You have yet to present any. You have presented none. Nothing. Nihil. Nada. Non. Nyet. Bubkis. Should you happen to present some, I’ll acknowledge it.
I’m the evangelist?
Would it be rude of me to find this statement spectacularly humorous in its irony?
Regarding the OP: faith is what fills the gap between knowledge and certainty. Sometimes we have a lot of knowledge about something, and therefore very little faith is required to act as we would were we certain. Sometimes we have very little knowledge about something, and therefore a lot of faith would be required to act as we would were we certain. It’s a continuum. In most cases a little bit of faith is unavoidable, and we accept that. I accept that gravity is real, on a small amount of faith and a large amount of personal experience and a knowledge of a great deal of history that implicitly states that we know of no instance where gravity has not been in effect. Therefore, I act as if I were certain that gravity is real and in effect. I carelessly don’t tie all my possessions down, etcetera.
People act on small amounts of faith all the time. The common mistake is to assume that this validates faith in any way. It doesn’t, any more than the fact that tiny measurement errors commonly occur in any practical effort indicates that gratuitous measurement error is a good thing. It’s not, and neither is faith.
Excessive application of faith serves no purpose but to allow people to act on unproven or even counterintuitive notions. It’s a justifier for action. It can promote good actions if the person was already mildly inclined towards the action; and it can justify bad actions the person wishes to perform but would normally refrain from for sensible reasons. It can also be used as an avenue for external groups or individuals to inject notions to their own benefit, without regard for the benefit of the individual (and therefore usually not to their benefit).
Persons have a moderate tendency to reject faith in a belief that they find makes them overly uncomfortable or displeased, so I would reasonably expect that on average faith makes a person happier or more comfortable. (This can as easily be demonstrated in the rejection of uncomfortable realities (anti-faith?) as it is in the acceptance of comfortable imaginings.) There is no such self-correcting mechanism for faith-based actions taken upon others, so as expected faith-based actions tend on average to have a negative effect on others. For every charity there’s a hate group; for every expression of love for fellow man there’s a condemnation of the ‘other’ like Jews, homosexuals, or even mere atheists; and for every crusade there’s a…well, there’s been few or no good effects caused by faith that balance the effect of justifying a crusade.
Summation: faith tends to unhinge people’s actions from reality, which both conceptually and in practice is a bad thing. It itself has no value, and is prone to use as an excuse for justifying beliefs and actions that have negative value.
Faith is a word, a symbol, nothing more. It is not good, or bad. It is not negative or positive. It is nothing until someone uses it. Still if the use is bad, it is not a reflection on the word, but rather on the user.
It makes no difference our beliefs, opinions, thoughts, or theories. Only truth is real. Our job is to find truth, wherever or whatever it lies or it is.
But the point is that faith is a totally unreliable guide to the truth, since (as I pointed out above) belief in faith is not based on any evidence or any guidance as to what is true or false. If you rely on faith, then you can believe in anything at all, irrespective of the evidence for or against that claim. And so to the extent that truth is valuable (as you indicate that it is), faith is a bad thing.
Wrong
We operate everyday with inaccurate perceptions of truth and varied degrees of faith. It’s how humans operate. The essence of the spiritual journey is seeking truth but not with faith alone but a weighing of subjective and objective evidence and our continued changing life experience.
For everyone, faith is a tool that is applied in seeking the truth.
How do you know that the evidence of your senses is reliable?
I would like to see examples of everyday uses of faith. So far, the examples that defenders of faith have come up with are better explained as beliefs held on the basis of inductive evidence rather than faith. Even you admit that evidence is relevant; but if you are using evidence, then is it really faith any more, as the word ‘faith’ is defined in this thread?
Inference to the best explanation. The best explanation for why I seem to perceive (not just with my eyes, but through auditory and tactile perception) a computer on my office desk every day is that there is an object, persisting through time, which is the cause of my perceptual states. Do you have a better explanation for the consistency and predictive accuracy of perception?
No, I share your faith in the ability to parse sensory input data.
I don’t understand where faith enters into it. 'Splain, please?
A schizophrenic is someone who has memories of sensory input data that cannot be rationally explained by the course of events in their life correct? They cannot trust the evidence of their senses, or at least are lead to believe so by consensus. They interpret that input data in a way that is incompatible with the bulk of humanity. You and I are capable of parsing input data to a level where we can reasonably convince one another that we are using a shared template.
So what makes you believe that you have a greater handle on reality than a schizophrenic?
'Cuz I’m not crazy? 
I’ll have to think about it.
A friend of mine recently opened his own store. Do you suppose a little faith is involved in that? My daughter switched majors in college and made a complete revision of her career choice. Any faith involved in that? Everyday we make choices about our lives based on what we believe will be profitable or unprofitable. Emotionally rewarding or not. It’s not done completely on faith but contains an element of faith.
Of course evidence is relevant. You said,
my point is that this could only be accurate if people relied on faith alone as a guide to truth. Nobody does that so your statement is pointless.
my main objection is this part.
Faith is an essential element of how we get from concept to truth. Did the Wright brothers have faith that with time and effort they could actually fly? Was it faith that kept them going through the failures? It is not the only element. As an essential element it is hardly a bad thing.
You may be referring to people who hold onto their religious beliefs in spite of ample evidence against. I’m not sure I’d call that faith. I used the classic Heb 11:1 in my previous post. Once you gave been presented evidence and you deny it to cling to certain beliefs that no longer fits the Hebrews definition. I would call that some emotional attachment rather than faith.
Because reality behaves as if my senses worked. My sight behaves as if I am seeing real things. My sense of touch behaves as if I can feel things touching me. The things my sensory input tells me about behave as if my sensory input is correct. I have plenty of reasons to believe that they are working, and no reason not to.
I don’t have faith in my senses, any more than I have a faith in the existance of the chair I’m sitting on. I may have a kind of faith that the chair will support me, but I base this on empirical evidence, and so I hesitate to use the word faith. I have objective evidence that the chair will support me, so it’s more a matter of reasoned expectation than faith.
A schizophrenic’s senses give distorted input. However, they generally don’t know this, or it happens so slowly they don’t sense the change. But when objective tested, their input can be shown to be wrong. If you can show my input to be wrong, then obviously I will not be able to trust it. But until you can show that, I have no reason not to trust my senses, and will go on using them.
I don’t have faith in my senses, any more than I have a faith in the existance of the chair I’m sitting on. I may have a kind of faith that the chair will support me, but I base this on empirical evidence, and so I hesitate to use the word faith. I have objective evidence that the chair will support me, so it’s more a matter of reasoned expectation than faith.
Having faith in my chair supporting me is a different kind of faith than that of having faith that a god exists. I have objective evidence that the chair will support me. A person with faith in god has no objective evidence that there is a god. You can’t make a comparison between the two and expect it to hold up to examination. They’re two different definitions of the word faith.
I think that 100% of people who have experienced a mystical revelation would disagree with you.
One aspect of science is that the evidence be repeatable. Just because I cannot repeat and experience in a lab does not invalidate that the experience actually happened.
Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.
-St. Augustine
However, you have skipped a few trillion steps from where I’m working. I am talking about your first conscious perception. How can you trust your first conscious perception? If your first conscious perception was in fact incorrect, then how can you trust every subsequent conscious perception?
Your argument relies completely on consistency. Because you have perceived it that way in the past, (Or believe you have perceived it that way in the past) that it is a reliable predictor of future performance. I am not arguing that it’s not, or that your assumptions are unreasonable, I am only trying to highlight the role that faith plays in all decision making processes. The fact that we act on partial information in every case implies faith. We can walk through a jungle slashing foliage with our machetes and have a reasonable expectation that we can make it a few more miles without trouble, not knowing that our next step is into a deep chasm. The chasm is perfectly explainable using the faculty of reason, but past performance is not a very reliable indicator of the future in this isolated case. In the case where there is no chasm your faithful prediction will bear out, and you will continue on your journey unimpeded by the gap in your knowledge.
What I am getting at is that the first step of faith that we make is the idea that knowledge is attainable.
I trust your friend did a business case for his store. If he didn’t, and he acted on faith alone, he’ll go bust very soon. (He might even with the research.) I suspect your daughter switched majors based on dissatisfaction with the old, and some evidence she’d like the new one. I’m sure she’d switch again if need be. I’d say she’s experimenting and acting based on data. I trust she didn’t choose a new major based only on a picture in the catalog.
They had a goal, and they knew from the work of others who tried to build planes and gliders that failure was a necessary precursor to success. I think faith was minor. They did the math, they built the first wind tunnel, they experimented. If religious faith was anything like that, ministers would get asked a lot more questions than they do.
Even with these things being true to some degree, an element of faith remains. Even with research my friend and my daughter go forward having faith that they made the correct choice for them. As I said, nobody acts on faith alone. What I’m trying to get at , even for the sake of my own understanding, is the internal emotional mental processes that go on within people are similar in religion and out of it. If we want to have effective productive dialogs about how religion affects our society and how to deal with any problems then we need to understand what the issues really are.
For people of religious faith the issue might be what they were taught as a child. They had faith their parents told them the truth. That’s often accompanied by one or more experiences that are meaningful to them and they interpret as an affirmation of their faith. They didn’t just throw a dart at different beliefs listed on a dart board.
Does religious faith become more of a factor in the life of the devout? Yes.
The phrase that has hit me on the boards recently is two atheists mentioning caring about the truth, as if religious believers really don’t. IMO the true spiritual journey requires a commitment to seeking the truth.
My Bahai friend told me of a Lutheran minister who was attracted to Bahai principles and even read Bahai sacred writings at his own services. That didn’t go over well. eventually he decided he could not become Bahai because they had no clergy and he couldn’t remain being paid to be a minister. When it came down to choosing what he held to be true other factors influenced him. Here a on the boards we see plenty of examples of posters who evidently have some emotional attachment to their pet beliefs and will argue themselves blue to defend it in the face of evidence against.
There’s no doubt in my mind that among religious believers there’s lots of emotional attachment to beliefs that color how people look at their world. It occurs to me in this thread that beliefs held in the face of ample contradictory evidence don’t really qualify as faith when considering the classic Heb 11:1 definition.
Still, they needed faith that it could be done when it had never been done before and the added faith that *they * could do it.
Religious faith is a little tougher because it deals with the inner person more than the physical world. You know I totally agree that physical evidence must be a part of the equation is valuing the truth. I totally disagree that faith is somehow the enemy of truth.
And I think that 100% of the people who think that a mystical revelation counts as objective evidence do not understand what objective evidence means.
But it doesn’t mean that it happened the way you think it happened, or that it means what you think it means. Repeating the experience serves as a form of verification, and it helps in determining what caused the experience. If you can’t repeat the experience, you can’t determine what caused it to happen.
This is a meaningless question. My first conscious perception occurred when I was a baby, and I wasn’t up to questioning my senses just yet.
You’re using a different definition of the word faith here. There’s faith when you have objective evidence to base a prediction on, and there’s faith when you don’t. If I know the jungle and have no reason to believe that theres a chasm just in front of me, then I can have faith that I can continue without falling in one. But if I have no knowledge at all of the jungle and I’m basing my faith on something like ‘god will protect me’, something without objective evidence backing it up, then I have no real basis to expect either result.
I don’t understand your point. This isn’t a point of faith because knowledge actually is attainable. This only matters if we don’t know that. I can’t think of a time when we both didn’t know that and were able to realize it. The knowledge that knowledge is attainable is itself knowledge, and that realization would shift us past that point.
Would they have interpreted those experiences the same way if they had not been brought up to believe the religion of their parents? With children, it is a blind belief. They aren’t given any evidence, they are just told ‘god is’ and are expected to accept it as truth. They start off with the premise ‘this religion stuff is all true’ and go from there. Their parents taught it to them, who are they to question it? So when they have some kind of experience they can’t explain, they just fall back on their belief. This is only affirmation to someone who already believes, someone who already has the premise ‘religion = true’ in their head.
God can not be proved nor can He be proved to not exist.
In simple terms:
People who believe in God are impelled to help others. Churches provide food for the hungry, clothing and accessories for the poor, they run shelters for the homeless, and provide medical care for those who can’t afford it. Religion does an enormous amount of good charity work in this world of ours. I wouldn’t want to be without them even though I don’t agree with some of their doctrine. Religion is a valid viable part of our world society. It did not come about easily, and yes, there is a ton of evidence for the existence of a supreme being of some kind. Millions of people have spiritual experiences on a daily basis. Science will never explain by material methods what spirituality is and does.
I grow weary of “skeptics” who do little or no good works for the world society belittling the beliefs of these people who do. A science education is the narrowest of all educations. When education broadens again as it was when I went to school maybe “scientists” will begin to understand more of the world they live in.