Is the definition of faith believing in something without evidence? Aren’t religious people betraying their intellect with holding to their faith? We will be answering these types of questions in this post.
The definition of faith appears to be pretty broad. Take some of the definitions for faith from merriam-webster.com. One definition is “belief and trust in and loyalty to God”. Another definition is “firm belief in something for which there is no proof” and yet another is “complete trust”. Here are some other definition’s from dictionary.com. Dictionary.com defines faith as “Confidence or trust in a person or thing” or as “belief that is not based on proof” and another definition they have is “belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion”
I think the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does a very good job in noting the wide range of meaning the word “faith” can have. Here is a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
“‘Faith is a broad term, appearing in locutions that point to a range of different phenomena. We speak of ‘having faith that you will succeed, despite setbacks,’ ‘having faith in democracy,’ ‘putting faith in God,’ ‘believing that God exists by faith,’ ‘being a person of faith,’ ‘professing and keeping the faith (or losing it),’ ‘keeping (or failing to keep) faith with someone’, and so on. At its most general ‘faith’ means much the same as ‘trust’. Uses of ‘faith’ and ‘faithfulness’ closely parallel ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ and these are often used interchangeably.”
The definition I am going to go with here on my blog is that having faith in something means you are trusting in something. If we go with this definition, then everyone has faith to some extent. It may not be faith in any religious sense, but everyone experiences trust every single day
So, here is the thing to acknowledge outright, in religious matters, one can’t prove their belief system with absolute certainty. I, as a Christian, can’t know or prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the claims of Christianity is true. Does that mean that being a Christian or religious in general is somehow unintelligent and foolish? I do not think so, because on an everyday level we have trust in the midst of uncertainty. Take for example, driving to the grocery store, we trust that our vehicle will make it from our home to the grocery store. There is nothing that informs us that we can be absolutely certain that our vehicle will indeed make to from the house to the grocery store. Now, we can have reasons that inform us that our vehicle will most likely indeed make it from point A to Point B, but we can’t have absolute certainty that it will and there are many situations in life that require us to have faith in the midst of uncertainty.
Now, does that mean we ought to put our trust in things that have high levels of uncertainty or that have a lot of data that shows a particular thing to be untrustworthy? I would say, in general, we should certainly not. So going back to the religious question, I think if there is hardly any data to back up a religious belief system (thus making it highly uncertain) or if the data shows that a religious belief system is completely untrustworthy, then that religious belief system should not be believed or adhered to. My own personal standard is that if the data indicates a religious system to be more probably true than not, then that is the one I will believe and adhere to.
As we move forward, I will be looking at the claims of the Bible with the aim of looking at the data that indicates whether it is probably true or not. My next post however will be about how the relationship between religious faith and emotion. The discussion about religious truth claims is not devoid of emotion at all.
