What is faith ?

[Rabid]

(I tried to use the forum's search engine, but there was too many noise that I couldn't find any relevant information)


I just wanted to know how SDNers would define the concept of “faith”.


Here I'll try my hand at it (I'm really bad at philosophy, so I expect to be wrong) :


Faith is a psychological construct people use to cope with stressful situations where they feel that their own willpower / means of action are insufficient to bring the desired outcome(s).
Faith generally imply, but do not impose, the belief on (a) greater(s) power(s) (not necessarily Divine in nature).
If Faith is generally associated with the religious sentiment, it is not exclusive to it.
So it is possible for an atheist to still express Faith in concepts such as the “Group / Tribe / Society / Nation”, “Progress”, “Science”, “the Free Market” or even “Humanity”.

[Lord Baal]

The bible say that faith is the certainty of what you cannot see and other thing that is about the same or something like that, I hardly payed any attention when a certain cute girl tried to convert me.

However if is to be philosophical I would say that faith is, well, having the certainty of the existence of a situation or event regardless lack of physical, real proof or even proof that negate the conditions needed to this situation or event to occur, usually associated with hope and a safety felling.

This could be applied to anything, from the belief in some deity to the belief of a certain soccer team wining the word cup (even when they suck). However for many, many people would interpret faith in different manners too, raging from an obligation, passing to a fundamental pillar of life up to a useless felling.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Simon_Jester]

Faith is the belief that there is some person or thing which is fundamentally trustworthy- it will not let you down, it will not fail you, it will accomplish what you need of it if there's any way at all.

I can have faith in your judgment, I can have faith in your personal honor- I can have one of those and not the other, for some people. I can have faith in a man, or in an institution, or in an abstract ideological construct, or in a god.

All that is secondary to what faith is.

[Number Theoretic]

Perhaps faith is a feature, that is somehow "hardwired" into the psychological nature of humans that keeps us sane. Almost everyone has at least some faith in something, even "regular" atheists. A person with no fatith in anything is a Nihilist and i doubt that i have ever met a real Nihilist, so i suppose they are rather rare.

[Lord Zentei]

Faith is:
1. Confidence in a person or thing.
2. Belief that is not based on proof or evidence (and which may conflict with proof and/or evidence).

[Rabid]

Interesting answers. I'll wait for more before trying to re-formalize my thoughts.

Perhaps faith is a feature, that is somehow "hardwired" into the psychological nature of humans that keeps us sane. Almost everyone has at least some faith in something, even "regular" atheists. A person with no fatith in anything is a Nihilist and i doubt that i have ever met a real Nihilist, so i suppose they are rather rare.

That's where I was trying to go in my definition : it's not so much a quality ("the faithful" VS "the unfaithful", "the believers" VS "the unbelievers") than a process deriving from how our brain work, meaning that we have a tendency to "have faith" in some things, even the Atheist. The question I was trying to answer was "how would you define process of faith in general terms ?".

Faith is:
1. Confidence in a person or thing.
2. Belief that is not based on proof or evidence (and which may conflict with proof and/or evidence).

Seems okay but a bit underwhelming, I have to say.



Is Optimism linked to Faith, and if yes, how ?

[Lord Baal]

Well, is optimistic (or even sane) to believe that a invisible giant will send my immortal soul to a pit of fire if I misbehave... I don't think so. However many people seem to link those two concepts, meaning that having faith on something imply a good thing.

But what if I have faith in the sun going supernova tomorrow and killing every one and everything I know. Or having faith into the non existence of God, heaven or hell, and that when we die is just like sleeping or being unconscious, forever, so no spending the eternity with your love ones...?

In that case belief differ from faith I guess.

What about faith in science?

Like having faith that science will solve a problem (not caring if the result is A or B, but just getting a result).

At this point I have faith into stop writing nonsense

[Rabid]

Decided to go on a little Wiki-trip...

"Faith", as a word, seemingly descend from the latin fides, which if I trust wikipedia is supposed to mean "trust", "belief"

"Belief" is told to be "the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true."


So, Faith seems to imply a form of Belief, while Belief does not seem to imply Faith.


proposition : To have faith in something, you have to develop a form of belief => To have faith in someone, you have to believe that he/she is trustworthy, even if you may not have all the necessary proofs of it or may have been misled.


Which leads us back to what Zentei said.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Faith is believing in something with no evidence, or against the evidence. Believing in something that does have evidence for it (like the Sun coming up in the morning as it always does, or the claims of a known expert in a field) is trust, not faith.

[Number Theoretic]

Or, as a Bayes-style statistican would say: knowledge with a certain degree of uncertainty.

But something other struck me: If Faith is believing in something without evidence, is it faith in your parents, when you believe that your parents are truely your parents?
(without ever daring to demand genetic evidence for this, as tasteless as this would be)

[Lord of the Abyss]

But something other struck me: If Faith is believing in something without evidence, is it faith in your parents, when you believe that your parents are truely your parents?

That depends on how honest you know them to be, and of course other evidence like how you look. If Mom and Dad the redheaded con artists tell their kid, a black guy, that they are his bio-parents then yes that's faith.

And of course, early on it probably is faith; kids are known for their unthinking trust in their parents.

[Dave]

The bible say that faith is the certainty of what you cannot see and other thing that is about the same or something like that, I hardly payed any attention when a certain cute girl tried to convert me.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. - Hebrews 11:1

Have something very close to that still stuck in my head from middle school. Anyway, I find that particular definition useful because (1) it's straight from the bible which makes it difficult for evangelically-minded Christians to dodge and (2) it's very easy to demonstrate that it's wrong. (We hope a Nigerian Prince will give us several million USD, but it'd be dumb to have confidence in it.)

Now back to your regularly scheduled definition nitpick-fest, already in progress.

[Knife]

Humans are pack animals of a sort, wouldn't surprise me it we have hardwired in our heads the notion of believing in things our pack say to us with or without evidence. Seems a pretty straight forward survival technique to me in a tribal world our species was in for a vast majority of our time on earth. Seems to me only a hop skip away from our trusted leaders telling us bullshit and believing it to our trusted leaders telling us god storis that are bullshit and believing it. I mean, this is the guy who gave you your first pointy stick to hunt with, the same guy who pushed you out of the way of that saber tooth cat, why would he lie about the sky god?

[Lord Baal]

I for one had faith on mankind correcting it's mistakes and stop being collectively so fucking stupid, but paraphrasing what Tom Billy Jones one's said, the individual human is smart, the pack is idiotic, or maybe idiocy is contagious somehow and then we get scientist being prosecuted for not predicting a earthquake and people saying that autism is the result demoniac possession.

Now I have faith on aliens coming in a wiping out humanity so we don't pollute the stars!

[Lord Zentei]

Faith is:
1. Confidence in a person or thing.
2. Belief that is not based on proof or evidence (and which may conflict with proof and/or evidence).

Seems okay but a bit underwhelming, I have to say.

That's all it is, though. As for reasons why we succumb to it... it's probably because it's easier to make assumptions about things than to seek evidence for every thing we assume to be true. We make assumptions all the time (such as, the floor will carry my weight, etc.), and that usually manages to keep us alive well enough. So in the broadest sense we can't really make do without it. However, when we are actually able to make meticulous analysis of a phenomenon in nature, of course we're better of doing so, it's just that it takes more investment.

PS: also, Knife's point is a good one - we feel more at ease associating with people we agree with on such-and-such. It's usually better for a group dynamic that the members think alike, so our psychology naturally leads us to want to think like those we want to hang around (and leads us to be suspicious of the outsider).

[Anacronian]

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Ambrose Bierce

[Starglider]

The creation of artificial faith is quite simple. We go into the belief network, we inject some ridiculous proposition, we set its probability to 1.0 (a value which should never normally occur for anything other than logical axioms) and then we block that node from ever being updated. As usual messy human wetware makes things a little less tidy, requiring the deployment of a strong rationalisation generator to defend the 'article of faith' from modification by actual reasoning.

[Number Theoretic]

This sounds like i could program myself to have faith in anything, even if it is ridicilously arbitrary. In my experience, something has to make sense before i can have faith in it. Or am i missing someting here?

[Steven Snyder]

Faith is believing what you know ain't so. - Mark Twain

[Count Chocula]

Faith: Certainty without proof. Can apply to subjects outside of religion.

As a bad Catholic, I believe but I don't have faith. Shame on me.

[Darth Hoth]

I would tentatively define faith as belief and trust in an authority of some kind, with an element of emotion and judgment. To be contrasted with knowledge, which is the unemotional acceptance of demonstrated fact.

***

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. - Hebrews 11:1

Have something very close to that still stuck in my head from middle school. Anyway, I find that particular definition useful because (1) it's straight from the bible which makes it difficult for evangelically-minded Christians to dodge and (2) it's very easy to demonstrate that it's wrong. (We hope a Nigerian Prince will give us several million USD, but it'd be dumb to have confidence in it.)

How does that in any way disprove the definition? Faith, as biblically defined, is indeed "dumb" (as in, stupid, unreasonable) according to all rational standards. The Bible itself says as much. The real hardcore fundies even celebrate this, because it then stands "above" reason, and is thus immune to all rational arguments against it. "The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men."

[Broomstick]

I'd define "faith" as emotional confidence.

Religious faith, or faith in religion, is a subset of the general concept of "faith", one which unfortunately sort of overwhelms other subsets of faith.

One can have faith in one's spouse, in one's family, in the utility of education or skills, in one's own abilities...

The problem is when faith is unquestioning or unreasoning. Faith based on facts or on history (having faith in someone who has been reliable in the past, for example) is fine. Faith based on things disproved (such as Creationism) is not a good thing.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

There's faith as a form of casual reasoning: it seems reasonable and beneficial to believe any number of things for which there is no definitive evidence (at least that one has bothered to look into), or to have confidence in things that seem good (as per Broomstick's list). Then there's belief that there is virtue in maintaining a belief for it's own sake. This leads straight to Dark Side Epistemology which is extremely dangerous. Of course, the two shade into each other without absolute demarcation. One might face some emotional pressures not to suspect the validity of one's faith in one's spouse even if one is not committed to the proposition that one's spouse's devotion must be beyond question. This emotional pressure can vary continuously from negligible to too overwhelming to reason with.

[K. A. Pital]

Faith is simply a belief that does not require proof. Faith is the substitute for precise knowledge. People lean on it all the time, because it is impossible to know everything (or even know enough to never rely on faith in any aspect of your existence).

[Rye]

Faith is the epistemological position that strong (usually religious) beliefs can be axiomatic at the believer's psychological fiat. It's not always religious, a gambler may have faith his system will absolutely pay out on the next bet, for instance.