(September 23, 2020 at 3:42 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: John Bunyan in the 1600s; E.G. White in the 1800s; C.S. Lewis in the 1900s; and me in the 2020; these are bits of data that when accounted for decrease the accuracy of your words and increase the accuracy of mine.
The faith/trust you place on chairs when you sit on them, is of the same kind that parted the Jordan when Israel stepped foot on it's shores. Nothing changed except for what the proposition entailed and who the proposer was.
I just read the article on faith in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Very long and detailed and carefully worded. Though it brings up a number of aspects that we haven't discussed on this thread (it's extremely detailed) it concurs with what you've been saying. Faith, for them, is a reason-based act of will which shows trust.
One thing that article emphasizes is humility. And I know that humility is way out of fashion these days, especially in America, but it makes sense when talking about trust. In these examples, the trust we have in sitting down on a chair is less relevant than the trust we have when relying on some process or activity which we don't entirely understand.
The obvious example would be flying in an airplane. I can't describe the physics of airplanes very well; I couldn't fly a plane; I couldn't fix one -- but I've often ridden in them without fear.
Or for example a politician who votes to fund some kind of big scientific research project. The politician has no personal knowledge that the Large Hadron Collider will work, but he trusts the boffins who say that it will.
Since Catholics emphasize that there is a great deal about God which is beyond human understanding, it makes sense that they would point to this aspect of faith.
As with the other kinds we've been discussing, this faith in God is not different in kind from the faith we have in surgeons or pilots or others who do things to us that we don't fully understand.
Atheists will want to argue that such faith in God isn't warranted, but I don't see how anyone could argue that this is not what faith consists of.
