Religious faith is a concept that has been defined in various ways, from trust to the biblical definition found in Hebrews:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
The elusive nature of its definition makes it unclear as to what religious faith truly is. Can anyone shed some light on its true nature? Furthermore, according to the bible, why should it be considered better evidence than things that can be seen?
Faith isn’t just a religious term, you can also have faith about secular things, like the justice system or an ideology.
This article does a decent job explaining religious faith. Basically, it claims faith is made up of three parts:
The sum of that is faith.
Just as an illusionist misdirects, so should we be careful about trusting what we see.
Think of it like the theory of relativity. Einstein didn’t just make it up, he developed it as an explanation for observed phenomena and prior work. He followed essentially the steps above, he gathered evidence (knowledge), distilled that evidence through reason (assent), developed a theory to explain it, and tested the theory through experiments (trust).
So for me and probably most other religious people, faith is the religious analogue to the scientific method. But instead of limiting ourselves to secular explanations, religious faith is based on religious explanations for phenomena, and it can be tested in a similar way as a scientific hypothesis.
This is where I’d say no. Faith is in no way an analog to the scientific method as faith can not only lead you to a correct answer but it can also lead you to an incorrect one just as easily. The scientific method doesn’t do that.
As to your Einstein illustration, he gathered evidence THAT WAS SEEN NOT UNSEEN, and tested his theory NOT TRUSTED IT.
The scientific method leads to incorrect answers all the time. Sometimes your data is poisoned, other times your random sample isn’t truly random, etc. Your model can hold up given your observations, but you can’t know what you haven’t observed.
And that’s where faith comes in. The more evidence you have supporting a theory, the more you trust it, and the more you’ll scrutinize any competing theories. If I presented an alternative to the theory of relativity, scientists would rightly scrutinize it because Einstein’s theory is so well established.
The problem with any kind of faith, be it religious or secular, is trusting it in spite of evidence to the contrary. It’s fine to scrutinize alternative explanations, it’s not okay to reject them altogether. A lot of religious people do the latter, such as rejecting evolution in favor of intelligent design, when there’s absolutely space for both to coexist (i.e. maybe God used evolutionary processes and “day” in Genesis was a long period of time, not a literal 24h window). But a lot don’t, and there are plenty of religious people actively involved in the sciences who have to adjust their religious views as new scientific evidence corrects some assumptions.
If your faith is edged out by evidence, you need to reevaluate your faith, taking in the new knowledge, assessing how much you trust it compared to other evidence, and then testing it to gain trust in that faith. It’s the same idea as the scientific method, but with things that cannot be seen. Unfortunately, a lot of people (secular and religious) exercise “blind faith” in their pastor, college professor, or some other influencer. That’s unreasonable, regardless of the type of faith.
So faith is intended to be the religious equivalent of a scientific theory, something refined and tested as new evidence comes out, not some hard and fast truth that must push against competition.
You are missing one HUGE difference between scientific theory and faith. That is falsifiability. Scientific theories are useless, they are not scientific, if they can’t be falsified. Faith can’t be falsified and is in no way any equivalent to a scientific theory. Of course, you are entitled to believe faith is whatever you want it to be including the equivalent of a scientific theory, but you are wrong in this case.
As far as religious people in the sciences go, some adjust their views along with the evidence and often do not end up too religious much longer. Then there are those like Kurt Wise.
Not necessarily. Faith is in something, and many of those somethings are falsifiable.
For example, young earth creationism (since you brought up Kurt Wise) is falsifiable with the abundance of evidence we have on the subject. The proper response here is to take the creation story as either more abstract (“days” are instead some creative period) or a metaphor (e.g. God’s ways are orderly).
Another more general belief is that the Bible is infallible, despite there being a ton of consistency issues, both within the text and between the current translations and the “original” (at least older) source material. Anyone who has done any form of serious study of the history if Bible should know there’s not a good reason to believe the current Bible is anything other than a cherry picked group of books written by normal people, so the value is in the message, not specific passages (biblical literalism is particularly silly imo).
Both of those are pretty core, falsifiable aspects of faith. The problem here isn’t faith, which should be based on all available evidence, but “blind faith,” which isn’t faith at all, but a form of brainwashing.
Faith covers the things science cannot, and should be replaced by good science where available.
Sure, that does happen, and so does the reverse. It seems the trend lately is less religiousity, at least in Western cultures, but that’s not true everywhere.
Yes, but faith in and of itself is not falsifiable. If it is. It simply isn’t religious faith as per the biblical definition in Hebrews 11:1.
Young Earth creationism is falsifiable but it isn’t a faith. Kurt Wise still believes in YEC despite the evidence as that is what his faith in the bible tells him DESPITE EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY. That is even what famous Christian apologist William Lane Craig says, I’ll paraphrase, where evidence contradicts biblical faith, faith wins out.
I do agree that blind faith is a form of brainwashing and I will say you are so close but I think you are missing the point. Faith does not cover the things science does not. That is a ridiculous statement. What science doesn’t answer is simply unknown (NOT UNKNOWABLE), nothing, not even faith can answer it until science does. Yes, you can take a leap of “faith” and guess what the answer may be but you can be wrong as well as you may be right. The scientific method will eventually end that dilemma. Faith is not nor has it ever been a way to truth since an answer derived from religious faith can be easily correct or incorrect. To equate it with the scientific method is some Deepak Chopra-level bullshit.
I guess we have a different definition of faith. Faith has multiple definitions:
I’m referring mostly to 2a (and to an extent 2b1), not 3. 2b2 is an issue with fanatics, as in the type of people that commit terrorist attacks in the name of religion, even if those attacks by their very nature go against their religion, but justified because the target is threatening their religion.
I guess that’s where Mr. Craig and I disagree. If the quality of the evidence is high, then faith should be adjusted to account for the evidence. In almost every case, the religious doctrine could be reinterpreted taking the new evidence into account, such as creation not necessarily being 7 literal days, but 7 creative periods (and other cases where the same term is used should probably also be reinterpreted). Religious doctrine is often vague enough WRT overlap w/ science that it’s rarely an issue (i.e. can’t really disprove the existence of God).
If you take the position that faith wins out, you’re opening yourself up to brainwashing. If faith and evidence contradicts, that’s a time to carefully look at both.
I disagree with that. For example, is murder okay? Science can’t decide that, because morality is outside its purview, but it is absolutely in the realm of religion and philosophy. In fact, I take religion to be a form of philosophy that appeals to a higher power instead of man’s reason, and a lot of philosophies look a lot like religion.
Faith, imo, is merely your dedication to whatever philosophy you think explains the world best. Sometimes that’s religious, and sometimes it’s secular, it just depends on the person.
If we go on the assumption that there exists a higher power and that higher power communicates with people in some way, then it’s not just a guess, but an alleged message from the divine. That’s what scripture is, and usually the overlap is limited to where we come from (i.e. creation stories), why we’re here (morality, but sometimes touches on science), and where we’re going (eternal punishment/reward). That’s a pretty limited cross-section, and usually religion and science can peacefully coexist.
If we reject that assumption, then the whole idea of religion makes no sense and we’re better off sticking to secular philosophies.
Whether a higher power exists is, AFAICT, unknowable, but the implications of that can be tested. For example, if this religion promises that if I do X I’ll get Y, then I can do X for some period and see if I get Y. Most religions make some kind of promise like that.
The question is about religious faith and the elusive nature of its definition. As if to prove my point you post a dictionary definition of faith that isn’t limited to religious faith. You claim that non-religious people have faith. That isn’t true. Non-religious people have trust, and if you want to define non-religious faith as trust that is fine but there is already a word that fits perfectly and that is TRUST. so why muddy things up with religious mumbo jumbo?
You Have that backwards. God can’t be 100% disproven but that isn’t the point. god hasn’t been proven to exist and until it has it isn’t reasonable to believe in one. but like you say we go on an assumption and you know what happens when we assume.
And what is wrong with that?
And whenever a test was made, they have always failed. For example, look at the double-blind experiment into The Efficacy Of Prayer that was done in 2006.
Faith is trust in something that cannot be seen, and it’s based largely on spiritual experiences, not tangible evidence. It can be tested like trust can, but the proof is often spiritual experiences more than documentable, verifiable evidence.
But faith shouldn’t be based purely on these spiritual experiences, but also include reason and empirical evidence. So faith fills the gaps in our empirical evidence. If you don’t believe in the divine, that’s replaced by educated guesses and intuition, and the religious person would say that intuition is the guiding force of the divine.
That’s certainly one perspective. I personally think it’s faulty, but I’m not really interested in getting into a debate on the plausibility of the divine, my intention here was to discuss the original topic about what faith is.
You can absolutely choose to live with the assumption that God doesn’t exist, but you’ll need to fill that void (the things science can’t empirically test) with something else, likely with a healthy dose of “intuition.” Secular humanism is a partial replacement, at least for morality and meaning.
I think secular humanism, like any secular philosophy or set of philosophies, can and should be used by religious people to help establish the boundaries of their faith and what is and isn’t knowable through science. As a religious person, I believe morality is derived from our divine nature (i.e. we’re all God’s creations and should be treated as equals), and that rules out some secular philosophies (i.e. Objectivism) which I find to be natural conclusions when eliminating the divine from the equation.
Faith can be tested on an individual level, but that article smacks of testing God, which goes against biblical doctrine (see Matthew 4:7).
A good scientific study is a double blind study, and the study claims to be testing patients, when they’re actually testing God. If God is all-knowing, God would certainly be aware of the study, thus breaking the double blind nature of the study.
And that’s the problem with testing God, and why any form of test should be on an individual basis for their own personal relationship with God (that individual test is consistent with the Bible). And that’s also why reason and empirical evidence are so important, to help separate what is likely from God from nonsense.