> “faith” in the context of religion means to “believe absent evidence”.
I'm pretty sure this definition comes from atheists. I think it's a strawman. I don't know any religious person who thinks they believe without any evidence.
I'm pretty sure this definition comes from atheists. I think it's a strawman. I don't know any religious person who thinks they believe without any evidence.
The person of faith believes evidence in the form of 1st person subjective experience is sufficient to justify their beliefs.
The person of science believes evidence must meet a fundamentally different set of criteria.
There are two different language games being played, with each player insisting their ruleset is the right one.
Faith in the ultimate analysis has existence independent of evidence.
> The person of science believes evidence must meet a fundamentally different set of criteria.
Ironically, these two claims are themselves are both faith based, necessarily - those who make such claims do not have access to the fact of the matter on either of these (because it is not possible to attain), thus the mind injects predictions (based on its training) into the individual's stream stream of "reality", and the individual falls for it (as their culture has taught them to).
Science even teaches this stuff, which makes the whole thing even more hilarious.
The Rationalist community (SSC, LessWrong) has an excellent approach to it (too bad they also forget their scriptures): ~"we are not rationalists, we are aspiring rationalists".
Meanwhile: how many innocent Humans died around the world today while us super smart Westerners are living it up in a state of unrealized delusion and unearned decadence?
“Well that’s where you have to have faith”
You are not actually omniscient, it only seems like you are, and you have faith in your perception (as you have been taught to by the ideology you were raised in).
I sent an observation that is consistent even among some of the most stringent bible believing people.
A possible remedy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
They key flaw in your model of reality (or in your ideology's terminology: reality) is the inconsistency between "always" and "some".
That’s not even counting the types of “evidence”. Like “ nature is beautiful” and “bananas fit in your hand and angle toward your mouth”.
And then the chapter goes on to give examples of people who had faith—none of which did what they did or believed the way they do because of anything describable as what would count as evidence in science, or a court of law.
This is not to say that the faithful are irrational or even that they are wrong. The faithful have good reasons to believe as they do, but those reasons are not confirmed by evidence.
Why is this so important? Well, what do you do when all the evidence says you are doomed to fail? Or that there is no way out? Do you give up? Or does your hope, as Hebrews says, consist of things not seen?
If the faithful insist that their faith is confirmed like any other belief is confirmed, they will miss the whole point of faith, and when the time comes that they need that kind of faith, they find they don’t have it.
Abraham is in that list, and is elsewhere described as the paragon of faith. Yet in Genesis 18/19 Abraham is said to have met and talked with God, and discussed the destruction of Sodom, which Abraham then witnessed immediately. Abraham's faith was not a belief in a God he had never seen.
Likewise Cain, Abel and Noah are in the Hebrews 11 list but Genesis says they spoke with God before they exercised their faith.
In Hebrews 11 the "things unseen" are elaborated as the creation of the universe and the future fulfillment of God's promises (almost entirely the latter). They're unseen not because there is no evidence for them, but simply because the faithful people did not live to see them fulfilled.
"Faith is belief without evidence" is a trope widely believed by Christians and atheists, but that's not the faith being promoted in Hebrews.
Yes, and one of the things Abraham did was take his kid out for a human sacrifice--because he saw god in a dream.
Its one thing if you and I were talking with God, while a bunch of guys in lab coats were doing experiments trying to verify whether it was God or just some kind of magic trick.
But there's no sense of the word "evidence" in which a dream is evidence that God wants you to kill your kids.
> things unseen
i.e. things we do not gain knowledge about through our sensory organs, i.e. not empirical evidence. Hebrews is rather poetic, at least in my favorite English translations, but I don't think it could be any clearer that faith doesn't come from sensory experience in the way empirical evidence does.
> but that's not the faith being promoted in Hebrews.
People wonder why I care so much about what Hebrews says about faith, given that I'm an atheist. The reason is this: if you think faith is the same thing as evidence, then sooner or later, when you really need a good reason to ignore all the evidence which makes you feel like you are doomed, you will need the kind of faith which gives you things to hope for, even though the answers are as yet unseen. When (not if, this eventually happens to everybody) that happens, I hope you find you have the right kind of faith too see you through.
It's true that the people discussed in Hebrews 11 were said to have met and spoken with God. But, unless I'm missing something, the chapter still seems to say that present-day believers must have faith in a God they've never seen; verse 6 says that anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists, which to me implies that they haven't met him as the early believers did. So this still seems to require some kind of leap of faith, beyond the evidence available to us today. I'll leave it at that, since we clearly disagree.
A person could have a well-founded belief in God without seeing him as Abraham did. What if someone in the early church had seen apostolic miracles and talked to an eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus? Would it still be a "leap of faith" for them to believe in God and his promises? I would say not. So I don't think verse 6 "requires some kind of leap of faith" in the sense you're using it.
I think such a person would still need faith, per verse 6, to put their justified belief into action in critical moments, e.g. at a moment when they're facing persecution for following Jesus.
Now, how much of a "leap of faith" is required given the evidence really available to believers then and now... that's the big question about which we presumably disagree.
If you saw somebody walking around healing people, and he claimed that all known religions were false, and you should start worshiping this new god, would you do it?
Or would you just think this has to be some kind of magic trick/scam?
Here is the difference for me: A teacher has two students, and she firmly believes they both can succeed in her class, and in life.
1. The first student has a history of getting good grades, has engaged parents, secure home, etc. The teacher takes this as EVIDENCE that the student will succeed.
2. The second student has always gotten very bad grades. He gets in trouble a lot. His parents are disengaged and have trouble keeping food on the table. Nevertheless, the teacher has an unshakable belief that this student can succeed. In complete contradiction to every piece of objective evidence. Because she has FAITH in the kid.
There is a huge difference between those two ways of coming to a belief. This difference should not just be glossed over. Both kinds of ways of coming to believe are essential to human existence.
Sometimes, the apropos thing to do is throw out all the evidence. Sometimes the most rational thing to do is have the courage to keep going by faith.
I get from that that faith is where your confidence in the logical conclusions of your belief gives you impetus to turn your hope into action.
Faith isn't to do with why you believe, its to do with what you do with that belief, and the separate question of why you believe of course involves evidence.
No, that is simply what follows from having faith as is demanded of adherents. Faith in itself does not mean that. Faith is to fully believe by choice, and if one does, then it necessitates that they do what is demanded of followers.
This is a constant thing we see among religion argument.
I do agree with you that “faith” is often defined in this way, but it is absolutely not the definition we are discussing.
Well yeah, because it's in the Bible that way, and a lot of the people you're talking about are Christian.
It's fine for people to have different definitions of things as long as they agree when arguing. But just as I'm not talking about your definition of faith when you say 'faith', you're not talking about my definition of 'faith' when you say 'faith'.
If you want to talk about 'belief absent evidence', I agree that's a bad thing, so there's probably no argument there. Furthermore, I think the vast majority of religious people think they do have evidence for their belief and don't agree that they have 'belief absent evidence'.
Perhaps they're using the word wrong, but that's not a real area of disagreement.
That is what faith is by definition. You can't redefine the term, whether you have faith or not.
Subjective experience is not empirical evidence i.e. evidence, colloquially used. Even on the individual level there's a willful interpretation involved. They might play the semantic game of calling it evidence, but it isn't.