Question about "faith"

[Belacqua]

"The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other."

This makes a lot of sense to me. I hadn't thought about it this way before. 

I have come to think of morality in much the same way. Since it's pretty much guaranteed that human beings will make irrational choices when upset or tempted, morality works as a kind of rational structure or overlay, that we use to counter those irrational urges or poorly-justified decisions. It's natural to want to punch someone when you're angry, or swipe something if you really want it, but morality is a cool bit of reason which (we hope) prevents this.

So I can see faith operating in the same way. 

If you call your girlfriend and she doesn't answer for a while, a jealous or neurotic man might react strongly. Emotion and imagination would persuade him that his girlfriend is up to no good. But if he has faith in her, his reason will remind him that he's jumping to conclusions, and he should wait and see. Naturally, trust may be broken or misplaced, but if we are correct in judging that faith is warranted, it acts as a counter to irrationality. 

It's easy for me to see this in regard to people. As we've seen, many people will deny that faith in God is justified in the same way that faith in one's girlfriend may be justified. 

But it's a reasonable and useful definition of faith.