most recent post directly relating to the OP, though I will comment that I think it’s silly to argue about ‘what atheists believe’ when the term is used by one person to mean a certainty-level belief that no God exists, by another person to mean a personal absence of belief in any god, by a third to indicate the disbelief of the specific few gods that they’ve heard about, and by a fourth person to refer to any person (including self-procaimed agnostics) who hasn’t specifically identified themselves as a theist. Heck, “religious person” is a more uniformly defined and understood term.)
Scylla, what you describe here seems to only glancingly align with what I thought the definition of the word ‘faith’ was in this thread. The closest you get is “Faith. Faith let’s you act when your intelligence would otherwise dictate that you shouldn’t bother. It gives you the will to act on something doubtful as if it were true.”, and then you proceed to defend the small subset of ‘faith events’ where the belief being held is merely that one might succeed when the odds are against him; where the actions the person believes in following are a rationally determined (though perhaps improbable) course of action (as opposed to, say, sitting in the airplane praying or singing the latest Weird Al song), and where the success being sought is a specifically noble and worthwhile endeavor. You most certainly are not defending the person who has faith that spending his family’s food money on lottery tickets is so certain to succeed that he need not get a real job, or the person who has faith that merely praying is a better way of dealing with a broken arm than going to a doctor, or a person who believes that killing innocent bystanders will ensure themselves a special place in heaven.
Not to be rude, but the specific case of faith that you find valuable is such an uncommon example of faith that it isn’t hardly a defense of faith at all. It’s like defending ‘dismembering people’ based on the specific case where the individual in question is on the verge of slaughtering a whole crowd of innocent people, and the only possible way of stopping him happens to involve the unavoidable consequence of tearing him apart. It just doesn’t carry any weight in relation to the entire concept under discussion.
(Also, I call the virtue you’re touting “will” or perhaps “determination”. The dude with faith sits in plane and prays (and dies).)
It seems that in this thread a lot of the defense of the value of faith is based in focusing on a limited subset of faith applications (for example those that produce good outcomes) and are deliberately ignoring all the bad things that have been known to happen when people base their beliefs on that absence of evidence known as “faith”, and then act on those unsupported beliefs. (For example, racism is pretty much entirely a faith-based construct, though neither exclusively a religious or nonreligious one.)
As a practical matter, if you ignore all the bad outcomes of something and pay attention to only the good outcomes, then you can defend the claim that anything has value. (For example, the sodomizing of small children is in good to do because it causes pleasure for the sodomizer. --not a belief I hold, by the way.)
Needless to say, no defense of faith or anything else that relies on ignoring large portions of its effects and applications will ever be very convincing to me. That people bother to present such arguments makes me wonder if they have ever honestly considered the effects of the thing in question, outside the rosy image of it they have constructed for their personal edification.