RE: In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus
May 2, 2025 at 3:15 pm
(This post was last modified: May 2, 2025 at 3:18 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(May 2, 2025 at 2:35 pm)Angrboda Wrote: I think you're talking about works, more properly. Faith is a mental attitude which can be expected, or maybe should be expected, to result in acts.
Yeah, I can agree with this. Perhaps a better framing is to say that faith is actionable, whether or not it actually results in an action. If you're a skydiver, your trust in your parachute can be observed when you jump. But in a marriage, trusting your spouse's loyalty is more of a mental attitude. There isn't much for you to do, beyond staying married. Although, the locus of action might then shift to the spouse: Your trust is well placed to the extent that they behave faithfully.
In such cognitive cases of trust, I would still argue that faith becomes meaningless if God doesn't exist, in much the same way that trusting your spouse is meaningless if your spouse doesn't exist. Faith is not the means by which God comes into existence, or the means by which you come to believe he exists. He has to exist before you can have faith in him.
