putting the brakes on faith

[DeistPaladin]

I find that "confidence" does a better job than "faith" in describing what I have in a given idea.

people should stop using faith and use confidence. it would make a bit more sense then saying i have faith there is xxx.

Just throwing this out for thought:

Since we can't know everything, when we make a decision, we must go with what knowledge we have and then make a decision based on what we believe and hope that when the dust settles, that our "faith" will be validated. I'm not speaking of religious faith here but more broadly of acting without complete knowledge.

Without this kind of "faith", we could never make a decision. We could endlessly deliberate anything.

Obviously, I'd differentiate this kind of faith from the religious kind, which doesn't involve acquiring ANY knowledge and makes assumptions on the most extraordinary of claims on the basis of someone else's say-so. I'm simply trying to wrap my head around the question of whether there is any such thing as a good kind of faith.

It reminds me of one scene from Star Trek TNG where Data and Geordi are talking about "going with your gut". Data concludes that where knowledge is incomplete, humans fill in the missing pieces with their personality. I looked for a You Tube clip but couldn't find one.

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Whoever came up with the idea that believing without evidence is a good thing, is the one everyone should be worshipping. It's the most brilliant con ever.

[KevinM1]

I don't know if I'd call that faith, though. It's really just making decisions based on previous experience, knowledge, and pattern recognition. Most people make decisions based on probability - choosing what they think will lead to the most beneficial outcome. Things go wrong because we sometimes operate on a faulty set of information, or we interpret that base info incorrectly, or some unknown variable pops up.

The problem, like someone else said, is that we use the term 'faith' when we should use 'confidence', and theists (deliberately?) try to conflate their meaning of the word with ours in order to reduce them as being equal. I have confidence in science, particularly, because it's a process, which is wholly unlike religion. When done correctly, science is inherently self-correcting. And that's exactly where theists go wrong when they try the old, "See? You employ faith, too! Just like me!" tactic. I don't need faith to believe in science. The results of science are in me, given all the surgeries I've had. Those rods in my back, the plates in my hips... that's real. The same goes for the keyboard at my fingertips, my ability to craft something tangible out of code written in a computer, etc. And, even beyond that, if I had the money and time I could recreate the experiments other scientists executed and compare my results with theirs.

You can't do that with god.

Every theist argument that goes down this path can ultimately be described as "belief in god makes me feel good, which is why I believe in him." Well, feelings aren't evidence because they're not evident to others. And to try to bring that simplistic psychosis into the realm of rationality by painting everything in the same way is laughable.