Kent Stevens

The question here is whether everybody requires faith in order to function? Are there some things that we must accept as axioms if we are to going to make progress on something?

It is fairly obvious in maths and logic that there are certain axioms that are assumed to be true. But isn't having assumptions saying that we have faith in certain things that can not be proved. Do we have faith in the Law of contradiction? Why do we know that someone can't be tall and not tall at the same time for an example of this law? If you say someone just can't be, you admit faith.

Another example would be in Euclid's Geometry. At it's foundation are a series of axioms. Are not these axioms based on faith, as they can not be proved by any other method?

What about having faith that reason and argument are the best way towards truth. Why is reason the best way? If you say it just is, are you not admitting your faith in reason.

Then if we take certain moral axioms are not these based on faith? Why is murder wrong? Why is harming others wrong? Why is stealing wrong? If you say they are just wrong, you admit faith.

Do you faith even to get out of bed in the morning? Why do you want to get out of bed? In order to go to school. Why? To get a good education. Why? To get a good job. Why? In order to get some money. Why? In order to be happy. Why? I just do. Why? Faith.

So therefore everyone we know require a degree of faith even to think logically. We need faith to be able to live our normal lives.

If we are able to accept these things on faith why can we not accept god on faith? Probably because we classify god's existence as an empirical idea that can be proved or disproved by experience.

David Gould

Using reason does not require faith. Neither does using mathematical axioms. The axioms are simply defining the system within which you choose to work - there is no rule in maths that 1+1 = 2. That is simply a system that we have defined to be useful.

The reason that that particular system is so useful is that when compared with data from the real world we find that 1 apple and 1 apple gives us 2 apples - every time.

The reason that reason is not accepted by faith is that it has such good results when applied in the real world.

Religious faith, by comparison, does not have good results in the real world. Good and evil happen to good and evil people in exactly the way you would expect if nature was impersonal and random. If you want to define God as impersonal and random then the facts fit the theory. However, why would you want to bother?

Using the word 'faith' the way you do ignores that we do not simply have our minds to work with - we can compare the results therein with the real world.

Thus, I do not have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. I have reason to believe it to be true because it has risen every day of my life thus far.

I may be wrong - that is true of induction. But it gives me a basis from which to work.

God has never answered a prayer that I have made. Thus, I can be pretty sure that he never will.

Francois Tremblay

You seem to be confusing faith with validation. It does require validation to accept an axiom or a guiding principle that is pre-reason, obviously But no faith is required, for example, to accept my own existence. It is self-evident.
Usually, things that one declares on faith are not self-evident - otherwise no faith would be required to enforce belief (as the outlandish example of gods demonstrates).

Tom Piper

Kent,

You are quite right.

David and/or Franc28,

How about explaining how you can know that the Wright brothers flew a heavier than air craft early in the 20th century if you don't accept, on faith, some sources of information as authoritative. How can you know that there is a Mt. Everest on this planet if you don't accept on faith some sources of information? And so on and so on,...

Tom

NialScorva

Just to point out, there is a difference between faith and belief. There's a marked difference between religious faith and the belief you're refering to. As Franc points out, validation of belief is the distinguishing characteristic. Religious faith is almost always characterized by priveledging certain beliefs above validation. I believe that the axioms and principles you refer to are correct, but only so long as they continue to be valid. Belief in God usually transcends that, the belief is considered true regardless of validation.

Dr. Retard

People in this thread are employing different definitions of 'faith'. On some definitions, we all have faith. On others, only certain people do. On some, faith is reasonable. On others, faith is irrational.

owleye

Kent...

Though faith can be said to be applicable to everything, as you have done, I think doing so waters it down so much that it becomes practically a meaningless term. It is better to separate reasoning from faith. Consider the following. We know that when we add seven and five we will get twelve, assuming we accept the rules that make it so. Moreover, when we know such truths, we recognize that they are necessarily and universally true, and not true merely on subjective, spiritual, faith-based, or cultural grounds. This form of acceptance of rules is not a matter of belief in the rules, but rather that we recognize that it is a kind of "game" (as Wittgenstein would say) that deals only with its formal structure. Mathematical truths are true in this sense only because of the formal structure of the rules it is following, though Godel's theorem tells us this is a more complicated story than how I stated it.

The next step, then, if we go beyond the formality and make a hypothesis that the rules are applicable to some particular world domain, we can no longer guarantee them in this way. We have to suppose them for the purpose of seeing whether they can be confirmed in experience. If they do, it gives us some reason to accept these rules as applicable. Otherwise, we are at liberty to reject them. This activity doesn't rise to the level of faith, yet, since at any time we are prepared to toss it out.

Faith would come in only at the next step, when experience teaches one thing and theory teaches another and we decide to accept the theory in the face of (apparently) conflicting evidence. Alternatively, faith would enter into it if the acceptance of a theory doesn't depend on evidence for or against it at all, or possibly that there is always a particular interpretation of the evidence that will conform to what the theory tells us.

Owleye

Clutch

What you have to ask is, what does it mean to believe something on faith? Literally it means believing as a matter of trust -- trusting in a god's existence, even though the evidence may not support it. If the evidence, the operations of reason, patently warranted theism, what need for trust? Faith picks up where the evidence leaves off; Tertullian's "I believe because it is absurd" is just further along a continuum from the more modest faith of most Christians -- "believing where we cannot prove".

That's why faith is something theologically valuable, isn't it? Because it takes a strength of character that goes beyond a mere reliance on the observable, the testable, the rationally justifiable. (That's what makes Christianity so self-entrenching as a belief system, as lots of people have pointed out. The experience of seeing the rational defectiveness of belief in a god gets reinterpreted as a test of worthiness. Passing the test requires glossing the doubt.)

But all this is lost if one just runs faith and reason together. Shall we understand the bible to talk about "a trust in empirical confirmation and logic that moves mountains"? Is that what faith means? Yuck. Sceptics will reject this because it's transparently a fallacy of redefinition. Christians will reject it because it eviscerates the conception of faith as vouchsafing belief in spite of a lack of evidence.

Kent Stevens

Perhaps with all the difficulties associated with the term faith we should replace the term faith with the term "acceptance" or "assumption". The proposition then becomes You got to have acceptance, or You got to have assumptions. The alternative to this is paralysis, an inability to function.

Acceptance means accepting some things are the case without much more justification. This does not necessary mean an open door policy on any strange and wild belief. However, religious people may take it to this stage.

To any statement we might ask the question why. Why is the world round? Why are there no unmarried bachelors? Why is Mount Everest the highest mountain in the world? Why do I want to do this?

We can keep on asking why. For example why is murder wrong? Because harming others is wrong. Why? Because you would not like it being done to you. Why? Because I want to enjoy live. Why? I just do.

To get out of this infinite loop of whys you must just accept a statement. You need to say something like I just do, it just is, I don't know. Without acceptance this infinite loops of whys does not terminate. If you are stuck in an infinite loop you are paralysed and unable to function normally.

Some of the fundamental ideas that people tend to just accept are outlined below. The idea of reasoning to find truth. The desire for truth or an accurate representation of the world. The law of non-contradiction. The Principle of Induction which is the generalisation from examples. The idea of causation or that one thing causes another.

Another fundamental assumption is Empiricism in terms of that seeing is believing. I am not a person in the movie Matrix. My sense perceptions correspond to the real world.

The axioms of Euclid could be backed up by observing prepositions proved by the given axioms. To prove that Euclid's axioms work you can draw a triangle for example and observe it's properties. From these observations you can conclude that these axioms work. However, you naturally assume Empiricism, Reasoning, the desire for truth, and the Principle of Induction for example.

Most people accept some basic moral ideas such as murder is wrong, harming others is wrong, or theft is wrong. These things could be further justified but these ideas are fairly fundamental.

To get out of bed in the morning you must accept something like that you just want to get out of bed.

The term acceptance as I am using it is not generally acknowledged. We may use the term faith traditionally in its place, but using the term faith might get us into trouble further down the track. Acceptance and assumptions are like faith but are distinct from it.

Francois Tremblay

"How about explaining how you can know that the Wright brothers flew a heavier than air craft early in the 20th century if you don't accept, on faith, some sources of information as authoritative. How can you know that there is a Mt. Everest on this planet if you don't accept on faith some sources of information? "

Now you are confusing faith and confidence. That I am confident in the information given to me by someone or something doesn't mean I have faith in something.

It's incredible the mental contortions that people will do to try to put faith in their lives...