Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

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JohnW
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Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by JohnW »

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

Post by honorentheos »

JohnW wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:32 am
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.
Someone wiser than I once pointed out that, as a believer, they often saw their degree of certainty to bend to the extremes. It was rare to have mild opinions. And as they developed their views away from Mormonism they found far more of their views were held in the middle ranges of certainty. 3s and 4s, 7s and 8s vastly outnumbered to 2s and 9s, while the 1s and 10s practically didn't exist. There is a certain necessity of being able to act in a world where certainty is an illusion. But it's far healthier, in my opinion, to allow that to affect one's perspective on probability and ability to act with full acceptance additional evidence can and should shift the probabilities.

Faith is usually ridiculed when it says one should take the lower probability option rather than meaning one should only act when the probability is near 1.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by malkie »

Let's take just one of your non-religious examples:
JohnW wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:32 am
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.
Even among different airlines and aircraft manufacturers there is almost certainly a huge area of overlap in the contents of the checklists. But you would expect that each item has a pass/fail criterion associated with it, and a severity level of some sort. The checklist ensures that an imperfect aircraft (meaning probably almost every single one) is not allowed to be operated below a certain standard level of fitness.

Every checker for a given aircraft/airline uses fundamentally the same checklist, and measures the same levels - e.g., oil pressure. Although human error will inevitably occur, it is not very likely that an aircraft that is passed as fit by one checker will be grounded as hopelessly unfit by another. Except for airlines where proper maintenance and checking is not carried out, I should expect to feel as safe on a Boeing as on an Airbus, a Beechcraft, a Cesna, or even perhaps a Tupolev.

Should I feel equally confident in Christianity vs. Islam vs. Buddhism vs. Hinduism vs. Judaism? And can I trust Scientology as much as I would the major religions?

As we have seen, however, we don't even have to step outside the bounds of one specific sub of Christianity to have different standards applied ('Bishop roulette') and vastly different outcomes. Look at the 'Heartland vs. LGT' dispute, where faithful LDS are openly accusing other faithful LDS of being apostates, and sheep in wolves' clothing, and nobody, including leaders who arguably ought to be able to settle the dispute, seems to be concerned - let them insult each other, who cares? appears to be the attitude.

So I see having faith in the fitness of the aircraft I'm about to get on as fundamentally different, in this respect, from faith that I'm being invited to have in a religion.

What if I'm an investigator and I ask the missionaries where the Book of Mormon events took place, because I've heard about the dispute? What answer should I expect? And how should I feel about prophets who cannot give an unambiguous answer to an apparently straightforward question?

I'd also see QM as on a much higher level of reliability than aircraft maintenance, never mind religion.

I'm happy for you that your struggles were resolved. But that analogy would resolve nothing for me - in fact, it would highlight the vast difference between faith in a religion or a god, on one hand, with faith in a scientific theory on the other, to the extent that I could not use the analogy to help me maintain faith in a god/religion.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by drumdude »

All aboard the USS Mormonism. With enough faith, anything is possible. Nephi made it across the ocean in a handbuilt boat, this ship should be totally fine too.

Have faith.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Gadianton »

If faith is just moving forward against the problem of induction, then there is nothing special about it. Religious zealots should quit talking about being "blessed" for faith, since faith is mandatory to function. That's like being blessed for speaking a language or for walking on two feet.
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by Res Ipsa »

Gadianton wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 1:41 am
If faith is just moving forward against the problem of induction, then there is nothing special about it. Religious zealots should quit talking about being "blessed" for faith, since faith is mandatory to function. That's like being blessed for speaking a language or for walking on two feet.
Well said, Dean Robbers. I don't understand this self-defeating gambit. If religious faith is no different than evidence-based confidence, then it should not hold any sort of special place in society.
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JohnW
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by JohnW »

honorentheos wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:53 am
JohnW wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:32 am

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.
Someone wiser than I once pointed out that, as a believer, they often saw their degree of certainty to bend to the extremes. It was rare to have mild opinions. And as they developed their views away from Mormonism they found far more of their views were held in the middle ranges of certainty. 3s and 4s, 7s and 8s vastly outnumbered to 2s and 9s, while the 1s and 10s practically didn't exist. There is a certain necessity of being able to act in a world where certainty is an illusion. But it's far healthier, in my opinion, to allow that to affect one's perspective on probability and ability to act with full acceptance additional evidence can and should shift the probabilities.

Faith is usually ridiculed when it says one should take the lower probability option rather than meaning one should only act when the probability is near 1.
I think you are saying that we sometimes get stuck in binary view, where things are black or white. When we begin to see the complexity in life, we should adjust our belief or faith accordingly, meaning that faith and belief don't need a binary switch on or off as well. Is that what you are saying?
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by honorentheos »

JohnW wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 2:08 am
honorentheos wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:53 am


Someone wiser than I once pointed out that, as a believer, they often saw their degree of certainty to bend to the extremes. It was rare to have mild opinions. And as they developed their views away from Mormonism they found far more of their views were held in the middle ranges of certainty. 3s and 4s, 7s and 8s vastly outnumbered to 2s and 9s, while the 1s and 10s practically didn't exist. There is a certain necessity of being able to act in a world where certainty is an illusion. But it's far healthier, in my opinion, to allow that to affect one's perspective on probability and ability to act with full acceptance additional evidence can and should shift the probabilities.

Faith is usually ridiculed when it says one should take the lower probability option rather than meaning one should only act when the probability is near 1.
I think you are saying that we sometimes get stuck in binary view, where things are black or white. When we begin to see the complexity in life, we should adjust our belief or faith accordingly, meaning that faith and belief don't need a binary switch on or off as well. Is that what you are saying?
More that faith stands out from normal decision making when it insists a lower probability explanation should be preferred over a higher probability one based on the available evidence. Too often the effect of faith-based thinking is one tends to black and white thinking as the faith constant imbalances how one weighs probabilities.
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JohnW
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by JohnW »

malkie wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 1:21 am
Let's take just one of your non-religious examples:
JohnW wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:32 am
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.
Even among different airlines and aircraft manufacturers there is almost certainly a huge area of overlap in the contents of the checklists. But you would expect that each item has a pass/fail criterion associated with it, and a severity level of some sort. The checklist ensures that an imperfect aircraft (meaning probably almost every single one) is not allowed to be operated below a certain standard level of fitness.

Every checker for a given aircraft/airline uses fundamentally the same checklist, and measures the same levels - e.g., oil pressure. Although human error will inevitably occur, it is not very likely that an aircraft that is passed as fit by one checker will be grounded as hopelessly unfit by another. Except for airlines where proper maintenance and checking is not carried out, I should expect to feel as safe on a Boeing as on an Airbus, a Beechcraft, a Cesna, or even perhaps a Tupolev.

Should I feel equally confident in Christianity vs. Islam vs. Buddhism vs. Hinduism vs. Judaism? And can I trust Scientology as much as I would the major religions?

As we have seen, however, we don't even have to step outside the bounds of one specific sub of Christianity to have different standards applied ('Bishop roulette') and vastly different outcomes. Look at the 'Heartland vs. LGT' dispute, where faithful LDS are openly accusing other faithful LDS of being apostates, and sheep in wolves' clothing, and nobody, including leaders who arguably ought to be able to settle the dispute, seems to be concerned - let them insult each other, who cares? appears to be the attitude.

So I see having faith in the fitness of the aircraft I'm about to get on as fundamentally different, in this respect, from faith that I'm being invited to have in a religion.

What if I'm an investigator and I ask the missionaries where the Book of Mormon events took place, because I've heard about the dispute? What answer should I expect? And how should I feel about prophets who cannot give an unambiguous answer to an apparently straightforward question?

I'd also see QM as on a much higher level of reliability than aircraft maintenance, never mind religion.

I'm happy for you that your struggles were resolved. But that analogy would resolve nothing for me - in fact, it would highlight the vast difference between faith in a religion or a god, on one hand, with faith in a scientific theory on the other, to the extent that I could not use the analogy to help me maintain faith in a god/religion.
Yes, the analogy isn't perfect. It's not like I found the analogy and, poof, I had faith again. It was just enough for me to keep trying, which eventually led to what I consider the real thing.

Having said that, let's push the analogy just a bit further to see exactly where it breaks. I don't think your description is entirely fair. You talk about aircraft safety using various aircraft terminology that shows you know much more about the topic than me. At that point you compare it to highly specific doctrine in religion. Wouldn't that compare more closely with highly specific things on the airplane, like seat back and tray table materials? Airplanes getting you somewhere safely is very different than specific doctrines. I would compare it with the general finding that religions tend to help people deal with the troubles of life. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of whether being a member of a religion (any religion) helps you better navigate life, but the fact that there are studies that argue both sides means it could possibly be a real thing. That is more like basic aircraft safety. Of course, Latter-day Saint Theology claims to have the fullness of the gospel, so I'm not helping my point there. But I wasn't exactly arguing that point here. I was just saying faith in God/Gods or religion/religions is similar to faith or trust in various other things.

If we place our faith in something worthwhile, it will be helpful to us. This is true of both secular and religious things. What each of us finds worthwhile may be different. That is also fine.
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JohnW
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Re: Everyone Has Faith; That is the Only Option

Post by JohnW »

drumdude wrote:
Mon Apr 24, 2023 1:34 am
All aboard the USS Mormonism. With enough faith, anything is possible. Nephi made it across the ocean in a handbuilt boat, this ship should be totally fine too.

Have faith.

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