What is the value of faith?

Great Debates
141

Excuse me? Where was the claim made that the lack of objective justification for faith implied that believers cannot function in the real world? We’ve been through the threads about claims by theists that any attempt to paint religion as not rational meaning that atheists consider theists insane. It’s a strawman long since dismantled.

Since you seem to imply you know a lot about science, you must know that the very definition of a theory implies that there exists evidence to support it, enough that it gets promoted from hypothesis - and the lack of evidence to falsify it also (tips hat to Lib.) Many religious claims, on the other hand, have been falsified, for instance the story of creation, the Exodus, and a host of others. Please name one that might be considered at the level of theory. There are certainly religious hypotheses that have not been falsified yet (and many unfalsifiable) but it seems to me that the state of religion, for the last three thousand years or so, resembles the state a field of science when no one know what the hell is going on, and hypotheses and predictions abound. That usually settles down within a few decades, not a few millennia.
There is one religious hypothesis that hasn’t been falsified, and which has made correct predictions, and that is atheism. Falsification of atheism would be trivial - a deity of any type only need show up. (There will be arguments, of course, but that is true of any scientific evidence.)
God, we’re waiting.

142

What? But that argument is wrong. It’s begging the question big time. God exists in the first premise, you can’t have that be the conclusion. The first premise invalid until it’s proven to be true. That argument basically says ‘I attribute X to god, X exists, therefore god exists’.

143

Not at all. Looking at other species, and the fossil record, shows the path in which these things evolved. Going from nothing to us would require that all this evolved at the same time, and would be quite impossible, but the actual development of these things proceded in stages. We certainly see enough creatures with primitve hearts, right? Plants, for one, have circulation but no heart.

Macro-intelliegence in the sense of society? How conscious would you consider a dog? It seems we have a layer of self-awareness on top of the subconcious. Just as I solve problems in my subconscious, my dog solves problems without being self-aware. And below that we have autonomic systems solving problems as they have evolved to do.

You can randomly generate starting configurations and be just as well off. The offspring of the successful ones would evolve and dominate the field, just as in evolution. The rules are programmed, but remember they are a weak simulation of the natural world.

144

Those are superficial attributes of your body. It’s the body itself you have very little control over. Most of the things the body does are done without your having any control over, and probably very little knowledge of. Unless you eat at Taco Bell. No matter how much will you exert you can’t stop your kidneys from filtering stuff out of your blood, or your lungs from absorbing oxygen from the air inside them, or your toungue tasting things placed against the taste buds.

Why? What reasons do you have to believe that this is true?

145

This is *precisely * an example of the irreducible complexity argument, itself an extension of Paley’s “watch analogy,” and it has been rather thoroughly refuted (here is a good place to start, although not the only resource).

It’s good that you are trying to establish a coherent cosmology, but you really do yourself a disservice if you build it upon fundamentally flawed principles and misunderstood basic concepts (as you appear to have of the mechanics of evolution).

146

Vinyl Turnip I don’t think that people have exactly comprehended the argument that I am making. Nothing that I have said is exclusive to the explanations of Evolution that have been presented here. I see a lot of false dichotomies seeking to reinforce established dogma. For instance, Voyager’s chauvinistic assumption that his dog is not self aware.

What I am talking about is a system of categorizations and how we perceive those categorizations, if you are trying to teach me evolution you haven’t quite caught up, because nothing I am saying conflicts with the established theory of evolution in any way.

Arguments about whether the human being can control the form of it’s own body are irrelevant. I am not talking about individual intelligence but aggregated intelligence. An individual human cannot build a high-rise condo either, but an aggregated intelligence can, just like an aggregated intelligence can manipulate the form of an individual’s body.

Voyager The fossil record shows the lineage of how things evolved yes. I am not making the argument that the human being was just suddenly there one day. What I am saying is that I don’t believe that evolution is a matter of trial and error with every possible permutation, that there is a driving intelligence behind it that chooses out of possible paths. The lower the order of intelligence the fewer options it has, but it still has options. That life in and of itself implies consciousness, that it solves problems, doesn’t just randomly bump against chemicals and thereby alter it’s form by either surviving or dying. Human beings invent things, and the ‘fossil’ record of human engineering is littered with discarded designs, but the evolution of our technology was still, not random. It was designed with a purpose.

It seems like you are arguing that one day intelligence just sprouted through a confluence of sufficient complexity. To me, that smacks of vulgar creationism too. My argument is that intelligence is intrinsic to life and is a necessary component for something to be considered alive, even if the intelligence is so minimal that we as humans with our egoic anthrocentric definitions of intelligence cannot recognize it as such. My argument is that wherever there is life there is intelligence of some degree.

147

No one who knows anything about about evolution believes this. Evolution is not random. Mutations are semi-random, but evolution is not. The driving force behind it is natural selection. Natural selection determines which mutations give an advantage, allowing the creature to survive and pass on it’s genes.

Consciousness is not required for choice making. Do you consider a bacteria moving away from a harmful chemical a conscious choice? Randomly bumping into things is not the other either, that’s a false dichotomy.

148

Apparently I am among them, because the entirety of your last post makes almost no sense to me. hotflungwok and Apos have already attempted to address some of your previous posts line-by-line and it doesn’t seem to be helping much, so rather than continue making rhetorical spirals I will just say that I think you’re being needlessly esoteric in whatever it is you’re attempting to argue, and bow out of this discussion for now.

149

It wasn’t a gambit, it was an example of the sort of faith this thread is talking about: i.e. faith in some truth claim.

You are simply being dishonest in pretending otherwise.

This is not a response to what I said, but rather another digression. It makes no difference how closely anything is tied to their identity. I don’t believe that people of faith are idiots, or that they are evil. I believe faith, in the sense of having faith in the existence of god, or in the validity of various doctrines, is intellectually a bad idea. Please stop misrepresenting me.

Then perhaps you are in the wrong thread, since this is a thread about discussing faith in the sense I noted.

Surely you are aware that dictionaries give several definitions for faith, and the OP
is not, in fact, addressing all of them, nor is it addressing which ever ones you happen to cherry-pick.

No, it does not. You are confused.

No, you misrepresented it.

150

Sorry for the delayed response.

I appreciate your input here. There’s one area I would disagree on and that’s believing without evidence. I think that quality is linked to our desire to discover and I don’t see it as an enemy of truth. As you have correctly pointed out, those kind of beliefs should be held provisionally in recognition of the truth about what we believe vs what we know. If a person can hold their beliefs provisionally and consider and evaluate new evidence as it comes along I don’t see how that can be an enemy of truth.

We do know that for many people the emotional attachment they have to certain beliefs makes it hard for them to honestly look at new evidence. Those are the cases in which justification and rationalization come to the fore to defend beliefs. We see this in believers and non believers.
It wasn’t my intention to defend one type of faith with examples of another. My goal was to recognize that some element of faith is indeed at work in all of us. If the dialog is going to be productive we must be precise about exactly what we are talking about.

I would agree that the kind of faith that holds beliefs even in the face of ample contradictory evidence is an enemy of truth.

I don’t agree that belief without evidence is an enemy of truth providing people hold those beliefs provisionally and our mind and hearts are open to new information and experiences.

I’d also point out that when you really look at the Heb 11:1 definition, it doesn’t mean the type of “faith” that denies evidence, and IMO that’s what was being implied.

151

Okay, there are a few missing steps. There’s a chain of comments, starting with Post 88:

and ending with my comments:

The second sentence does not follow directly from the first. I’ll fill in the gaps now.

The implication was that faith does not involve “empirical” evidence" nor is it based on “objective” information. But, I’m saying that faith depends on some evidence and on some information. (I’m guessing that “empirical” was used in contradistinction to “phenomenological”, and when I used “objective” to modify information, I was following the lead set by the post that I was responding to – it’s not clear to me what the difference is between objective information and non-objective information.)

IOW, those who are basing their lives on faith are not basing their lives on blind faith, but, rather on faith that is based on evidence and information. Whether the evidence is satisfactory and whether the information is sufficient is not a question of objectivity but of epistemology. You and I can say that it’s unsatisfactory and insufficient but someone who has faith can rationally disagree. Are faith-based people rational? In a practical sense, they are as rational as anyone else. The evidence for this is that they are able to function quite well in the real world.
How’s that?

Fine so far.

Religious claims were falsified? Hmmm … that suggests that they were based on scientific hypotheses, right? Isn’t falsifiability a key criterion in the demarcation of science?

I haven’t claimed that religious claims are theories, scientific or otherwise. I merely suggested that theories, themselves, are not objective.

Ah, still some more scientific religious hypotheses …

And when was that exactly?

So hypotheses and predictions no longer abound? :wink: It’s okay – you seem to be referring to Kuhnian *normal * science.

So atheism is a religious hypothesis? :eek:

Trivial? Or impossible? I suggest that there is no evidence that you will consider to be sufficient to falsify atheism.

152

Voyager I think part of the problem here is that faith has become a loaded term. It seems like many people here are using a version of faith that is synonymous with delusion. Both Judaism and Christianity command a person to seek the light of truth. I do not know as much about Islam but I think there are similar concepts.

The problem here is that the playing field has been defined by the people who are subverting the concept. Faith is not at all ignorant. A person who fears the truth is lacking in faith.

Pope Benedict has been doing a lot of talking about the relationship between faith and reason.

There are two unfair processes that go into this conversation many of the times it comes up.

  1. One side dominates the semantic playing field and will only accept arguments using the emotional biases it has over the words. IE if Christians are dominant, then faith is de facto good. If rationalists are arguing it is de facto bad. Anyone who is not following the dominant meme has to negotiate their way out of the dominant definitional space in order to assert their point of view and establish their own semantic space in which to work.

  2. The non-dominant side of the argument is often characterized by the dominant side by the lowest common denominator. To get past this, one has to be either, very persistent, highly educated, or a skilled rhetorician. In the case of the dominant faction on this particular forum, the presumption is that people of faith are all some variation on redneck evangelical or the crystal gazing hippy at the local head shop.

Something I wonder is how many of you taking the rationalist side of the argument have read St. Anselm or Benedict XVI on this subject? Anyone? There is a wealth of material on the topic of reason and faith.

I would argue that “blind faith” is not faith at all, because a person of true faith is not afraid to have their faith tested.

153

You get huffy about people supposedly lecturing you on what evolution is, but then you say things like this that suggest that you don’t know what it is. Hardly seems fair to accuse people of holding to “dogma” given that.

You are going to have to define intelligence a little better then. Does a computer have intelligence? What sorts of processes involve intelligence? When something makes a choice, what functionally is actually going on, according to you?

I don’t see how that follows at all. Life implies some sort of self-sustaining metabolism and generally also semi-perfect reproduction, but it does not imply consciousness. The individual blood cells in my blood are alive, but there is no evidence that they have any sort of self-awareness or consciousness.

I don’t see how. Whatever intelligence is, it involves SOME sort of process and functionality, and this most certainly could have evolved.

Then you must have a very strange and uncommon definition of intelligence. Is a car alive, since it has systems that can make choices based on information sent to its computer system? How about an auto-sensing dryer?

154

Apos Machines are not making choices they are activating programmed responses to stimuli. That isn’t the same as a choice. The car and the dryer do not have the option NOT to follow the pattern they are programmed to follow. That’s the difference. Your point about blood cells and Hotflungwok’s point about bacteria are reasonable examples however.

155

In rereading the thread something occurred to me and this post represents it airly well.

If I understand the first sentence I’d have to disagree. I think it is an element of faith that moves us to act on the best information we have knowing that our knowledge is less than perfect. It appears to be the kind fessie is talking about. It may not be the kind of faith some are criticizing.

Wouldn’t you say that people who accept the religion of their parents or interpret some subjective experience through the lens of religious beliefs might be acting on the best information they have at the moment?

When new evidence comes to them and they resist or deny this new evidence to cling to beliefs isn’t it then, that we call their faith something counterproductive?

I’ve called into question the concept that the kind of belief that is held onto in the face of ample contrary evidence even qualifies as real faith as described by Heb 11:1. Perhaps that’s one problem that believers share with non believers. We have allowed people to continue to deny plain and ample evidence and then calling it faith. Because that kind of behavior is so much a part of religion we have accepted that definition of faith and that seems to be the definition that is so criticized. It deserves to be.

Once someone has been given serious and clear evidence to contradict a belief how can they claim to be “certain of what they do not see” or “sure of things hoped for” Once you’ve been given real evidence the issue is no longer unseen or hoped for because then there is hard evidence to consider.

Thoughts?

156

So who bases their entire lives on faith? Monks, perhaps, but they live in an environment where they don’t have to face the real world. Jesus said give up all and follow me - they do, but few others do. Most people compartmentalize their lives quite well - thus the lack of a claim that those who believe can’t live in the real world.

Pretty much what I said.

First, note that I only included falsifiable claims. 300 years ago, these were scientific claims, in fact at the beginning of the 19th century, many religious leaders in the US were quite excited by science, since they assumed science would support their religious claims. Science falsified old claims about the age of the earth, but these were fairly easy to give up. Darwin made such an impact since evolution threatened humanity’s special nature, and that was a lot harder to give up. So the religious claims I mentioned overlap in the realm of historical and geological claims, and thus are subject to falsification. The claim that “God loves us” is not. (Not scientifically falsifiable, at least.)

What do mean when? Each subfield has this during periods of turmoil. Some examples: the origin of the universe before Arno stumbled on MBR. The causes of the demise of the dinosaurs (still going on, to some extent.) String theory and alternatives to it today. I assume you are not implying that science is some monolithic entity. The same is true for science in the small. You know, sometimes one side of a battle gets defeated by the evidence, and sometimes someone figures out that the two sides are using different notation to say the same thing.

Of course it is a religious hypothesis. What other kind could it be? And if you pay your money and become able to search, you’ll see that I have consistently said that I am open to a god popping up and showing himself. I’ve suggested certain things that God can do that would be pretty convincing, such as instantly rearranging stars. Hell, parting the Red Sea would be pretty convincing. So you suggest wrong. I started off believing, and my present lack of faith is not due to any unhappiness with my religious training or upbringing, just an examination of the data.

BTW, I still don’t get why you don’t consider theories objective. Being objective does not imply guaranteed correctness. Hypotheses are very subjective, of course.

157

Here is the definition

Being sure of what we hope for? Certain of what we do not see? How is that provisional? This seems totally opposite of how you say you operate (and how you seem to, given your posts.) Someone certain of the creation can say that since we can never see what really happened, they don’t have to accept scientific evidence. If you are certain, will you search for evidence to contradict your faith? Will you accept it if it is offered. We’ve seen many posters whose faith falls nicely into this definition. I am very happy to say you are not one of them, and I salute you for it.

158

I really liked your post #152, mswas.
I think that, in a sense, a reliance on the Bible (or any other “Holy Document”) for understanding and directing life (“faith”) is really a lot like relying on empiricism and logic. They’re both external mechanisms, constructs. A person can run their experiences through those machines and what comes out, that’s “true”, because they believe in the validity of the construct. That’s actually where their faith resides, in the machine or the book. Everything else is disregarded, sometimes for good reason, and sometimes merely because it’s threatening.

Here’s something to consider. I’ve borrowed a bit from that Catholic school I went to in first grade.

The “Holy Document” (Bible, Koran, whatever) is “The Father” - someone else’s tale, someone else’s reality. But a reassuring story to many nonetheless. I think most famous religious documents have some real wisdom, mixed in among the superstition and politics. It’s a necessary starting point - my children are 3 and they’re starting to ask those questions, but they’re very literal. They need my story as a beginning framework. Some people, though, want to keep their tale locked in time, want their children to repeat it word-for-word. Some of them retain their insistence on literalism, refusing to look at the Bible in a new light.

Logic and empiricism are “The Son” - an individual’s own experience. Kids don’t have any logic until they’re at least 4, and they can’t grasp it abstractly until around age 7. And yes, in many ways it’s a huge improvement over “The Father”; the new telling of the story has room for growth and improvement because (1) it’s used by an individual on their own quest and not tethered to collective knowledge, and (2) it’s based on the new accumulation of empirical knowledge that has passed since The Father figured things out.

Yet empirical facts, on their own, lack meaning. They don’t contain any value statements. Utility alone doesn’t determine “goodness”.

Which brings me to the third part - the “Holy Ghost”.

And that’s a really tough one to quantify because, hey, it’s a ghost. But I think that is the part of faith that says “I may not know what to do because of what’s happened in the past, and I may not be able to figure out ahead of time what to do in the future; but I am of God, God is good, God is guiding me, and I will do the best I can.”

You’ll argue - You can’t just say “I am, therefore I’m right”**. Except…people do. Every day.

People who lack that belief are much more dangerous. “I am, therefore I’m wrong”? Those are the mindless followers everyone rails about. The people who blow up planes, they’re not doing it because they’re over-confident. People blow up planes because of a need for external validation, because of charismatic leaders who pander to their fear. And then there’s all those virgins in Heaven (at least that’s what I’ve read).

If they had more true faith in themselves, in God, and in their value as beings of God, they would have to choose differently.

“Father”, “Son”, “Holy Ghost” - all three are essential.

** OK, the “I am, God is” thing, I haven’t worked out an explanation for that one. I’ll keep thinking about it, if anyone’s interested.

159

Fessie Everything you said was great, particularly the part about teaching children. I have just had my first so I am paying far more attention to such things than in that past. It’s quite interesting how you are supposed to imprint upon them a legacy and then teach them how to undo it.

I was with you every step of the way until:

People blew up planes because they wanted a foreign occupier to stop propping up a totalitarian government that they disapproved of. I think the faith of the 9/11 hijackers is categorically different from the person who just wants to plug up and not hear you. There were real and discernable political grievances at play there. Certainly their faith in a reward in paradise helped supply the nerve to do it, and their faith helped define their cultural identity, but it wasn’t mere blind faith alone that caused them to do what they did. Japanese pilots crashed their planes into ships also without a faith in God as a motivating factor. While faith in God is the most important aspect to the Islamist movement, their tactical decisions are demonstrably sound and rational.

That being said, I wouldn’t put the Islamists on the same playing field as the completely irrational faith that does nothing except defend itself by keeping itself ignorant of other possibilities. All of the 9/11 hijackers were highly educated in both their religion, the skills of their trade, and our culture. They chose a warrior’s death fighting for ‘their’ people. I do not see a lack of faith in the Islamist movement in the same way I do in a bullheaded evangelical or a babbling hippy. Yes, it occurs, frequently even, but I don’t think it’s an accurate blanket statement. I think taking your faith to the extreme where you will martyr yourself for it shows a very strong faith.

The discussion so far has been around the engagement of ideas. The War on Terror is not simply about ideas, the political dimension changes the scope from where we’ve focused so far. We’ve thus far been talking about faith in ideas, not faith in acts.

If we were to start examining that faith we’d have to do a compare and contrast between two opposing faiths. The faith in Islamism vs the faith in Liberal Secularism. They are fighting us because they don’t want 7 year old hoochie-mommas in training shopping at the Bratz store in Riyadh. We are fighting because we think that a global capitalist system with democratically elected governments will bring about a peaceful and unified global economy. Throughout western philosophy there is an undercurrent of creative destruction levelled at traditional societies. They rightly believe that if our system permeates their culture, their culture will be destroyed. The Western system is riddled with the corpses of traditional cultures that have been assimilated into it from the Celts in Roman times to the Japanese more recently.

However, to keep this on topic. This does point out an application of faith that many of the people taking the con side of the argument engage in. That is the faith in sociocultural systems.

160

Ah, but that’s the beauty of this concept. This is only MHO of course as I work out the details, it can be provisional and it has not been only because of what I previously mentioned. We have allowed our definition of faith to be determined by others who exercise something else altogether. Perhaps we have neglected to consider the possibilities because we’ve just accepted what has become the norm to our own detriment.

In a secular example, the Wright brothers, based on the best information they had available to them, believed they could build a flying machine, even though no one had been able to do it before. They had to be sure of what they hoped for and certain of things not seen, namely , that it could be done and that they could do it. In order to do this they experimented and used the scientific principles available to them. even though they had failures they still processed the new information and retained their faith that it could be done. The new information didn’t say with any certainty that it couldn’t be done so their faith remained even though they had to process the new information to succeed. If they had given up at some point too discouraged to continue we might say they had lost their faith.
In that case someone else might have picked up where they left off using the new information they had gathered, and continued on with faith.

In a religious or spiritual example, it is faith to believe God is. We can go a lifetime with this belief because it is a viable conclusion dealing with the best information we have so far. There is no God is also a viable conclusion so belief or non belief depends on the person, their personal experience and input and using the best information they have so far. That varies from individual to individual.

Let’s conflate the two examples. If the Wright brothers had quit and decided , based on our failures and the fact that nobody has ever done this we conclude that it’s an interesting idea but it really can’t be done. Would they have been reasonable to reach that conclusion. I think so based on the best information available to them.
Here’s a question for a select few dopers.Should non belief in the possibility have been the default?
Thank God it wasn’t huh? :smiley:
In order to progress they had to go forward with their faith that it could be done, that* they* could do it and that it was worthy of doing.
Doesn’t that fit the definition of Hebrews 11:1?

However, if they had ignored their failed experiments and the new data and continued to try the same failed techniques over and over insisting not only that flying was possible but that it had to be done in a specific way {that evidence showed was wrong} we wouldn’t call that faith anymore would we? we’d be scratching our heads and thinking 'What the fuck is that all about?"

Yet in religion, when that same thing occurs we still see it as faith and then claim that it is faith itself that is the big mistake, a major flaw, the enemy of truth.

Let’s take your example. A few hundred years ago the belief that God created the earth and it’s only 6000 years old might have been viable based on the best information we had. Unnecessary, but viable because we didn’t have the tools to know better. Once the data showed that wasn’t likely and then to the point of near impossibility, do we call it faith for people to cling to that concept? Well, unfortunately we do but I don’t think we should, anymore than we would my previous example of the Wright brothers clinging to bad info.

The sureness of things hoped for and certainty of things unseen exists within the moment using what we have. We move forward in faith, but part of that faith is that as we move forward we will gain more info and our faith will evolve the same way new data helped the Wright brothers.

We didn’t physically see creation but I think “things unseen” must be interpreted as not just literal visual data but including what we see in our hearts and minds as we move forward. New information , new experiences, both subjective and objective are taken into consideration and processed. To deny them is not faith but just a stubborn emotional attachment to something that hinders human progress.

As a believer I’ll try to not let the term faith be hijacked in that manner any longer, by anybody. It may have become an accepted definition but I think it stands in the way of the essential faith we need to move forward.