Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option
Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:32 am
So the title may have just a little bit of clickbait in it, but the statement is generally true. Hear me out.
At a very basic level, faith is a word that signifies trust in God or trust in religious leaders. The secular version of the word is even more general. It just means strong trust in someone or something (e.g. I have faith in the banking system).
When I get on an airplane, I don't demand to see the oil pressure gauge or carefully look over the safety checklist. I trust someone else has done that. When I get on the internet, I do check to make sure my news feed comes from a trustworthy site. When I read a scientific paper, I usually don't repeat the experiment to check their work. I trust someone else will do that. I do, however, repeat their experiment when it is related to my current research and it challenges my previous results.
You see, we all have faith or trust in things. Life is just too short and our brains are too tiny to know everything before we do something with our lives. We have to trust in someone and move forward with the information we have. This can be true in both secular and religious realms.
Why is this important in a forum like this? I sometimes hear people give a terrible definition of faith. This definition goes something like this: faith is believing in something while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Yes, many of my fellow religionists follow this sort of definition, but it doesn't make it any less wrong.
When I was struggling with my faith a couple decades ago, my problem was that I had a problematic definition of faith. How could I believe in the church now that I knew all this difficult information? It just happened to be that I was taking my first graduate-level quantum physics class at the same time. I found myself asking the same questions of quantum physics. I know church doctrine and policy is not the same as quantum physics, but there were enough similarities to lead me to the epiphany that faith and trust have to be siblings. In both cases, I found myself able to trust in something that just didn't make complete sense to me at the time.
I'm curious what your thoughts are, especially considering this concept is one of the main reasons I kept my testimony during my own struggles with faith.
At a very basic level, faith is a word that signifies trust in God or trust in religious leaders. The secular version of the word is even more general. It just means strong trust in someone or something (e.g. I have faith in the banking system).
When I get on an airplane, I don't demand to see the oil pressure gauge or carefully look over the safety checklist. I trust someone else has done that. When I get on the internet, I do check to make sure my news feed comes from a trustworthy site. When I read a scientific paper, I usually don't repeat the experiment to check their work. I trust someone else will do that. I do, however, repeat their experiment when it is related to my current research and it challenges my previous results.
You see, we all have faith or trust in things. Life is just too short and our brains are too tiny to know everything before we do something with our lives. We have to trust in someone and move forward with the information we have. This can be true in both secular and religious realms.
Why is this important in a forum like this? I sometimes hear people give a terrible definition of faith. This definition goes something like this: faith is believing in something while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Yes, many of my fellow religionists follow this sort of definition, but it doesn't make it any less wrong.
When I was struggling with my faith a couple decades ago, my problem was that I had a problematic definition of faith. How could I believe in the church now that I knew all this difficult information? It just happened to be that I was taking my first graduate-level quantum physics class at the same time. I found myself asking the same questions of quantum physics. I know church doctrine and policy is not the same as quantum physics, but there were enough similarities to lead me to the epiphany that faith and trust have to be siblings. In both cases, I found myself able to trust in something that just didn't make complete sense to me at the time.
I'm curious what your thoughts are, especially considering this concept is one of the main reasons I kept my testimony during my own struggles with faith.