Theists, what does faith mean to you?

[Catholic_Lady]

On my first post on here I said that faith isn't this blind thing where you believe just because, or you believe it just because you want to. At least not to me. Having faith is based on having gathered evidence that least you to believe a certain thing.

Yes your just taking personal experience and defining it as faith, my question is why do you need to call it faith, why not just personal experience?

Then we are just arguing semantics.

I've said all along that it is my entire life experiences that lead me to believe as I do.

[Mr.wizard]

Yes your just taking personal experience and defining it as faith, my question is why do you need to call it faith, why not just personal experience?

Then we are just arguing semantics.

I've said all along that it is my entire life experiences that lead me to believe as I do.

I agree it's semantics, faith is becoming one of those religious terms like "god", that means something different to every person who uses it and therefore has become an utterly useless term.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

With all respect, but who are you to say what can and cannot be evidence for me?

There is no evidence for you or evidence for me.There is only evidence. (Thank you Simon.)
The sole purpose of evidence being to prove.
I don't think you are equipped to call your personal experiences evidence to believe in what you believe.
Personal experiences are not evidence,they are simply personal experiences.They do not prove anything.

An example of the distinction between personal experience and evidence:

You can throw a rock in a 45 degree angle and experience that they follow a different trajectory than that of a rock that is thrown in a 90 degree angle.But you haven't proven anything to anyone or to you.
In this case,a proof would involve using physics and mathematics and stuffs.Ask Uncle K.

I'm not sure if my example is correct,if it is in fact incorrect,i hope someone else can provide a correct example.

[Pyrrho]

No one can just make up bullshit and say that it is evidence for themselves and expect anyone to take them seriously.

If I were to say that my dining room table is evidence for me that the world is a giant tortoise, everyone of sense would be able to say that that is total bullshit nonsense.

Calling some random thing "evidence" does not make it evidence.


Edited to add:


http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defini...ctCode=all

Notice, it is not for one specific person.  The nature of evidence is the same for everyone.  That does not mean that everyone has all of the same evidence; it means that what evidence is, is the same for everyone.

But my point is you don't know what I have experienced in my life to tell me that I'm just "making up BS."

You don't know what kind of "available body of facts or information" I have obtained in my life.

This was covered already in post 55.

#55

Which was:


You are right, I do not know her.  So it may well be that her husband does not really love her.  For all I know, she has no husband.  She may not even be a woman, either, as I have never seen her.  One can make up almost anything online.

That said, I have no reason to suppose that she is making any of that up.  There is nothing extraordinary about the claim that she is a woman and is married and her husband loves her.  It is all perfectly ordinary, and so one tends to just take someone's word for such things.  Of course, if it were a matter of particular importance to me one way or another, I would want to look into the matter to see the evidence for myself.  But it is of no importance to me to do so.  So, as a matter of polite policy, one pretends that such things are true, even though none of us really know it at all, as we have not seen the evidence.  All we have is her word on it.

This is following the general rule that how unusual a claim is determines how much evidence one generally requires for it.  If she were to claim something surprising, like that she is Michele Obama, then we would naturally be a bit more skeptical of her claim.  Of course, there is nothing stopping Michele Obama from posting here and pretending to be a white woman who is a Catholic, so we could not be certain that she was not Michele Obama.  But probably none of us would seriously believe her if she made such a claim without providing any evidence.  At least, none of the reasonable ones would believe such a story without some evidence beyond her mere claim to be Michele Obama.

The case would be even greater if she were to claim something impossible.  Like if she claimed to be the Roman Emperor Claudius, who has returned to life and is now posting here.  Then we (at least the reasonable ones) would simply not believe her, and regard her story as false.


None of this makes her claim that her husband loves her anything like the claim that God exists and Catholicism is true.  We know that people commonly do have husbands and we know that there is commonly evidence regarding the husband's feelings toward his spouse. So it is very likely that, if she is really a woman and married and believes her husband loves her, that there is actual evidence of his love for her.  Of course, I have not seen it in this particular case, but I have seen evidence of a like nature, and so I know it is at least very possible that her husband loves her, and that she had good reason to believe that her husband loves her.

That greatly contrasts with the God situation.  No one has ever put forth good evidence on that.  What we have are a bunch of fallacious arguments, slipshod and falsified evidence, and we have that for contradictory religions.  And being contradictory, we know that, at most, one religion is true, though obviously they can all be false (which, in fact, is what is most reasonable to believe, but I digress).  So we don't have any examples of anyone having good reason to believe in a god or religion, so we have good reason to believe that anyone who claims to have such evidence is mistaken or lying.  (Most of the time, I suspect that the person is mistaken, though there have been plenty of religious frauds that have been detected, too.)

In this specific case, the types of evidence that were mentioned for the god belief are exactly the same types of evidence that every other religion has in its favor.  And since we know absolutely that they cannot all be true, we know the evidence is not good enough, and cannot be good enough.  So, regardless of the situation with her husband, we know that there is not adequate evidence for the god claim.

[Catholic_Lady]

Then we are just arguing semantics.

I've said all along that it is my entire life experiences that lead me to believe as I do.

I agree it's semantics, faith is becoming one of those religious terms like "god", that means something different to every person who uses it and therefore has become an utterly useless term.

I don't see anything wrong with that. There are a lot of words that can take on different meanings to different people. Love, for example, is another one of those words.

[Catholic_Lady]

With all respect, but who are you to say what can and cannot be evidence for me?

There is no evidence for you or evidence for me.There is only evidence. (Thank you Simon.)

If I see a troll in my kitchen, I have seen evidence that trolls exist. If no one else has seen a troll, they have not seen evidence that trolls exist. Therefore, having seen the troll was evidence for me, that trolls exist. But unless someone chooses to believe me, this means nothing to anyone else if they have not seen it themselves.

[Kingpin]

With all respect, but who are you to say what can and cannot be evidence for me?

There is no evidence for you or evidence for me.There is only evidence. (Thank you Simon.)
The sole purpose of evidence being to prove.
I don't think you are equipped to call your personal experiences evidence to believe in what you believe.
Personal experiences are not evidence,they are simply personal experiences.They do not prove anything.

An example of the distinction between personal experience and evidence:

You can throw a rock in a 45 degree angle and experience that they follow a different trajectory than that of a rock that is thrown in a 90 degree angle.But you haven't proven anything to anyone or to you.
In this case,a proof would involve using physics and mathematics and stuffs.Ask Uncle K.

I'm not sure if my example is correct,if it is in fact incorrect,i hope someone else can provide a correct example.

Personal experiences are commonly called anecdotal evidence or soft evidence. Eyewitnesses in a trial for example may all give slightly different accounts of something that happened but it is meaningful in determining something to be true. Its not verifiable or repeatable but it does not mean it is not valuable in helping to determine something to be true beyond reasonable doubt.

[Minimalist]

I wasn't using it as an argument to try to make a convincing case for God's existence to someone else. Just explaining why I personally, have faith.

The whole point of "faith" is that it does not require a reason for the believer.  That's the whole point of it.

[Mr.wizard]

I wasn't using it as an argument to try to make a convincing case for God's existence to someone else. Just explaining why I personally, have faith.

The whole point of "faith" is that it does not require a reason for the believer.  That's the whole point of it.

That was my point as well.

[Catholic_Lady]

I wasn't using it as an argument to try to make a convincing case for God's existence to someone else. Just explaining why I personally, have faith.

The whole point of "faith" is that it does not require a reason for the believer.  That's the whole point of it.

Didn't King explain that this^ particular definition of faith is relatively new, and the word actually originated from something involving truth and evidence?

But then again, this is just a matter of semantics at this point. But that is why Tarty asked us on his OP to explain what faith meant to us. If we say what faith means to us, then I don't see where anyone else can tell us it doesn't mean that lol.