Hi MarkD: I don’t think I have any faith commitments (most certainly none supernatural), but perhaps I’m missing a subtlty of your term.
Hi Shawn: I’m not sure there should be gradients of faith. Faith is a belief without evidence. I’m with you about the damage done to our world; the first casualty is reason.
Back to my original point and lifelong concern. Why believe something without evidence? And worse, why believe something with no possibility of the existence of evidence? Like “spirit bodies”.
This is why I think you see a conflict with faith and reason. You define faith as a belief without evidence. However, this could not be further from the truth. Take for example the Christian belief that we will be resurrected and given new bodies in the future. Why do we have faith in this? Because Jesus was resurrected. It is reasonable to put our faith in a future resurrection because Jesus himself was resurrected, and showed evidence of this. He presented himself to the disciples after his resurrection, thus providing evidence of his resurrection. Never at any point did Jesus claim that the disciples must believe in the resurrection without evidence, or reason, but only blind faith. Rather, he provided evidence of his resurrection. To sum up my position, faith is putting trust in something God has claimed because of reason and evidence.
Yes, there are gradients in faith, and that is what Einstein was talking about. His experience in studying nature supports his faith that God’s creation is noble, and logical. Blind faith in manmade doctrine is not based in this experience nor in reason. This goes counter to 1 John 4 where we are told to test the spirit of truth, not accept pit blindly.
That brings us back to my previous observation that there are many different standards of evidence. Science requires objective evidence founded on demonstrability, the courtroom another, sales and politics another. This is because demonstrability is applicable to very few things in life - particularly over things which you can control. Thus restricting yourself to this alone is not only outright impossible but also implies some degree of addiction to being in control. So for most of life we must use standards of evidence which are considerably weaker than what is demanded by science. And this is not just a matter of going with our best guess, because another factor playing into this is the fact that while science requires objective observation where what you want doesn’t matter, life requires subjective participation where what you want is central.
The reasonable compromise is thus to recognize the line and know when your decisions are subjective and do not pretend otherwise. And then you acknowledge the superior epistemological status of conclusions which are founded upon objective evidence. For religions this means that in order to be reasonable they must accept the correction of demonstrable scientific findings.
As for the question, why believe? Well people have a great many different reasons. Here are mine.
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Hi Thanos: there is no scientifically acceptable evidence that Jesus was resurrected. There are biblical accounts, but they cannot be accepted as evidence. People don’t live after death, that’s a reasonable definition of death. Ask my my mother who died in 2005 (ha ha, of course you can’t! [and BTW, my mother would get a kick out of this discussion])!
Mitchell: I have a hard time keeping up with you, certainly my own failing. But I like following the way you think (and thanks for the link to your five beliefs), but I may need to some chew time before I get back to you!
I am not well read enough to know; did Einstien consider himself a theist?
Not in the more restrictive sense of the word. He stated very clearly that He did not believe in a personal God. So while he might have spoken of God like this was a person, it is was only a way of speaking. It is pretty clear that the only god he really believed in, was essentially the laws of nature for these are what he saw governing the universe. I doubt he had a systematic way of thinking about such things for the focus of his mind was very much on the work of science rather than religion. Though he did deny being an atheist and said once that he believed in the pantheist god of Spinoza. So he didn’t see religion as being without any value at all, but the following quote of him is particularly enlightening: “science without religion is lame , religion without science is blind.” Religious people often quote this backwards showing the fundamental difference in his thinking from theirs. For him, science not religion is the means of sight and knowing the truth, the role of religion in his thinking was more that of a motivator and link to action. For let us not forget that Einstein was not without criticism of science, for he saw and was even a part of the worst that it could do without a moral compass of some kind to guide the use of it.
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I would agree that there is no scientific evidence of the resurrection. However, I think asking for scientific evidence of a miracle doesn’t make sense simply because the scientific method assumes what one is studying has a natural cause. The scientific method can only take one so far. But analyzing the historical evidence of his resurrection, I believe, makes the resurrection much more likely than a natural explanation. However, that is not the topic so I won’t go into that now. My point is that nowhere in scripture does God want us to believe in something by “blind faith.” Rather, God on many occasions provided evidence to trust in him. Even today I think there is plenty of reasons to have faith.
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Evidence-based reason are based in faith:
- That it’s worthwhile to pursue knowledge.
- That evidence informs reason.
- That reason is trustworthy.
- That the universe can be reasonably understood.
- Etc.
None of these can actually be proven. We reach these conclusions, actually, no, we presume these presuppositions as a starting point via an intellectual leap.
But…but…but…faith is the opposite of any evidence based belief!
No, that’s an Enlightenment construct, a false dichotomy. “Faith” does not mean “blind belief.” It’s an informed intellectual leap.
So…in your pursuit of evidence-based reason (for which I applaud you), you are relying on foundational faith-based assumptions that you may have never questioned, but which you cannot prove nor for which you can provide evidence that is not circular.
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No, faith is an unprovable conclusion.
I cannot prove (to you, to myself, or to anyone else) that my wife loves me. But I have solid faith in both her love and…her faithfulness (the original words in the biblical language connote both “faith” and “faithful_ness_”). Of course, my faith in her and her love is both an intellectual leap (because it would be impossible to prove) and is based on years of evidence.
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Hi Thanos: I think first off, there is no need to suss out gradations of faith, as I mentioned to Shawn Murphy elsewhere. You’re either willing to accept a supernatural claim without proof or not.
That not withstanding, I think your claim about a miracle is confusing. A “miracle” is like any other phenomena, and should be addressed the same way - observe, question, hypothesis, test, measure, conclude.
To me “historical evidence” is no different than “evidence”.
Hi there fmiddel: As you might guess, I DON’T believe that evidence-based reason is based in faith. To your points:
That it’s worthwhile to pursue knowledge.
That’s a preference, not a statement of faith
That evidence informs reason.
I believe that
That reason is trustworthy.
I believe that
That the universe can be reasonably understood.
I believe that
But you say “none of these can actually be proven.” Seems to me that you could contruct a proof the “reason is trustworthy” though it would rely on reason (!!!)
As I read it, there is a super strong liklihood that your wife loves you. You could list a million ways in which she shows that. And you and I would conclude that she loves you. But COULD it be we are both wrong? yes. COULD it be that a vigin gave birth? no.
WRONG! A virgin not only can but HAS given birth. How? In vitro fertilization. I explained this to you before. It was inevitable that someone would try this eventually.
Ok, forget the virgin birth. Do you believe in ghosts and angels and demons?
I believe there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to reality. These things you speak of are definitely in that category along with a lot of other creatures of folk myths around the world. Therefore, although I have never had any experience to make such things real to me, I have no reason to doubt that others might have. I am, however, definitely biased against the possibility of there being any scientific evidence for any of them.
Theologically, angels make sense, so I am willing to credit that they do exist. But they are not real to me having no part of my actual experience of reality.
Well, that’s exactly it. Any proof would be entirely circular. All the things you acknowledge that you “believe” are expressions of…faith.