Well put.

I thought that was induction?

Ummmm ... no. Unless I'm missing something, the biblical use of the word "faith" relies heavily on induction as the basis for belief. It repeatedly talks about the created world as an evidential basis for believing in both God and in a moral order. That appeal to reference the natural world would make no sense if the highest biblical value was to believe something was true in the total absence of evidence.

This "new" rational faith is at least as old as Descartes (Aquinas, even?). I realize it's more fun to go bashing fundamentalists (I'll join in, if you'd like) for upholding faith as something opposed to reason, but you'll find very few people to have a "meaningful" conversation with in that camp.

Do you really think it's meaningless to explore the relationship between critical thinking, radical skepticism, and faith?

You can't have faith and apply skepticism to it.

Dogma, sure, but not faith.

Faith is operating without need for verification or validation.

You hear the voice you do the deed.

In contemporary society we have dogmatic filters to apply to what people call faith nowadays, but it all had to start with some guy taking the voices in his head at face value.

Patient X as it were.

So the fact that "the world exists" is the logical basis for having faith in...what?

I like that.

Yep. I think that's the crux of my point. Faith adds action to conclusions arrived at by induction. It is acting as something is true, on the basis of incomplete (but reasonable) evidence for it being true.

On that definition, I think two things emerge:

1) We all engage in mundane acts of faith with regularity (sitting in a chair without checking the strength of the legs), and

2) Religious faith is not a different kind of faith than that which is engaged in by people at large, every day.

I think there are two aspects to religious faith that differentiate it from mundane acts of faith. First, religious people accept as evidence a wider range of data than religious skeptics. A religious person may accept their own internal state of spiritual awareness as confirming evidence, which is not a kind of evidence that a religious skeptic has access to, or has any good reason to allow into the conversation.

Second, the actions undertaken by religious people (acting as if their conclusions are true) are generally more sweeping, more radical, and more controversial than the mundane actions of faith undertaken by everyone. If I believe my chair can support my weight, and I sit down in my chair, my action is a very mundane act of faith, and nobody takes much notice of it. If I believe that God is real and that he/she hates materialism, and I sell everything I own to live a life of simplicity and service, that's a conspicuous act of faith.

It's completely irrational if I believe that my present life, and the pleasures I enjoy in it, are the sum total of my existence. It only becomes rational if I am acting in faith (based on a chain of inductively supported conclusions) that there is a greater purpose to life, and that my present state of pleasure is less meaningful than that greater purpose.

Long answer to a short statement, but yes, UT, I would say that faith and induction are very similar in how they process evidence and conclusions, with the difference being that faith is acting upon those conclusions as if they were true, rather than simply holding them in escrow until better evidence comes along.

Your present example of faith is so semantically skewed that faith and probability and induction could all be the same word.

Your example of the chair isn't faith. A chair is designed to catch your ass and suspend it above the floor. It's not faith to sit in a chair without looking.

You see a chair, and if there are no obvious flaws in it, and you sit down expecting it to do its job based on your experience with past chairs and your understanding of the concept of a chair.

That's a probability assessment on your part.

While I don't disagree with you on your second part, that doesn't make those people's behavior rational or reasonable.

Internal revelatory events aren't testable. They can't even be compared against those of another person. While that may be acceptable as evidence for personal use it has no merit outside of that person's skin.

As a personal issue, I don't give a tinker's damn what people do in regards to the voices that drive their lives so long as they only blow themselves up. That's why I have such a problem with the weight given to religion when people use it to judge other or act against others. You, generally speaking, don't get to use the rules of your invisible sky daddy to act against me, judge all you want, but act against me and it will be bad.

And you keep going back to the chair/faith issue. Again, that's not faith, that's probability, it's the same model as expecting the sun to rise tomorrow. It's a probabilistic model. The sun has risen reliably since recorded time, a proper chair has caught people's asses since chairs were properly made.

No, it's not.

That's just silly. The only reason you believe anything religious is because you were taught so or really want to.

Don't confuse the mechanism of induction as it is used internally in respect with a religion as opposed with induction in relation to the evidence for the existence of deity.

Can I be annoying and just say, "ME TOO"

Why should there be any separaton of science and faith. I always thought it should be so anyway.

No, I think it's meaningless to conflate faith and critical thinking to the point that they are interchangable. Doesn't it cheapen both concepts to water them down to the point that they lose their defining characteristics?

When people refer to religious faith, I am certain that the intended meaing is NOT "using the scientific method of investigation in order to determine the most verifiable statistical probability."

They are aspects of the same mental transaction.

And acting on that probability without having access (or choosing to investigate) to the data needed to make it certain. That's the definition of faith that I'm trying to give here. My whole point is that it's a very standard mental transaction, and that the variables are the kind of data accepted into the transaction, and the extent action taken when the conclusion is assumed.

If you read back, I said the same thing. Nobody has any external access to that data in a meaningful way, so it doesn't carry any weight in dialog. My point was that a religious person still has access, and may accept as data, something which is only available for internal investigation.

I think there was some confusion in how you read the last part of my post. The fifth paragraph ("It's completely irrational if I believe that my present life ... blah blah blah") is all referring to the action of selling everything. I'm not saying that it's irrational to be a religious skeptic, to believe that there is only the material life. I'm saying that the act of selling everything and living an ascetic life devoid of pleasure is irrational. It was speaking to my point of the radical nature of actions undertaken by people who are religious.

It seems more to me like an effort to redefine faith as induction so that faith pics up the intellectual credibility of reason when it should rightfully be viewed as just doing what the voices tell you.

I get the feeling that when you say "what the voices tell you" you believe that someone with a spiritual experience is crazy.

I realize that's an easier definition of faith to belittle, but I, and may other people who adhere to religious faiths, find that an inadequate definition. I'm trying to offer one that is more in line with how many people understand their spiritual lives. You seem more interested in limiting the conversation to fundamentalists, in which case, you'll have to go round some up.

When what you are doing stops being faith, please stop calling it faith. Using the wrong words for things is an ill-fated way to initiate a discussion.

Flint, what do you mean?

If you have intellectually outgrown the concept of operating on faith in invisible supernatural powers, then instead of spinning your wheels writing a definition of faith that includes the level of scientific rigor that you deem appropriate, maybe it's time to say "Hey, this faith stuff isn't for me anymore. I've outgrown it. Time to move on."

Now, to be clear, I don't care what you do or what you believe. But if you're going to tell me faith means something damn near the opposite of what the dictionary says, then yes, I'm going to call you on that.

Well, we only medicate or incarcerate the people who do bad things when the voices tell them to do so.

I'm not saying everyone hears an overt voice, although plenty do.

In general terms we're hardwired for any sort of gregarious behavior, which can only stand to reinforce the communal religious experience. We get a dopamine dump every time we stand around telling each other how wonderful the invisible guy in the sky is. As well as group athletic events and so on.

Oh, to be sure, I still believe in invisible supernatural powers. I take issue with your characterization of why.

I haven't speculated as to why.

I took that as implying that the "why" of faith was incompatible with reason.

And this statement brings us back to the heart of the faith and science.

For faith, it's "God did it." or the Virgin Mary in a dog's butt, or Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich.

For science, it's as yet to be explained phenomena.

In light of the diminishing realm of the supernatural it makes less and less sense to say "God did it."

Faith and science don't have to be contradictory because faith is by definition the suspension of the need for explanation.

Amigo,

Virgin Mary in a dog's butt, Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. Are you trying to be insulting on purpose? Do you use the most extreme idea of what faith is for a tiny segment of the worlds population for a reason? If you continue to use only the most extreme, yes crazy examples of what faith can produce, you will loose credibility with me.

Descriptions of faith, by people who don't have it, will always sound like the blind man describing the elephant. I guess it's the frustration that breeds the vitriol.

I've seen the vitriol on both sides. I think it's more the kind of person you are than the point you are arguing.

Let's address the substance of the post. Crazy idea, I know.

Citing documented, real world examples is vitriolic?

No, faith is an acknowledgement of the current lack of an explanation. What's more, it's a lack of an explanation for things which science cannot find an answer to. (Do you honestly believe we can determine the origins of the universe in their entirety through scientific study? That to me seems a lot more foolish than humbly accepting that we can't. We should never stop trying, but we should recognize our limits.)

You refuse to accept that there are different types of faith, and that most of them don't involve hearing voices or seeing idols in everyday objects. Until you can expand your definition, or propose a new word that you would prefer everyone use, you will get nowhere.

Bottom line: scientific knowledge is limited, but acknowledges it's own limitations.

Religious faith, as self-described by it's adherants, is an invitation to short-circuit the discovery process; constantly addressing every as-of-yet explained phenomenon as a "supernatural" occurance.

Of course, the more sophisticated faithful will recognize varying levels of what has been adequately explained, at this point in history; but ultimately science is the refusal to "give up" and say it must be God waving his magic wand.

Cite. Not a single adherent in this discussion has described it as such, quite the opposite in fact. You and Troubleshooter both insist on asking people here to defend the beliefs of people who are not here.

I don't ascribe only unexplained phenomena to God. I ascribe the explained phenomena to God as well. Explaining something will only ever tell you how, it will never ever give you an answer to the question why. I am just as continuously and deeply interested in the how as you are.

Cite? I've been playing drums in church praise & worship bands for years (see: this thread). Different churches, different pastors, I attend the services, I attend the Bible studies, I know about this stuff--I'm not just making this up. If there's something that has bothered me, for years, it isn't just something I'm making up. It's something I've observed and really struggled with.

What I "insist" is that people use words as what they actually mean, instead of back-peddling their belief system into a semantic pretzel which they have reverse engineered in order to wrap duct tape around conflicting sets of information.

I can't believe I've gotten so tail-posted in my own thread. To be honest, I'm not even sure what's being discussed in here. Somehow what I just posted, combined with my initial post, appears to amount to:

"It's okay for me to do it, but I don't like it when you do it. And mainly I just don't like what you're calling it."

You and I may be doing the same thing, but when you use the word "faith" a giant red flag goes off in my head. I, myself, would be embarassed to associate myself with the accumulated idiocy that has been proudly attributed to "faith" over the centuries. I'd rather scrap that word than try to write a custom definition.

I can totally see that. But I would also be embarrassed to accidentally get associated with Troubleshooter's hardline-opposing position on the whole thing. Do you have suggestions for words which would better reflect a non-fundamentalist position? Isn't it fair to want to "take back" the word from the idiots who misuse it?

I think the idiots are using it correctly.

The give me another word to use. I'm guessing you won't like "inductive reasoning."

I have no problem with the phrase inductive reasoning, in and of itself. I like how it means inductive reasoning, so you can call it that... and it means that. I like it when we call things what they are, so we can know what they mean.

...but what if you don't agree that what he induces is reasonable?

Troubleshooter,

Faith is not a suspension of the need for an explanation. It really makes no sense to suspend that need. From my point of view, I really don't understand why anyone would need to suspend the need for an explanation. In fact the more I think about what you may be trying to tell us with such statements, the more I think they are just a bit silly.

From my point of view, you have no experience with faith or the spiritual. You are talking about and putting down something you have no experience with, in fact in such conversation you are on the outside looking in. You appear to be as close minded and intolerant as some of the religious people you don't mind insulting. If you came to my job and started putting down and insulting my professional methods, only to find you you lack the experience to make such statements, I'd dismiss you out of hand. Oh, you read an article about some crazy guy in the papers, that's what you know about my job??? Yea, I'd dismiss what you have to say out of hand.

I'll not call you crazy because you don't hear and see what I hear and see, please allow me the same courtesy and tolerance.

Who then *would* you call crazy? How about the person who sees phantom clowns which he claims instruct him to perform various nonsensical tasks? Should you extend him courtesy and tolerance to his clown-centric faith or try to help an obviously diseased mind? Does your societal duty to help cease if the damage is not physical?

It is my understanding that our perceptions do not widely differ; you distinguish the world in the same basic manner and precision as I do. The difference is that in your view there are "extra" elements. You claim events happen for a reason or are caused by an entity despite no perceptive indication. You base the validity of concepts or actions solely on events or feelings that occur completely within your own mind.

How then would we distinguish your behavior from that of a crazy person?

Purely a matter of numbers and time. If enough people suffer the same delusion for long enough, it becomes a valid way of viewing the world.

@ Troubleshooter. I disagree slightly with your definition of faith. It is not belief without the need for explanation. It is belief without the need for proof. Religion is nothing if not an explanation of life.

How do we distinguish your behavior from that of a crazy person? Same either way.

So, here we go again, nonsensical clowns, can we not go to the far extreme of an example when talking about having faith?

Dana, belief without the need for proof. I was a serious agnostic a long time ago. My experience has given me proof. I suppose there is this craziness you could ascribe to me. It is proof none the less for me.

Ahh, but they *don’t* suffer the same delusion, just the same type of delusion. If we could run double-blind trials and verify that the faith experiences you experience and we cannot detect are shared and consistent among others then you would have a point. Unfortunately that isn’t what we see; for some people it is clowns, others unicorns, and they only start to become somewhat consistent when you put those people in communication.

Besides, if we could provide solid statistical support to the idea of faith then it would cease to be faith by your definition. Those statistical studies would become proof.

Come on now, that isn’t extreme at all. Faith is what is extreme; the clowns just sometimes insist that you eat a few paper clips, and they really only hang out in closets. The rest of the time it is no big deal. Faith on the other hand is justification for an entire moral code, and ascribes meaning and purpose to every event in the world. Just because you have faith and don’t see clowns does not make the clowns more extreme, I don’t see either.

I'm willing to take an honest look at it, but I'm not walking into the analysis with a prefered outcome, which happens to coincide with a massively widespread belief system that has been propogated by hook and/or crook.

I prefer to let the evidence do the talking instead of working backwards from a fixed position. And that's the real difference--science doesn't have "faith" in a preferred outcome.

True

Just a outdated one in my opinion.

Oh I agree.

From the cookies:

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
- H. L. Mencken

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. -- Albert Einstein

"It's not much fun being around dumb people." -James Watson, co-unraveler of DNA

I don't see how this quote applies to the current thread.

Now that right there is funny.

Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy. -Ben Franklin

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition. -- Alan Turing

I found this article today; in it is one of my favorite observations about this contentious issue: Science and Religion ask different questions. Science largely attempts to answer How? and Religion largely attempts to answer Why? When those two questions are transposed, there is less certainty.

A couple of interesting excerpts from the article...