If, hypothetically speaking, there's evidence now and you believe now, fine.

But to make the leap in the first place. To believe without any evidence in the first place, to 'take it on faith', that's totally irrational, right?

And of course, I'm not going to take on faith that you have evidence now. I'm yet to know of any evidence from you - I disbelieve that you have any whatsoever.

EvF

Quote: When I was about 18, I took a look around me, saw the complexity of life and in that instant I decided that there had to be a God.

I'm also still awed by mother nature but wont jump to a conclusion that a God created it. Complex life evolved thousands of years through natural selection

Quote: So after about a year in the cult I read some blatant inconsistencies about the cult

What about the inconsistancies in the Bible?

Quote: No, again it was admittedly a leap of faith.

How do you know that you've picked the right religion? Why a leap of faith to Christianity? Faith is not a word just relevant to the Christian religion. You can also have faith in other religions. My guess is that the "idea" of Christianity was a little seed planted in your head either by your parents or the country where you were born. Another country = another religion

Quote: Since becoming a Christian, it has been a long time now, I can tell you that I know God exists because of my experience with Him. Is any of it proveable to you? No. I'm just explaining what I know even though I cannot really explain how I know this.

Yet again, no proof which will (when Christians are confronted) result in the bolded words of your next quote:

[quote] As for why I continue to believe in God and why I am still a Christian, I will point to an article by Cornelius Van Til called [url=http://www.reformed.org/apologetics/index.html?mainframe=/apologetics/why_I_believe_cvt.html]"Why I Believe in God"[/url]. I ran across this the other day and I think it explains what I think better than I could explain it myself. (Of course what he says about the early years does not apply to me but the rest does.)

[quote] So now you know and, if appropriate, you can have your laughs now

No rhj4, I'm not going to laugh at your beliefs and try and belittle you. You have a right to believe in whatever the fuck you want.

Personally I don't find your "reasons" plausible

(October 26, 2009 at 3:26 pm)EvidenceVsFaith Wrote: Why take a leap of faith in the first place? If you had evidence then you wouldn't need faith. Why "Have faith" in the first place? It's baseless is it not? An irrational thing to do?

EvF

Well, you wouldn't need a 'leap of faith' to believe some of that evidence... but you always need at least a little 'blink of faith' Holding faith without logical justifications makes for quite the 'wormhole spaceflight of faith' though

You need faith to believe in evidence?

Faith is believing without evidence, so you are saying that belief without evidence is required to believe in evidence? Well, no...because, by definition when you believe in evidence you don't have faith in it.

How are you defining faith? If it's trust in evidence, it's not faith. Because faith lacks basis, it is taking something "on faith", it is irrational, it lacks evidence.

Blink of faith? Give me an example.

If you believe in evidence and you are let down, then the evidence was wrong so you actually had faith, not belief in evidence - because it turns out it was not evidence! Because if evidence turns out to be wrong then how was it ever evidence in the first place? You merely thought it was.

EvF

Well, if you remember our discussion at AA?: it really comes down to wether you believe in the evidence or not... (Belief = trust = confidence = faith imo). And it all comes down to definitions

You trust evidence, you have confidence in evidence, you believe in the evidence: you have at least a little faith in the evidence. See the below parallel

Theists trust 'God', theists have confidence in 'God', theists believe in 'God': theists have at least a little (lot of?) faith in 'God'.

---

Quote:Blink of faith? Give me an example.

1=1, to me that is a blink of faith. You still have to trust it, have confidence in it, believe in it... I collectively call that 'faith', as it is nothing different than what theists do (except that theirs is without any decent justifications so far as I am aware)

I don't need to 'trust' evidence. I would, however, need to trust without it. Evidence is only unreliable when it turns out not to be evidence, so by definition it doesn't require "faith".

1=1 is true by definition. I do not need to have any confidence to believe it, unless I am deluded and I, therefore, engage in faith-based thinking, as opposed to evidence-based thinking. And I am so deluded as to think 1=1 requires confidence - it's fucking true by definition! Lol.

The God example doesn't work because there is no evidence for God, so of course you need evidence to believe in it.

To, for instance, believe in evolution however - you don't. If there were no evidence of evolution then you'd need faith in it to believe in it, because there would be no evidence. But seen as evolution has evidence, then it is not a faith-based belief, but an evidence-based one.

Indeed, it comes down to definitions. I understand faith to mean "belief without evidence", which means that if you have evidence then you don't have faith. And so believing in evidence of course has evidence, the evidence itself is evidence, evidence for anything is evidence of the existence of evidence itself.

...So evidence does not require faith because if it did it would not be evidence.

EvF

(October 26, 2009 at 3:45 pm)Craveman Wrote: I'm also still awed by mother nature but wont jump to a conclusion that a God created it. Complex life evolved thousands of years through natural selection

ok.

(October 26, 2009 at 3:45 pm)Craveman Wrote: What about the inconsistancies in the Bible?

You would have to be more specific here.

(October 26, 2009 at 3:45 pm)Craveman Wrote: How do you know that you've picked the right religion? Why a leap of faith to Christianity? Faith is not a word just relevant to the Christian religion. You can also have faith in other religions. My guess is that the "idea" of Christianity was a little seed planted in your head either by your parents or the country where you were born. Another country = another religion

Maybe so. All I know is that I have not seen or heard anything that would convince me to change my mind. Did you read the article I cited?

(October 26, 2009 at 3:45 pm)Craveman Wrote: Personally I don't find your "reasons" plausible

ok

If you are so confident in 1=1... Then you clearly believe it is true. You also have to trust your justifications for proving it (IE: by definition) are true. Essentially you just took a quick blink of faith when you considered 1=1 to be true

As the non-existence thread was showed: you cannot be truly certain of anything. In my mind, you can prove that 1=1 is true, and can based everything in and outside of the universe around that fact. Just like you can in my mind prove that there is no pony dancing on this table.

All the evidence screams that there is no pony and that 1=1 is true... but we still have to take it on a little bit of faith

(October 26, 2009 at 4:37 pm)EvidenceVsFaith Wrote: I don't need to 'trust' evidence. I would, however, need to trust without it. Evidence is only unreliable when it turns out not to be evidence, so by definition it doesn't require "faith".

I do not understand as this quote seems to be contradictory to:

"If you believe in evidence and you are let down, then the evidence was wrong so you actually had faith, not belief in evidence - because it turns out it was not evidence! Because if evidence turns out to be wrong then how was it ever evidence in the first place? You merely thought it was."

Given this, how can you know when you are exhibiting faith or accepting evidence?

Faith=Belief in lack of evidence. 1=1 is true by definition, so is therefore absolutely proved because it is defined as being as such. Absolute proof is as strong as evidence as you can get, and if I had any evidence at all that 1=1, then, I by definition couldn't "have faith in it" (because faith lacks evidence). So no, I absolutely do not need faith to believe 1=1. That's the very opposite of having faith.

It's as if you are arguing that everything requires faith. Which makes the whole concept of faith meaningless. It makes it no different from trust. Faith is irrational trust because it is without evidence. Trusting evidence isn't having faith in evidence because the trust is evidence-based. So it is therefore not faith-based...which is the opposite.

(October 26, 2009 at 4:46 pm)rjh4 Wrote: Given this, how can you know when you are exhibiting faith or accepting evidence?

No. I am not talking about knowing as in absolute knowledge. There either is or isn't evidence for something, but we can't know absolutely that what we once thought of as evidence, turns out not to be. It's simply the fact that trusting evidence is infinitely better than just believing anything without any valid reasoning. I believe that we, as mortal humans, as so-called 'higher primates' should just do the best we simply can, to follow the evidence. We can only do what we think is best, that is obvious.

EvF