What Is Faith?

Religion is not the same thing as faith which can be defined as (1) the impulse to believe in the absence of evidence or explanation, and (2) the act of accepting such evidence or explanation because it seems reasonable or fulfills some unintelligible or apprehensive need. Faith is a both a rational and an irrational activity. It is rational because it requires thought for accepting and understanding and it is irrational because it requires no proof or substance, oftentimes in the face of indisputable or contrary evidence. With faith you can believe anything you want no matter how subjective or over-the-top, with religion you cannot. Religion demands that you believe a certain way, in specific things, or suffer the consequences.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

—Hebrews 11:1

"There are those who scoff at the school boy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the school boy who said, 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so.'" —Mark Twain

"Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother." —Khalil Gibran

"Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death." —Miguel de Unamuno

"For those with faith, no explanation is necessary. For those without, no explanation is possible." —Thomas Aquinas

"You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. You cannot believe in God unless you are capable of questioning the authority of prejudice, even though that prejudice may seem to be religious. Faith is not blind conformity to a prejudice - a "pre-judgment." It is a decision, a judgement that is fully and deliberately taken in light of a truth that cannot be proven. It is not merely the acceptance of a decision that has been made by somebody else." —Thomas Merton

Doubt is the essense of Faith. To reduce it to the level of knowing that if I drop a book it will fall to the floor would be to trivialize the experience. It—what ever 'it' is—would become factual, not spiritual. No, faith has nothing to do with facts or else faith wouldn't be necessary. This all comes back to the matter of free will—one has to choose to believe in what one cannot see, hear, touch, taste, feel, or prove. Chosing to believe in what cannot be proven is faith.

Choosing to deny what can be disproven is not the same as faith however. It is delusion. Ignoring facts, continuing to believe in things that can be disproven or denying a preponderance of evidence, is delusional. This type of delusion is also called 'blind faith'.

I assert that while most believers have a little 'faith' and a little 'delusion', they mostly fall victim to a third element: ignorance. They just don't know any better. They haven't been given all the facts or pursued college or taught critical thinking or learned how to question and research or been introduced to evidentiary information that could otherwise controvert and confute the articles of their 'faith'. And yet, although there is so much information readily available, sometimes just a book or mouse-click away, for some reason believers persist in their ignorance. Part of it may be attributed to the fact that there is so much information available that believers don't know where to begin. They're quickly overwhelmed and resort back to ignorance as a kind of comfort zone. This suggests there's something else going on berneath it all that empowers ignorance to persist.

This behavior demonstrates to me there are three other elements that continue to enable a believer's ignorance: laziness, cowardice, and wishful thinking.

Some believers remain ignorant simply because they're lazy. It's easier to be pointed to a Bible verse now-and-then or be taught from the pulpit or read a couple of thin books making the case for faith then it is to spend hundreds of hours in a library or read a thousand books, or go to college and learn a language or write a hundred papers or research a thesis or dissertation. Ignorance is easier than doing-the-work, doing-whatever-needs-to-get-done, getting your hands dirty, asking difficult and troubling questions, looking for answers, discovering your own scholarly weaknesses and vowing to do something about them. There's no other way around it; if you want to learn the truth it is going to take time—perhaps decades—and a whole lot of hard work. If you're lazy you're not going to start or else start and quickly give up. Having 'faith' is so much easier. All one has to do is 'believe'. A profession of faith takes only seconds. How easy is that?

Now laziness itself may be motivated by cowardice. Some believers may not want to do any real work and research because they're afraid of what they might learn. They're afraid of uncovering information that might legitimately contradict the tenets of their faith and so elect to not do anything at all or else read only those books that are deemed 'safe' (like-minded literature that champions the cause and affirms their belief system). They may have read everything Lee Strobel ever produced or Of Pandas and People, but when it comes to anything that might upset the status quo or second-guess the articles of their faith they stay deliberately well away. They may offer a hundred excuses why they have never read anything by Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins, Mark S. Smith or Quentin Smith, Robert Price or Elaine Pagels, but it may really be because they are afraid. What if one of these authors offers up some information that simply can't be denied? What then? What is it are they really afraid of?

The presistence of ignorance can also tie into wishful-thinking. Believers may not want to learn anything that might undermine their carefully constructed castles of wishful-thinking, about life-after-death, eternal happiness, being given a new 'spiritual' body, seeing all their loved ones again in Heaven, having all their questions answered, seeing all the evil people in the world get punished, etc. Would believers be so quick to believe the way they do if they didn't have their wishful-thinking? Would they be so adament of defending the Bible if they were told that everybody is going to be treated exactly the same when they die, that everybody will die, that there is no eternal reward or spiritual body waiting for them on the other side of the grave?

What is Faith?
FROM: Irregular Times

Believers perceive the world as fundamentally unjust. This perception has two aspects. First, believers see that in a world which is supposed to be ruled by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, bad things nonetheless happen. Second, believers perceive that good things happen to people they perceive as bad (unrepentant sinners and unbelievers) and that bad things happen to people they perceive as good (repentant sinners and believers). God/Jesus/Christ is supposed to promise special protection and other rewards, yet the unbeliever appears to lead just as rewarding a life as the believer. This apparent injustice created by an omnipotent omnibenevolent God doesn't make any sense to believers, yet sense must be made of it, because they believe that the universe must makes sense because it operates according to God's rules.

Such cosmic injustice make senses to believers only if it is balanced by a compensatory justice that occurs at a later time. But when? There is no evidence for delayed punishment later in life for non-believers who live it up in the present. No, during their entire lives non-believers have just as much good luck as do believers. So when does the compensatory justice of God take place? The only answer that makes sense, if an answer is required, is that this justice takes place after death.

The forms that this justice takes are in the reward of Heaven and the punishment of Hell. The fact that these forms of divine justice are alleged to take place only after death, where they cannot be examined to be proven or disproven is of great convenience to this theory, thus made tidily coherent and irrefutable. In a kind of circular logic, the existence of the divine justice of the afterlife is amply proven to the believer by the otherwise unthinkable injustice of the world created by God.

Belief in the justice of the afterlife is essential to emotional satisfaction of believers by their religion because it provides psychological defense against the contradiction of an omnipotent omnibenevolent God presented by the unjust world. Believers fear that their needs for control, acceptance, reassurance, and hope cannot be fulfilled without the existence omnipotent omnibenevolent God. Therefore, for these emotional needs to be met within a Christian framework, which is all that believers know, it is essential to believe in both heaven and hell.

However, this solution actually presents a new problem. How can an omnipotent omnibenevolent God allow a place such as Hell to exist? How can a God that is supposed to be ALL forgiving condemn anyone to eternal torment? At first, believers answer that God has given us free will to choose to follow his path or not. But, if God is also omniscient, then it is logically necessary for God to have known that by creating free will he would have condemned some of us to eternal torment. Would not this omniscient God have also known which people and angels would be condemned? Would not this omniscient God have known that Lucifer would fall and become the Devil, destined to torment others? Could not a truly omnipotent God have found a way to enable everyone to have free will and to make choices that would lead to salvation? Was it not the choice of an omniscient and omnipotent God, therefore, to condemn sentient beings to eternal torment? Can such a God truly be regarded as omnibenevolent?

Though such a line of questioning, the attempt to prop up belief in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient God through the invention of the justice of Heaven and Hell falls apart as an internally inconsistent idea. If Hell exists, God is either not omniscient, not omnipotent, or not omnibenevolent. Such an imperfect God cannot adequately provide for the emotional well-being of believers. What is an emotionally needy believer to do?

TMarch 27, 2006e is invented and eventually undermined is not truly rational because it is created for emotional purposes and is not based on observable reality. However, March 27, 2006ore is primarily logic in its operation. When logic fails to provide emotional comfort, there is nothing left to a believer but to reject the validity of logical, rational thought and submit completely to the command of emotional needs. This submission is what believers call faith.

Summary:

The promise of rewards for the faithful falls away when confronted by the religiously-neutral injustice of the world. Believers invent an afterlife system of justice (Heaven and Hell) to compensate and maintain their belief in a God who provides for their emotional needs. However, the idea of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient God is logically incompatible with the existence of Hell. Believers therefore resort to the doctrine of divinely created free will among humans and angels. However, true free will is logically incompatible with the omniscience of God, and therefore the omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence of God is logically destroyed. Believers, in response, flee from rationality and abandon themselves to a way of life commanded by emotion: that way of life is faith.

March 27, 2006