RE: Question about "faith"
September 23, 2020 at 5:38 pm
(This post was last modified: September 23, 2020 at 5:46 pm by Simon Moon.)
(September 23, 2020 at 5:08 pm)Belacqua Wrote: 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.
What I find unwarranted, is using the same word to describe the reasonable expectations in: surgeons or pilots, etc, that is based on mountains of evidence.
We can demonstrate that surgeons and pilots exist. We can demonstrate that their science based training continues to be effective. We can demonstrate the effectiveness of planes, surgical tools, medication, etc, etc, etc.
None of that can be demonstrated in the same way for the existence of a god. Not even close. All people talk about as evidence are: personal experience, ancient texts, philosophical arguments, improvements in their life, etc.
If a theist can't point to their god in the same way I can point to a plane, then how can it not be argued that they are using another definition of the word faith? Even if they say they are using in the same way as trust.
If a surgeon using came into the operating room, and said he was not going to use the demonstrable evidential methods of a trained surgeon, but instead was going to operate based on philosophical arguments, or a personal experience with a god, even the most devooute theist here would go running from that operating room.
Using the word faith to describe our demonstrably evidence based acceptance in the reliability of pilots and surgeons, and using the same word (with ostensibly the same meaning) to describe anything related to god belief, seems to smack of intellectual dishonesty, to me. Either that, or major cognitive dissonance.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.