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Originally Posted by kevmartin  If you really want to get down to it, this is true - when I pick up the coffee cup, I am having 'faith' that it isn't a hallucination and my hand won't go right through it, and when I drive through a green light, I'm having 'faith' that drivers on the corresponding red lights will stop rather than plough right into me. But I have evidence in both those cases to support my belief. |
Agreed. I flip on the light switch believing (having faith) that the light bulb has not burned out.
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Originally Posted by kevmartin To my mind that is what makes something faith - the lack of evidence (and anecdotal or dogmatic 'evidence' be it from a pulpit or elsewhere is not really evidence). |
The source of the evidence is not the problem. People can say things that are true from the pulpit, its just that saying it from the pulpit, or in a Bible, or whatever, does not make it true. The same goes with "feeling something is true." I may feel like I have gas, and I may very well have gas - or it could be I have a ruptured something or other.
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Originally Posted by kevmartin We have to draw our own lines as to what is real, and if you choose to fully believe in something without any real evidence is a different thing to rationalizing it out. |
This is where it gets interesting. And I think this is the key I am trying to get Sherri to see. How we discern whether something is true or not, and what we consider is evidence and what isn't.
I could decide that from now on, I'm not going to turn on any light switches until I've determined the light bulb works. The thing is, I have no way of knowing if it has gone bad in the time it take me to go from the light bulb to the light switch. You just can't factor "faith" out comepletely, there will always be some small question whether something is true, however minute.
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Originally Posted by kevmartin Of course there are layers upon layers upon layers to our beliefs too, each belief based on other pre-determined belief - we have to do this so we don't spend life considering every aspect of every decision over and over, so it just becomes subconsciously 'filed' as established fact (e.g. I can rely on the 'fact' that the coffee cup is real so it's ok to put it in the coffee maker and fill it with coffee - maybe a boring example but it's early and it will suffice). |
Well put.
This is why I have a hard time understanding atheistic beliefs. (I'm defining an atheist who demands there can be no God, rather than the agnostic who believes there isn't enough evidence to know there is a God.) What evidence is there that the existance of God is impossible? I submit that any such evidence is based on a problematic process of drawing conclusions.