Faith and theory

I think you lost me when you assumed "faith" ought to be a meaningful word with a coherent definition.

I think the best definition to give for faith is a practical one: faith is the word people use as a combination semantic stop-sign and applause light when asked why they believe in religion. If someone then goes all philosophical on them and asks them what exactly they mean, they then use whatever plausible explanation seems appropriate.

I've heard faith described as:

• exactly the same as inductive reasoning; thus, you have "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow.
• similar to the concept of credibility; the Bible's always been right before, so I imagine it will be right on this one issue here, even though I'm not exactly sure how.
• similar to the concept of trust: God is a good being, I'm sure He knows what He's doing.
• a direct meddling of the Holy Spirit in the internal workings of your brain, so that you are able to mystically come to the right answer about whether or not to believe in religion despite insufficient evidence.
• a decision to follow whatever idea seems intuitively true or most pleasant, and to give evidence less weight than these intuitions
• a decision to believe something even though you have no reason for doing so; also the thing those people who ask the obvious followup question "but why did you choose to believe that for no reason, as opposed to something else for no reason" should feel bad for not having.
• Not comprehensible to the limited human mind so don't talk about it

I don't think any of these definitions are "the correct definition"; I just think they're different ways that people in different situations and with different degrees of philosophicalness cash out the idea of "I believe in religion and you can't tell me not to and I feel pretty good about it"

As such, I don't believe there's a concept called "faith" which it is necessary to distinguish from theory in the first place.

I've been toying with a way of comparing theory and faith, but I'm not yet sure how well it works. Summary: Theory is to faith as our concept of physical necessitation is to that of social obligation.

We think of theory and faith as both imparting an obligation to believe. But the sense of "obligation" is different in each case. Theory borrows its sense of "obligation" from how we think about the natural world. Faith borrows its sense of "obligation" from how we think about the social world.

The sense of "obligation" in theory is that of natural necessity. We have an intuition that, in the natural world, forces act on things to necessitate changes in their states. (I'm talking about a primitive folk notion of "necessitate", here, not the determinism of Newtonian mechanics.) Analogously, we are obliged to believe a theory because the force of reason, like a natural force, pushes us to do so.

The sense of "obligation" in faith is that of duty, trust, and deference to those who deserve it. If someone deserves our trust, then it feels wrong, or insolent, or at least rude, to demand independent evidence for their claims. Certain kinds of social relations impose a duty on one party to act as though the word of the other party were beyond doubt. Faith is the duty that we owe to God to trust him, which duty we have in virtue of the fact that we are indebted to him for our existence. And this faith is rewarded, just as one would expect to be rewarded for showing due deference to one's social superiors.

Why is this important?

This is somewhat tangential to the post, for which I apologize, but it's in response to a number of different comments, so I figured I'd just respond to the post itself.

For my own part, I see no reason to treat the theological use of "faith" as something with sharp linguistic borders that separate it from other uses of the same word.

In the privacy of my own mind, I use "faith" to denote an emotional sense of confidence in a proposition, connotatively one that overcomes countervailing emotions.

For example, when I was recovering from my stroke, I experienced a lot of pain, anxiety, anger, fear, and depression. All of those things made it very difficult to actually engage in my therapy, take my medication, and do the other things that I needed to do in order to complete my recovery. And that motivational framework reinforced itself by adding weight to the prediction that I wasn't going to recover my full capabilities anyway. (After all, only ~10% of major stroke patients do, according to some sources.)

Something that helped was to explicitly invoke an emotional state that presumed I was going to recover, which made doing work towards my recovery feel much more like a worthwhile thing to do.

I have since then talked to a number of theists who went through similar experiences, and it seems pretty clear to me that the emotional state that I invoked is pretty much the same one they refer to as "faith."

In their case, it was explicitly "faith in God," though for many of them "God" didn't seem to mean much of anything in particular... it was more a parent node for everything they valued or endorsed. In my case, it was faith in my eventual recovery, without reference to God or any similar umbrella node.

But the common thread is an emotional state that exists with respect to a concept X, which increases the weight of X and, consequently, of behavioral impulses consistent with an expectation of X.

So I mostly consider epistemological discussions of faith -- both in the secular and the theological sense -- to be misguided. Faith isn't a belief, it isn't anything like a belief. It's a function that alters the motivational structure around my existing beliefs, just like fear and hope and love and hate and anger and other emotions are.

Of course, we have this cognitive habit of reifying the objects of our emotional functions. If I'm scared of X, there's a strong tendency to think and behave and talk as though X really exists, even in the absence of evidence, or in the face of counterevidence. Ditto if I love X, or hate X, or am angry at X, or have faith in X, or whatever.

And I accept that the epistemological model of faith in particular (though this is also true to a lesser extent for other emotions) has become pervasive at least in modern English usage, to the point where I pretty much cannot use the word without invoking an epistemological frame. That is, if I use the word "faith" in most communities I'm inviting a conversation about evidence and certainty, rather than a conversation about motivation and commitment, and I know that and act accordingly.

But I nevertheless consider it misguided.

I'm surprised to find people questioning the importance of the relation between faith and reason. It's the central issue in the debate between religion and rationality. Google faith vs. reason and start reading if you're unaware of this tradition.

So there's apparently no chance of having a knowably correct answer to what people 2000 years ago thought about faith and science.

And anyway, what would it change in our modern understanding if we knew what said dead guys thought?

Why does this post have only 5 up votes? This is an honest question. If you didn't up vote it, why not?

Faith: having an unprovable axiom in your belief system that simply states that everything will work out in the end.

What I like about this definition is that it separates all religion and almost all spirituality from the discussion of faith, leaving a small pearl that you can hold onto, knowing full well it's unprovable and not subject to reason.

A couple nitpicks: The author of the book of Hebrews is not known, and this book is not normally attributed to Paul even in Christian tradition.

Also, your second quote appears to be from the New Revised Standard Version, not the New International Version that you cite.

Interesting post. Not sure you said anything new, but this area has been worked over so thoroughly that it would be hard to find a truly novel interpretation.

Why is this so controversial?

It's pretty plain that when people say they believe in something they don't neccersarily see it before them or in the past - nobody bothers to say I believe in dogs, for example, but are super keen to say they believe in gods - which they probably haven't seen.

Wikipedia parses the meaning of belief into 2 categories. Not that categorisation can neccersarily be defended in any meaingful way until it because ''incorporated by obliteration '' into scientific literature.

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Commendatory - an expression of confidence in a person or entity, as in, “I believe in his ability to do the job.”
Existential claim - to claim belief in the existence of an entity or phenomenon with the implied need to justify its claim to existence. It is often used when the entity is not real, or its existence is in doubt. “He believes in witches and ghosts” or “many children believe in Santa Claus” or “I believe in a deity” are typical examples.[13]

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