Godschild Wrote:Why isn't faith a method to test? You use faith every day, when you sit in a chair you have faith that it's going to hold you up. When you sit down with someone behind the chair you have faith that he/she will not pull that chair out from under you and cause you to bruise your butt.Faith is more a part of everyone's life than we think about
travish Wrote:Faith isn't a method to test claims because it in entirely inconsistent and is subject to numerous biases.
I can have faith that invisible dragons are flying around my socks.
I can have faith that somewhere out there is a perfect carbon copy of me, taking a crap.
I can have faith that I am, in fact, a grapefruit disguised as a human.
Does that make any of them true? How would my predetermined assent to these ideas be a method for determining their validity?
The faith you're using as examples would be in a completely different context. You're using it more like trust. If you sit in a chair, it's more than likely you already have model in your head based on previous experience that it will hold you up, not to mention the fact that if it actually does or not is readily demonstrable empirically. This is called evidence. You have evidence to trust that the chair will hold you up, as your previous experiences have objectively demonstrated that it probably will.
Travish faith is trust, I trust in the existence of God because of my experiences with Him. I trust in God because I have experienced answered prayer. I trust in God because I've seen other lives totally changed and I was envolved in God's work with these people so again and again I've experienced God.
I've trusted my future to God through His son Jesus and have experienced God at work in my life, changing me in ways that I would have never imagined. This list of experiences could go on and on but I think that you can see what I'm saying. My experiences with God reveal to me that He is real and He is trustworthy and caring and extends a wounderful love to people. It's just like the example you gave about the chair (underlined) the more I experience the unexplainable of God the more I know He's real and He's what I believe Him to be.
Do you trust that dragons are flying around your socks, do you trust that there is a carbon copy of you somewhere else, do you trust that you are a grapefruit? If you do be careful you could get your socks burnt and your identity stolen or you could be devoured at the breakfast table. Ha ha ha just kidding about this last sentence.
God loves those who believe and those who do not and the same goes for me, you have no choice in this matter. That puts the matter of total free will to rest.
