That's a good analysis for what it is, but I think the problem is "faith" is a slippery word that can mean what you said, or other things not very compatible with that.Physics Guy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 03, 2023 4:13 pmI don’t know why God might like faith, but humans often do reward other humans for taking risks rather than waiting for certainty. As long as the risk-reward ratio isn’t too foolhardy, we admire people who take even big risks. We give them medals, or trophies, or a lot more money than anyone ever gets for playing it safe.
I think we do have reasons for admiring and rewarding risk-taking. Some of those reasons probably don’t apply for God. I doubt God is grateful to anyone for being first in the water so that God isn’t the one to get bitten by a crocodile. But maybe some human reasons for rewarding risk are reasons for God to reward faith, as well.
The version of faith you're talking about is the Ayn Rand entrepreneur or the "Tiger Fund" Wall Street trader who works a 60 hours a week and then spends the weekend on a Safari in Africa. I think Joseph Smith was an entrepreneur at heart, and a slightly different context could have produced a wealthy business person. There's a fine line between entrepreneur and fraud.
But I think in discussions of faith with religious persons, this is the "b" version of faith that gets played as a rejoinder to criticisms of the "a" version. I think the "a" version is the stalwart without so much imagination or drive, but who stays the course and looks neither to the left nor to the right. "Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe" doesn't really conjure an image of ambition and overman life-loving. Kierkegaard decided that pressing forward in ambiguity is a particular mark of character aligned with religiosity. But then all subsequent existentialists seem to think his point stands independent of religiosity. I think I generally encounter the advocacy of faith in the context of "blind faith": staying true to your origins, if you were born into the Church, and switching to the Church on the freakiest whim, if you weren't born into the Church.
But then when challenged, and the absurdity of blind orthodoxy or blind acceptance is pointed out, the apologists trudges through the web of related ideas where ambiguity and the spirit of adventurism meet.