What is "FAITH"

[Esquilax]

I feel faith is a necessity of life to some extent. However there is faith that is grounded in some reasonable assumptions, and there is faith in the sense of religion.

For example I have faith that tomorrow the sun will rise, that I won't get a terminal disease in the next 10 years and that the train I enter to go on a vacation will not derail. These are all assumptions of faith which make my life liveable.

I agree with you in spirit, but not in practice; you gotta be wary about giving theists another out, though the "you have faith too!" argument has its own set of interesting implications they don't really want to think about. I wouldn't call the examples of the faith you have faith at all; I'd call that reasonable expectations.

You have evidence for the rising and setting of the sun, as it's done so every day for as long as you've lived, assuming you haven't spent any time at the extreme edges of the globe, but even then we have demonstrated explanations for why it stays dark for days, or vice versa. You have a history behind your expectation that you won't get a terminal disease, but importantly you aren't taking that expectation as a binding condition of the world, either; if you did contract something bad, you wouldn't deny it because of your experience that it's a rare occurrence for you. You know that mostly trains don't derail, so you've got a probability calculation, however loose, to show that your train most likely will not derail. And if you see that, say, one of the carriages is missing a wall, or a set of wheels is askew, you don't then expect the same risk of derailing as a fully functional train. You factor the evidence available to you into the equation.

Faith, in a religious, capital F sense, is a belief that justifies itself, and that remains in spite of evidence, and not because of it. When a theist falls back on faith, what they're doing is saying, "I'm okay with not having evidence for this claim, but you aren't, so let me pretend like I have some by employing a term the dominant cultural influence of my religion has twisted into a righteous concept." Faith is the excuse you give that lets you retain belief in a claim without having evidence for it, or while the preponderance of the evidence is against you. It's the emergency brakes on an argument the theist is losing.

Now, to be fair, this isn't just a religious Faith; conspiracy theorists and believers in pseudo-science also employ it, but that doesn't make it any better, either. It's just admitting defeat without having to deal with the image of having lost.