I prefer Mirriam Webster. Specifically definition 2b.
2b or not 2b, how about providing the definition and your reason for choosing it?
You do recognize that asking a supernatural phenomenon to be measurable by natural means is an oxymoron right?
Well, generally I have found that most truely transcendental experiences are indescribable. Those who know do not say, those who say do not know. How do you describe the ineffable? God is a referent to what was experienced. God is real because it is self-evident, it has nothing to do with proof. Your mileage may vary as to what that means precisely in terms of your own experience, making the experience highly subjective. However, the notion of God is not about discerning whether God exists, it is a fact that God exists, the question is about how you relate to God. What is God? Some people like to call it ‘the universe’ or ‘existance’ and say that it works on purely mechanical principles. Other people like to see it in other ways.
The word God has appeared 4 times in your post. This word has held power over you and your intellect for the entirety of this thread. So clearly ‘God’ exists, it is clearly something, even if just a word with some weighty idea attached to it. You have devoted a great deal of time to this concept, even though you claim not to believe in it, or are skeptical of it. Obviously some people find God to be a meaningful word and use it a lot. They organize whole structures around it, structures that provide tangible and practical benefits to the people constructing them. So God clearly exists. There just isn’t a ruler big enough to measure God by, and that is why science cannot address the problem.
It’s a link, man. Click it and the magic happens. But if you insist…
“firm belief in something for which there is no proof”
I picked it partly because it’s a pretty darned hardline definition, which is in direct contrast to the somewhat milquetoast definitions you found at Definition.com. One supposes this merely underscores the fact that Arguments From Dictionary are subject to the fallacy of Argument From Authority as much as any other source.
However, I also like 2b since I believe it does agree with the definition of faith that we’re discussing here. I don’t think that the OP meant “What is the value of faith, as in that stretch of trust which allows you to overcome the tiny uncertainty you have that you might merely be a figment of the Red King’s dream.” I don’t even think he meant “What is the value of faith, as in the determination and will that allows you to forge on in the face of adversity (but which isn’t really commonly referred to as faith).” No, I think he meant, “What is the value of faith, the thing where you put absolute trust in the unconfirmed aspects of some religion or otherwise unprovable belief system and then go do things, good or ill, based solely on your unconfirmed beliefs.”
I’m perfectly willing to be corrected on this, but I will personally reject any definition of faith that excludes the cases of people having faith in deities. To me, any such definitions are positive-value strawmen.
Edit: wow, mswas doesn’t seem to believe in non-existence! It it can be mentioned, it must exist! That’s…interesting.
Hallucinations do not change people’s lives like spiritual experiences change them.
Because one may be false you will questions all? How will you know which is false?
As for studies:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1693
http://wired-vig.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2002/10/55826
http://www.clickpress.com/releases/Detailed/9278005cp.shtml
http://readthehook.com/stories/2004/09/08/facetimeDrNeardeathGreyson.html
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence01.html
Here are a few.
Your failure to comprehend does not make it incomprehensible.
Didn’t say it was.
No. No it’s not. It’s the state of quality of being rational. Rational is synonymous with reasonable, according to this same cite, which by the way is how I used the word.
Actually it’s you that failed. Twice. You’ve failed to read at a third grade level. You failed to verify your assertions before posting a smug and condescending correction.
Here’s a hint: If you’re going to get all snarky and contemptuous when correcting somebody else, it behooves you to look it up first to make sure you’re really right. If you’re not, than you look kinda dumb.
But now you know that, don’t you? 
BTW, I asked my 7 year old daughter what “rational” means. She said “that’s if it makes sense.” She knows the word. Moving on:
Perhaps the issue here is that you don’t understand the words.
Your failure to comprehend even at a frighteningly basic level does not reflect an issue with the arguments being presented but rather the tools you bring to the table to analyze them.
Exercises in futility do not make sense. They’re neither rational nor reasonable. Again, you need to learn your words.
That makes it perfect! Every single thing that you have said in your post is completely wrong! I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone do that before. Congratulations. Seriously.
Ok, basic english. “desire” “value” and “hope” are nouns (They can also be verb but we’ll ignore this to keep things as simple as possible for you.)
You can tell that they’re nouns because you speak of them as if they were either persons, places of things.
I have a desire.
I have a value.
I have a hope.
You see? Things. That makes them nouns.
I have a rational.
doesn’t work. You could say “I have a rationale” because “rationale” is a thing whereas “rational” is not. In this case (and as I’ve used it) “rational” is an adjective denoting the quality of a thing. An adjective modifies a noun, telling us about it.
I have a rational desire.
I have a rational hope.
I have a rational value.
or:
I have an irrational desire
I have an irrational hope
I have an irrational value.
For any given desire hope or value we can describe its quality of or lacking of rationality. For ones where it is exactly even we might say:
I have a desire which is totally neutral from the standpoint of rationality.
I have a hope which is totally neutral from the standpoint of rationality.
I have a value which is totally neutral from the standpoint of rationality.
In fact, the nouns “desire, hope, value” cannot escape the descriptive power of the adjective “rational!”
No noun can. Try it:
That Rhino is pretty rational.
Britney Spears is irrational.
My cookie is rationally neutral.
Any noun can be described in terms of its rationality.
They are like black holes in their descriptive power. Not even light can escape such a powerful adjective:
“Let’s look at this in a rational light.”
Wow. Those adjectives sure are strong. Boy, howdy.
Here’s a place where you can go to learn more about nouns and adjectives and play games with others that will help you understand:
Here’s a place where you can go to learn what words mean:
Here’s a place where you can learn how words go together:
The next time you attempt to correct me, you should check those places out first and be sure you understand what is actually being said. Ok?
[sub]this post was brought to you by the letter “B,” then number “3” and by the adjective “rational” [/sub]
None of these are studies.
Can you give us a link to an actual scientific study or not?
Many people do things that make sense only to themselves. Are they rational? If a voice only I hear tells me to kill someone to achieve grace, and I do so, have I committed a rational act? It would make sense to me, right?
That was a phenominally rude, uninformative, inaccurate, and generally pointless post. You should be proud of yourself.
Oh, by the way:
This is not a true statement about rational standpoints, a fact which Apos pointed out, and you didn’t seem to get. Rationally speaking, there are a large number of possible conclusions that one can draw about reality, including “I don’t want to die!” Futility and fatalism are not conclusions that your average person will draw from a rational examination of the facts of their life.
It might come as a shock to you, but atheists can have hopes, dreams…even a will to live without relying on a God-belief to crutch up their lives. (Not to mention morals, positive emotions, charitable impulses…) I will note that every time I’m reminded that some religious folk seemingly haven’t developed these (independent of the threat of divine punishment) I’m scared shitless all over again, every time.
(And you’d best watch out for low-flying irony when advising others not to answer snarkily when they supposedly misunderstanding your posts. Lest they look ‘kinda dumb’, and all.)
He’s quite right; if “you are going to do something that you know you can’t”, then you clearly were wrong in concluding that you can’t do it. Cause if you can’t do it, then you’re not going to be able to do it, no matter how determined or motivated or faithificated you are. So the whole situation boils out to “You know that you are going to do something that you are capable of doing”, which is about as emotionally and spiritually moving as a half-pint of tepid bathwater. (ie: “self-refuting absurdity”.)
Apos may have made one error that might have confused you, though: he seems to have implictly assumed that you arrived at your conclusion that the act would be impossible via rational thought. (Which then would clearly be proved as having been “mistaken” rational thought when you proceed to accomplish the ‘impossible’ task.) Clearly there is no reason to assume that you deduced the supposed impossibility of the task based on rationality; it could just as easily have been a faith-based assumption of impossibility, to bookend poetically with your faith-based assumption that you could then do the impossible. Rationally need not even enter into the situation. His egocentric assumption that it had (since he would have applied rational thought) could easily have obfuscated his meaning to you.
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of the word “rational”. It involves not ignoring what’s going on; not ignoring reality. For example, if the alternative is dying, and you happen not to want to die, then it is perfectly rational to try to avoid death, even if you have to get off your butt and work a little, and even if your success is not certain (hard to believe, I know). Clearly it’s not an actual “exercise in futility”, because if the dude with the faith was able to do it, then it clearly wasn’t impossible or futile in the first place.
Further, fyi, the adjectives “rational” and “irrational” are only meaningful when applied to nouns that have or relate to a thought or thought process, or something capable of having or expressing thoughts or thought processes. This would be something you should have noticed when you referred to a “rationally neutral cookie”. (snort). Walls, desks, and floors are also neither rational or irrational; they’re just there. (Oh, and for another example of an adjective and noun that don’t go together, try “obese” and “air”. There’s actually more to this ‘not speaking gibberish’ business than simple sentence diagramming; content and meaning of words are the next thing to learn. Presumably you already knew that, though, since you had all those nifty sites to tell you.)
Oh, and what the hey, I might as well leave the last fragment of your post in smouldering ruins too: if you thought about it (and understand the meaning of ‘rational’ too, of course) you would probably have understood that desires and values and hope are what you start from, and you use rational thought based on those personal attributes and other available information about the situation to decide the best, most rational method to achieve those pre-existent, axiomatic, independent-of-rationality desires, values, and hope. Put another way, they’re some of the premises that precede the logic of rational thought. For a real-world example: I rationally determine the best way to get cookies. The desire I have for the cookies, though, has nothing to do with rationality. It’s just what I want; I don’t justify it. (And of course, the cookies themselves are also neither rational, irrational, or “rationally neutral” (snort), since the cookies don’t think or exhibit rationality attributes at all. But then you already knew that.)
You know, that last post of yours couldn’t possibly have been this terrible by accident; you’re better than that. So it must have been a test, a challenge for us to find all the glaring problems, like those things on the back covers of Highlights magazines. Did I win?
They are all studies, at least one of them is published in the scientific journal “The Lancet.”
Here is the newest one.
http://www.noetic.org/publications/review/issue61/r61_Grossman.html
Opinion pieces are not scientific studies.
You still have nothing.
This is a link discussing the Lancet study. Warning: PDF.
Okay.
So, what does “proof” mean to you? And do you agree with this comment:
I don’t see how you arrive at this. Religious beliefs about objective reality can have evidence, and that evidence should figure into the conclusions drawn. If all available evidence points to a faith based belief being false then at the very least we have to question why those beliefs are still held and valued.
I’m drawing a clear distinction between details of belief that are unfalsifiable based on modern capabilities and other beliefs, such as the two I mentioned, for which ample evidence is available. As I’ve said several times, faith defined as belief without objective evidence is not the same as something mistakenly labeled faith that denies clear available evidence. IMO the “faith” that denies evidence is not what is being referred to in Heb 11:1
No thats not what I said.
I think there are emotional reasons people cling to beliefs in spite of ample evidence to the contrary, which I’ve already explained. I might consider it a form of denial rather than blatant dishonesty.
It’s not my intent to single out any specific group for criticism. We all walk the same human path with all it’s foibles. However, when people press their religion forward as the one* true* religion and state or even imply that everyone should believe as they do we can expect that to be challenged.
*Real *progress IMHO is society moving forward toward peace and prosperity for future generations. By looking inward to improve ourselves as individuals we become a more positive influence in society. That type of progress requires a high standard of honesty. Moreover the nature of Christianity as practiced in the US makes claims about possessing the truth, valuing the truth, and wanting to share and spread what they consider the truth to others for the benefit of all mankind. Making claims about what is truth for all makes an examination of the details of belief a reasonable proposition.
My observations are about the human condition of which I am a member.
Perhaps. That’s part of the human condition we share with each other. Often we don’t know but make our judgment call based on a combination of objective and subjective evidence and experience. People come to different conclusions and that’s fine, but actions based on those conclusions affect the lives of others. That’s where interactions and confrontation come in and as a people we try to reach some consensus.
That’s not what I claimed. I’m pointing out that letting go of specific beliefs doesn’t require letting go of all beliefs. A person can let go of belief in Bible inerrancy without letting go of belief in God or the divinity of Jesus. A person can let go of creationism beliefs in the same way.
In that case I don’t understand your statement about beliefs being unfalsifiable.
If someone believes the world is flat as a religious belief does that then become unfalsifiable? Are you saying that it doesn’t matter what people hold as religious beliefs? They can call anything a religious core belief and what? It can’t be challenged?
No, not all experiences end that way. IMO this seems to be an example of what I’ve mentioned before. A person has a powerful experience and it is interpreted by their association with others. It’s not a question of right and wrong. It’s just what happens because of the uncertain and subjective nature of this type of experience.
I consider the subjective experience valid as evidence for the individual that has the experience. It is up to the individual to judge but we should proceed with caution.
Before we continue, would you please let me know whether you are familiar with the concepts in the following articles?
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thanks.
And if it was able to be measured, then it wouldn’t be described as supernatural anymore. And until it can be measured, it gets stuck up on the shelf next to faeries and unicorns.
No, the experience is interpreted that way. There is no evidence god was in involved.
What? You can just name what you think god is, and suddenly that thing is god? The word ‘god’ has a notoriously non-specific but generally agreed on meaning (inside of each denomination of course), and all you’re doing here is declaring that god can be anything, and then saying that since god can be anything, god exists. You’re not moving the goal, you’re making the goal everything. When someone says ‘god talked to me’, there’s a certain expectation because of the common definition of god. If you’re going to call anything ‘god’, and not bother with any further definition, then I suggest you pick a new word, because the way you’re talking about it is misleading. It is not self-evident that god exists, or every single person would know it existed, and there would probably be a whole lot more agreement on his attributes.
There isn’t a ruler big enough? Please. This is just quibbling over the definition of ‘exists’. Tolkien’s Middle Earth exists, in people’s minds, but that’s no reason to build churches and kill people over it. God exists as an idea, and until it can be shown, as nothing more. This is one definition of ‘exists’. Another definition of ‘exists’, one which I’ve been using the whole time and one which is normally used when having a ‘does god exist’ argument, is physical existance. I don’t care if god exists as an idea. It’s obvious it does. But god real? Does god have any form of physical existance? Does god coincide with this reality in any way? That matters.
I actually sort of expected this to come up. The price of using the language, I suppose.
The word “proof” means a variety of things to me, depending on context. As always in the murky amazon that is English, we have to figure out which one is meant. It’s pretty unlikely that this time around it means “a series of ordered statements related by a fixed set of semantic rules yielding one or more specific conclusions based on the truth of the premises”, for example.
I posit that by “no proof”, the dictionary meant the common defintion of “proof” (1a, specifically), rather than the formal definition of proof (2a, incidentally). That is to say, “the cogency of evidence that compels acceptance by the mind of a truth or a fact”, rather than the more strict “the process or an instance of establishing the validity of a statement especially by derivation from other statements in accordance with principles of reasoning”. (Definition 3 from the dictionary, “something that induces certainty or establishes validity”, seems to roll both the informal and formal definitions together, one each on either side of the ‘or’. Most of the other defintions provided don’t relate to this discussion.)
So when we say “there is no proof”, it means there is no “the cogency of evidence that compels acceptance by the mind of a truth or a fact”. Realizing that “the cogency of evidence” is a set which could possibly have multiple elements, I would interpret the above as being approximately equivalent to “there is no evidence that compels acceptance by the mind of a truth or a fact” (which is a little easier to understand). One will note that this is a somewhat lower standard of evidence than formal proofs require.
So. My proposed interpretation of the proposed definition of “faith” is “firm belief in something for which there is no compelling evidence.” Next you will ask me what comprises compelling evidence; fair enough. I would suppose that to mean evidence which itself is compelling; that is, evidence that cannot be easily or readily dismissed or explained away. It would probably take more than one such piece of evidence to constitute an actual complete informal proof of the question (perhaps even a cogency of it would be necessary) but even on its own the evidence should be an implacable stumbling block to flat disbelief, to be considered ‘compelling evidence’.
One will note that although anecdotes are evidence of a sort, they aren’t compelling evidence, due to the long-established ability of the human to be a terrible eyewitness. We do still listen to eyewitness testimony, but it fails to be convincing when delivered by only one or two persons, especially persons with preconcieved notions of what might have been seen.
So by this definition if ‘faith’ you can still have had a modicum of easily misinterpetable experiences that you refer to as ‘religious’ experiences and still have ‘faith’, because those experiences aren’t compelling as evidence. I am of the opinion that this covers the vast majority of faith-wielding religious persons, so therefore this definition meets my litmus standard of including persons having faith in a diety.
As for the Czarcasm quote, we’ll note that he seems to be using the formal defintion of proof, very likely to persons who wouldn’t know what to do with a formal proof even if it came with an instruction manual and three “lifelines”. This is possibly poor form. However, we’ll note that the response he gets from this putative theist indicates that they too have some vague understanding of there being a difference between individual pieces of ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, becuase you don’t get all outraged at the notion of somebody wanting some reason to believe. So it seems likely that the theists recognize that he’s only asking for something mildly sturdier than a wet paper bag, and they’re strawmanning him with the notion that he just asked for something independently irrefutable, because they don’t even have the wet paper bag to show him.
Thats the one alright. So what you describe as “against all odds” qualifies. People believing they can accomplish something nobody else has ever accomplished, or that effort is worthwhile even though evidence shows it will likely be futile are exhibiting faith.
As I’ve said, Heb 11:1 does not require that we ignore existing evidence.
I don’t know what your experience is but I’d say it must be limited, or you are just not considering some available examples. How about those who have faith that kindness, and compassion toward others is good for humanity and act accordingly? There are lots of subtle ways in which faith plays a positive role in our society.
My contention is that believing *in spite of *available evidence against, is not the faith described in Heb 11:1. and in fact is not faith at all. One can exercise faith as described in Heb 11:1 and still consider all available evidence. I think we need to make a clear distinction between Merriam Webster 2b and 3. It seems to me you’re confusing the two and treating them as the same definition.
This seems to be a rewording of the religion and religious beliefs are bad argument. You’re entitled to your opinion. I doubt it’s true and I can see no way to come to any definitive conclusion. It seems perfectly obvious to me that some religious beliefs have been the foundation or justification for many heinous acts. It also seems abundantly clear given how widespread belief is, that there are at least as many acts of kindness, compassion and charity from the same source. Is there a realistic way to measure the two on some sort of scale? None that I see. AS far as I can tell your opinion has no real evidence to back it up , other than your own interpretation of your own experiences. If you find those valid then why not grant some validity to others who do the same thing but reach other conclusions.
What I find unfortunate and object to is, that the term faith has become so linked with beliefs held in denial of existing evidence that it’s more common positive and necessary use is overshadowed or dismissed. I’d like to correct that.
Is your explanation going to be as long as these articles? I’m always glad to broaden my horizons and learn new things. After perusing the articles I think I have a basic grasp. I was already familiar with Karl Popper and falsification in using the term.
from the article
As I said. The two beliefs I mentioned are based upon objective and testable assumptions are they not? Doesn’t virtually all accepted scientific evidence show it’s incredibly unrealistic to cling to a 6000 year old earth?