Faith

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For other uses, see Faith (disambiguation).

Faith is a belief in the trustworthiness of an idea that one has not proven formally or cannot prove formally. Formal usage of the word "faith" is largely reserved for concepts of religion, where it almost universally refers to a trusting belief in a transcendent reality (therefore spirituality and spiritual immortality), or else in a Supreme Being and their role as a guide for people moving into an experience of such reality.

Informal usage of the word "faith" can be quite broad, and may be used standardly in place of either as "trust," "belief," or "hope". For example, the word "faith" can refer to a religion itself or to religion in general. (For informal uses of the word "faith", see Faith (word)). As with "trust," faith involves a concept of future events or outcomes.

1 Epistemological validity of faith
- 1.1 Fideism and Pistisism
2 Faith as commitment
3 Criticisms of faith
4 See also
5 Notes
6 Further reading
7 External links

[edit] Epistemological validity of faith

There exists a wide spectrum of opinion with respect to the epistemological validity of faith. On one extreme is logical positivism, which denies the validity of any beliefs held by faith; on the other extreme is fideism, which holds that true belief can only arise from faith, because reason and evidence cannot lead to truth. Some foundationalists, such as St. Augustine of Hippo and Alvin Plantinga, hold that all of our beliefs rest ultimately on beliefs accepted by faith. Others, such as C. S. Lewis, hold that faith is merely the virtue by which we hold to our reasoned ideas, despite moods to the contrary.

[edit] Fideism and Pistisism

In Christian theology, fideism is any of several belief systems which hold, on various grounds, that reason is irrelevant to religious faith. According to some versions of fideism, reason is the antithesis of faith; according to others, faith is prior to or beyond reason, and therefore is unable to be proven or unproven by it.

The word is also occasionally used to refer to the Protestant belief that Christians are saved by faith alone: for which see sola fide. This position is sometimes called solifidianism and sol Pistisism.

Many noted philosophers and theologians have espoused the idea that faith is the basis of all knowledge. One example is St. Augustine of Hippo. Known as one of his key contributions to philosophy, the idea of "faith seeking understanding" was set forth by St. Augustine in his statement "Crede, ut intelligas" ("Believe in order that you may understand"). This statement extends beyond the sphere of religion to encompass the totality of knowledge. In essence, faith must be present in order to know anything. In other words, one must assume, believe, or have faith in the credibility of a person, place, thing, or idea in order to have a basis for knowledge.

One illustration of this concept is in the development of knowledge in children. A child typically holds parental teaching as credible, in spite of the child's lack of sufficient research to establish such credibility empirically. That parental teaching, however fallible, becomes a foundation upon which future knowledge is built.^{[citation needed]} The child’s faith in his/her parents teaching is based on a belief in their credibility. Unless/until the child’s belief in their parents’ credibility is superseded by a stronger belief, the parental teaching will serve as a filter through which other teaching must be processed and/or evaluated. Following this line of reasoning, and assuming that children have finite or limited empirical knowledge at birth, it follows that faith is the fundamental basis of all knowledge one has. Even adults attribute the basis for some of their knowledge to so called "authorities" in a given field of study. This is true because one simply does not have the time or resources to evaluate all of his/her knowledge empirically and exhaustively. "Faith" is used instead.

However, a child's parents are not infallible. Some of what the child learns from them will be wrong, and some will be rejected. It is rational (albeit at a perhaps instinctive level) for the child to trust the parents in the absence of other sources of information, but it is also irrational to cling rigidly to everything one was originally taught in the face of countervailing evidence. Parental instruction may be the historical foundation of future knowledge, but that does not necessarily make it a structural foundation.

It is sometimes argued that even scientific knowledge is dependent on 'faith' - for example, faith that the researcher responsible for an empirical conclusion is competent, and honest. Indeed, distinguished chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi argued that scientific discovery begins with a scientist's faith that an unknown discovery is possible. Scientific discovery thus requires a passionate commitment to a result that is unknowable at the outset. Polanyi argued that the scientific method is not an objective method removed from man's passion. On the contrary, scientific progress depends primarily on the unique capability of free man to notice and investigate patterns and connections, and on the individual scientist's willingness to commit time and resources to such investigation, which usually must begin before the truth is known or the benefits of the discovery are imagined, let alone understood fully. It could then be argued that until one possesses all knowledge in totality, one will need faith in order to believe an understanding to be correct or incorrect in total affirmation.

Again, scientific faith is not dogmatic. While the scientist must make presuppositions in order to get the enterprise under way, almost everything (according to some thinkers, such as Quine, literally everything) is revisable and discardable. In conclusion faith is trust.

[edit] Faith as commitment

Sometimes, faith means a belief in a relationship with a deity. In this case, "faith" is used in the sense of "fidelity." For many Jews, the Hebrew Bible and Talmud depict a committed but contentious relationship between their God and the Children of Israel. For a lot of people, faith or the lack thereof, is an important part of their identity, for example a person who identifies himself or herself as a Muslim or a skeptic.

[edit] Criticisms of faith

A certain number of religious rationalists, as well as non-religious people, criticize implicit faith as being irrational, and see faith as ignorance of reality: a strong belief in something with no evidence. Bertrand Russell used to note that no one speaks of faith in the existence of such entities as gravity or electricity; rather, resorts to arguing faith occur only when evidence or logic fails. The issue is more than theoretical.^[1] People can agree on the reality of that which is evidential or reasonable, but what is based on faith is not usually communicable except by common inculcation, which makes faith a divider and thus a phenomenon commonly correlated to intolerance and warfare. In the rationalist view, belief should be restricted to what is directly supportable by logic or scientific evidence.^[2]

Defenders of faith say that belief in scientific evidence is itself based on faith — in positivism; yet they do not themselves defy reason by walking off cliffs out of faith in divine intervention. Others claim that faith is perfectly compatible with and does not necessarily contradict reason, "faith" meaning an assumed belief. Many Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that there is adequate historical evidence of their God's existence and interaction with human beings. As such, they may believe that there is no need for "faith" in God in the sense of belief against or despite evidence; rather, they hold that evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that their God probably exists or certainly exists.

No historical evidence has managed to convince the entirety of the community of historians that any one religion is true. For people in this category, "faith" in a God simply means "belief that one has knowledge of [any particular] God[s]". It is logically impossible - according to standard Aristotelian logic - that all these different religions with their mutually contradictory beliefs can simultaneously be objectively true. Therefore, most historians with religious beliefs hold others to be "false", or essentially wrong. This is a standard tenet of most religions as well, though there are exceptions. An example of this is some forms of Hinduism, which hold the view that the several different faiths are just aspects of the ultimate truth that the several religions have difficulty describing or understanding. They see the different religions as just different paths to the same goal. This does not explain away all logical contradictions between faiths but these traditions say that all seeming contradictions will be understood once a person has an experience of the Hindu concept of moksha.

Some religious believers – and many of their critics – often use the term "faith" as the affirmation of belief without an ongoing test of evidence. In this sense faith refers to belief beyond evidence or logical arguments, sometimes called "implicit faith." Another form of this kind of faith is fideism: one ought to believe that God exists, but one should not base that belief on any other beliefs; one should, instead, accept it without any reasons at all. "Faith" in this sense, belief for the sake of believing, is often associated with Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and some other existentialist religious thinkers.

Faith as Religious belief, has been advanced as being desirable, for example for emotional reasons or to regulate society, and this can be seen as ‘positive’ when it has 'benign’ effects. However, rationalists may become alarmed that faithful activists, perhaps with extreme beliefs, might not be amenable to argument or to negotiation over their behavior

Robert Todd Carroll, author of skeptic.com, argues that the word "faith" is usually used to refer to belief in a proposition that is not supported by a perceived majority of evidence. Since many beliefs are in propositions that are supported by a perceived majority of evidence, the claim that all beliefs/knowledge are based on faith is a misconception "or perhaps it is an intentional attempt at disinformation and obscurantism" made by religious apologists:^[3]

"There seems to be something profoundly deceptive and misleading about lumping together as acts of faith such things as belief in the Virgin birth and belief in the existence of an external world or in the principle of contradiction. Such a view trivializes religious faith by putting all non-empirical claims in the same category as religious faith. In fact, religious faith should be put in the same category as belief in superstitions, fairy tales, and delusions of all varieties."

but according to Michael Green (theologian) faith is:

"Self-commitment on the basis of evidence"

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

^ D. Rawlins, Atheism
^ Harris, Sam (2006). The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. The Free Press. ISBN 978-0-7432-6809-7.
^ Carroll, Robert T. faith (religious). skepdic.com. 2006. http://www.skepdic.com/faith.html (accessed February 20, 2007).

[edit] Further reading

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, W. W. Norton (2004), hardcover, 336 pages, ISBN 0-393-03515-8
Hein, David. "Faith and Doubt in Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond." Anglican Theological Review Winter2006, Vol. 88 Issue 1, p47-68.
Zarlengo, Michael. Pray Like This: God's Secret to Answered Prayer. Dallas, Texas: Michael Zarlengo Publishing, 2005.
D. Mark Parks, "Faith/Faithfulness" Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Eds. Chad Brand, Charles Draper, Archie England. Nashville: Holman Publishers, 2003.