Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

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malkie
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by malkie »

JohnW wrote:
Tue May 16, 2023 6:27 am
Gadianton wrote:
Tue May 16, 2023 4:48 am
Okay, I may have overkilled this, but didn't seem like I've been explaining myself very well.
Thanks, Gadianton. I feel like I understand much better, enough to say I think I agree with you on this concept. My own faith went from difficult and uncomfortable to something much more firm. I guess I feel like that deserves some of my loyalty in times when I don't see clearly. Maybe we just disagree on the level of loyalty the church deserves. That difference of opinion probably isn't surprising.
I can see that, John.

To me, it's a bit like what I mentioned in a previous comment (or, if I didn't mention it, I meant to :) )

Sometimes it seems like having problems makes it necessary to deliberately suspend disbelief, temporarily, in the hope (faith?) that when the period of suspension is over, everything is back to a stable state, and we can carry on at least as well as before, if not a little better for having had our faith tested. Religious faith, or faith in a person, or a system - all more or less the same.

Of course, things don't always work out for the best, but at least we tried, right?

I simply will not do that for religion any more - for me it is no longer worth the effort. For you, it seems that it still is.

Does this make sense to you?
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Physics Guy »

The word "faith" seems to mean a few different things. That bedevils discussion, and it may be tempting to focus on some nicely pinned-down authoritative definition, but I think this is just the inconvenient truth, that a range of different things all get the label "faith" pinned somewhere near them. The things themselves are probably more important than the label, whatever exactly they are, so I'd rather have a difficult but worthwhile discussion that tries to bring them all into focus and sort them out, than define a clearly winnable debate that doesn't actually matter to anyone.

So for instance I really like this identified nuance:
Gadianton wrote:
Tue May 16, 2023 4:48 am
The most fundamental kind of religious faith is belief in the miracle. Every holy book out there is rooted in some kind of miracle. That's basically what makes it a religion. When you first throw in to follow that charismatic leader, it's all about the mystery and wonders the leader will perform. Faith is belief that the UFO will appear; that this convincing leader can make that UFO appear. ... it's like putting your money on that pharmaceutical start-up that will 1000x if they can pull it off while the critics balk. So you sell all you have, you follow that prophet, and six month's later, all the crap he's talked up doesn't materialize. Well, in the interim, you've established a relationship with the leader and the group, and now the criteria of your faith shifts from belief in the miracle, to loyalty to the leader and group.
I think this is true. There's a phase or form or kind of faith that is all about making a bold leap with high hopes, and then there's this other phase or form or kind of faith that seems to be completely the opposite: stay in the boat and don't ask for too much. Both these things regularly do get called "faith", but when you look from this angle, it's hard to see why we'd ever even think them alike, let alone call them the same.

Even as I'm shaking my head at how opposite these two notions of faith seem to be, though, other things besides faith spring to mind that have the same kind of paradox. Romantic love is both giddy infatuation and steadfast faithfulness. Artistic creation is both ecstatic vision and dogged persistence; so is scientific discovery. Starting a business is staking all you have on a dream—and staying up late grinding details.

I think this kind of paradox, in which the same concept seems to embrace opposites, is probably typical for undertakings that humans can successfully pursue, but that take much longer than the natural human attention span, and are bigger than the natural screen size of the human imagination. These things that we do may be coherent processes in which everything connects, but we perceive them as blind people feeling different sides of an elephant. Sometimes they're one thing, and sometimes another.

If you do have hold of one of those too-big-to-see things—a marriage, a business, a novel—then I think you're going to have to have the analogs of both of Gadianton's kinds of faith. If you didn't have reckless optimism at the start, you wouldn't be doing it at all. If you don't have the persistent loyalty, you'll never go the distance. So your initial enthusiasm must partly have been confidence in your own persistence. And conversely part of your persistence is going to have to be the ability to keep rekindling the initial flame.

I think that's possible, anyway. For every real but multi-sided elephant there may be many chimeras—composite beasts that were never actually real. The instincts that let us launch and sustain long-term projects will also let us get sucked into illusions. Plenty of people persist in bad marriages, waste endless time on impossible novels, work their fingers raw trying to spin straw into gold.

When the glorious promise doesn't come true right away, we can settle down into persistence. That can be the awesome human superpower that lets us do wondrous things, or it can be the horrible human trap that confines us. Which it is, in each particular case, can be hard to discern.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Marcus »

I had a lot of thoughts about this, but i'm supposed to be packing for a weekend away, so I'll just summarize, but I'm really liking where this conversation is going!

We seem to have two parts of what people consider 'faith,' to use it as a placemark word.

There is a religious definition, with possible scriptural support, of
  • faith as a simpler belief in things unseen, unknown, miraculous (in the strict sense of supernatural impossibility, which I would define as events with a probability indistinguishable from zero), and what a religious leader may tell you to believe,


and into a human or over-arching definition, of
  • faith as a hope for future and therefore involves types of behaviors that are working toward, by definition unknown outcomes, but with probabilities that could be, but are not guaranteed to be, above 0.
To me, this sums up an approach to 'faith' that includes a belief in a higher power, using whatever term, but also includes 'faith' that does not require that higher power belief, for simplicity let's say atheistic.

And of course the caveat that humans are complicated and may exercise both, either, one then the other at various times, etc.

In this sense, I withdraw my objection to the use of secular as it seems we are going to use faith in a secular context after all--let's be a bit whimsical and call 'faith' our loan-shifted word. Or....tapir-ized?? (see r/horse on reddit.) in any case, it can be secular, as in not involving religious belief.

Have to run, but this is a great conversation.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

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Yeah, it feels like progress on the one hand to zoom in more closely and identify different forms or aspects of things within the evidently rather broad envelope of "faith", and on the other hand also to zoom out and see religious faith as one example of a broader subject.

There may be cases in which this broadening and nuancing tends to defend religious faith, by making it out to be an example of a general kind of thing that can be good, rather than a unique bad thing, or by saying that religious faith can potentially be this better kind of faith rather than that worse kind of faith. By looking at faith both more broadly and more specifically, though, I don't think we're just giving religion a free ride.

If religious faith is an example of a more general thing, then it should be able to justify itself in the same ways other faith-like behaviors do—it can't just claim to be a special case that can only be tried in its own special court. And if faith includes a number of diverse components that we can distinguish, then religious apologists can't bait-and-switch between them by calling them all "faith" and equivocating whenever convenient. Broadening the concept of faith and identifying distinct aspects within it may even allow a sharper critique of religious faith, by pinning down its problems more clearly.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Physics Guy wrote:
Fri May 19, 2023 11:35 am
And if faith includes a number of diverse components that we can distinguish, then religious apologists can't bait-and-switch between them by calling them all "faith" and equivocating whenever convenient. Broadening the concept of faith and identifying distinct aspects within it may even allow a sharper critique of religious faith, by pinning down its problems more clearly.
Pinning an apologist down to specific terms rather than broadening the term to make it more encompassing might be a better approach. For example, giving the word subdivisions:

Alpha-faith = miraculous faith

Beta-faith = trust in proven phenomenon

Gamma-faith = some other nuanced version of faith that’s contextual to the conversation

It’s at ^ point I’m fairly certain you’d lose the believer because they don’t want to speak with agreed-upon definitions, thus pinning themselves down to concrete ideological concepts. They want to think and speak within ambiguity because it’s self-serving.

It’s akin to the ‘god conversation’ we’ve had here on the board over and over again. Believers refuse to concretely define the god-concept being discussed because it doesn’t serve their narrative. They like the slipperiness of their ideas.

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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Physics Guy »

Maybe; but if clinging to slippery non-definitions can be a rhetorical dodge, it can be just as dishonest a dodge to insist, in the name of concreteness, on definitions of a kind that just won't capture the relevant concept. If someone wants to talk about bowls, they're not necessarily just being slippery if they refuse to specify whether it's a bowl of peas or a bowl of soup.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Physics Guy wrote:
Fri May 19, 2023 1:46 pm
Maybe; but if clinging to slippery non-definitions can be a rhetorical dodge, it can be just as dishonest a dodge to insist, in the name of concreteness, on definitions of a kind that just won't capture the relevant concept. If someone wants to talk about bowls, they're not necessarily just being slippery if they refuse to specify whether it's a bowl of peas or a bowl of soup.
Perhaps. If the bowls serve specific purposes then it helps to identify the proper function of the bowl in relation to the task. If we’re talking about a specific kind of faith that serves a purpose then I think it’s helpful to the philosophical questions presented to break out the different kinds of faith so we’re speaking clearly to one another - in my opinion it helps reduce miscommunication. Using “beta-faith” in question to the trust we employ when flying gives clarity makes sense, while applying “alpha-faith” doesn’t.

To me, it’s sort of like having the word ‘love’ to describe the wide variety of ‘love’ we experience. If we’re having a discussion about love it helps to know the specific kind of love we’re discussing and then using a word that accurately describes it.

- Doc
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Meadowchik »

I still like the definition of faith as belief in things unseen which are true. In an atheistic sense it can still work of course. And like the Book of Mormon faith we often don't find out until after the fact if it was actual faith or fantasy. And sometimes may never know. But it's more like hoping and putting forth effort to embrace truth even in uncertainty. It's a process.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Gadianton »

I've caught up on Physic's Guys, Marcus's, Doc Cam's, and Meadow's contributions (WB Meadow!), and I'm restraining myself from writing a volume in reply as I feel I've gone over my already generous word-count for this topic. Great insights all. Quickly: I do recognize PG that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and so like everything else, there's ultimately going to be at least some base-level justification for the religious idea.

Where we're going to need Ms. Jack, the Rev, or Symmachus, is in the ancient usage of the word. I have a relatively good sense of when I can get owned really fast, and so I'm dipping my toes in the water and offering this tid-bit I found:
The Internet wrote:The term pistis* “can be rightly translated as proof, argument, reasoning, persua- sion, belief, trust, faith, conviction, obligation, and confidence”.
Good luck!

(okay, my interpretation is the Bible version lands in territory of trust; Aristotle: the emphasis might be trust in an initial report (don't throw out the seed? as opposed to modern thinking in terms of probabilities (eh hum, Marcus) although, probabilities could be linked to trust in authority so who knows.)

*Greek word used in Bible translations
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JohnW
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by JohnW »

malkie wrote:
Wed May 17, 2023 3:23 am
JohnW wrote:
Tue May 16, 2023 6:27 am


Thanks, Gadianton. I feel like I understand much better, enough to say I think I agree with you on this concept. My own faith went from difficult and uncomfortable to something much more firm. I guess I feel like that deserves some of my loyalty in times when I don't see clearly. Maybe we just disagree on the level of loyalty the church deserves. That difference of opinion probably isn't surprising.
I can see that, John.

To me, it's a bit like what I mentioned in a previous comment (or, if I didn't mention it, I meant to :) )

Sometimes it seems like having problems makes it necessary to deliberately suspend disbelief, temporarily, in the hope (faith?) that when the period of suspension is over, everything is back to a stable state, and we can carry on at least as well as before, if not a little better for having had our faith tested. Religious faith, or faith in a person, or a system - all more or less the same.

Of course, things don't always work out for the best, but at least we tried, right?

I simply will not do that for religion any more - for me it is no longer worth the effort. For you, it seems that it still is.

Does this make sense to you?
Yeah, I like this. That would capture the idea that for people who have felt betrayed by God or their religion it is more difficult to build that trust again. I imagine that depending on a person's personality or life experiences, betrayal may be something they feel more readily. Some of my kids have no problem letting me know if they don't agree with something, almost to a fault. Others are extremely trusting, almost to a fault. I guess this is just one more thing that requires each person to find their own balance.
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