Question about "faith"

[Angrboda]

Faith is ultimately a question about how we know things as true, and what qualifications we give to that knowing based upon our path to knowing. Religious belief and other types of belief tend to use significantly different pathways towards confidence in what one knows, and as a result, the qualifications one ends up applying to the two are going to be different. I'm just spitballing my way toward other points here, but that may be one of the issues regarding interfaith discussions between atheists and theists is that, combined with relatively shallow concepts of things like faith, people with different riders attached to propositions which one regards as true may, being unvoiced, simply differ, with the result that people end up talking past one another. It gets even worse when such questions are raised in the context of an apologia or attempt to convert another toward one's chosen viewpoint.

Ultimately though, faith is about knowing, and the philosophy of knowing is epistemology. Ignoring the tendency of people to have largely unintentional epistemologies, which they apply without any great consciousness that they are doing so, the long and short of it is that epistemology is still a very open question in philosophy with a great many unanswered questions, so there really is no conventional wisdom beyond Plato's justified true belief about how one navigates the subject. I find the subject fascinating, but my own personal views on the subject are hardly more intentional or consciously developed than anyone else's. So, as with many things, as I've aged, I've moved away from confidence I once held in certain propositions and toward embracing agnosticism across the board to a greater extent than I did when I was younger. That still leaves me with the epistemological questions, which, despite some misgivings of pragmatism as a formal philosophy, the pragmatist approach has assumed greater emphasis in my life.

I think that, in some respects, my earlier confidence in certain propositions may have been more an expression of hope, optimism, and vested interest (bias) than it was a product of sound thinking, so in hindsight I think I may have not uncommonly exceeded the warrant that the evidence gave me, trusting to my intuition without any rigor backing it up. I'm less inclined to do that these days, though I'm sure that like anybody else, I still do, the question is now more the extent to which I do that, and how doing so is likely to play out in my life. Yet another feather in the cap of the pragmatist approach there being that one can be more pluralistic and accommodating, even if it does come at the expense of certainty, and the moral mandate that certainty in a proposition seems to provide.

I don't have a settled epistemology, and while I understand why someone wants to compare faith in religion versus faith in secular contexts, it's very easy to, as with my former beliefs, let intuition and hope take one where the evidence and understanding have not yet visited.

In the past year, as well, I've come to the conclusion that, using ordinary common understandings about God in the Judeo-Christian religions, there can be no evidence for the existence of God. This is not a view which is likely to be embraced by religious people largely due to different understandings involved, so in practice I adopt a more colloquial view in which there can be and is evidence of God, and simply keep my own view under my hat. I find plenty to disagree with in discussions with other people without going there. The main one, which often splits atheists themselves is the question of whether or not there is evidence for God. If one adopts the negative position, that there isn't, one is going to come away with a radically different understanding of religious faith than if one doesn't.

(ETA: I see that I neglected to answer the question. As with Peebo there is little if any completeness in my understanding, so the best I can say is that I have faith of different kinds in varying degrees on many things, so the question about faith itself is not likely to be very illuminating without being more specific. A lot more specific.)