I also like hakootoko's definitions.

Of course, a person CAN turn atheism into a faith, by establishing those commitments and blind trust (and many people do, because it's easier than learning the nuance of empirical testing!) but that doesn't imply that all atheists are 'faithful' (in the religious sense).

That didn't come across exactly as intended. I should have spelled it out more.

I see faith as trust, trust in a conscious being. This is how I distinguish it from belief, a matter of commitment to a proposition. Faith isn't a type of belief, and belief isn't a type of faith. I trust my dog to not piddle on the carpet, but I don't trust her with my sandwich. And Doulos' statement works well here as another example ("Couldn't quite get how a loving God could torture human beings for all of eternity?  Faith!"). Despite proof texts to the contrary, I trust God not to torture people for all eternity. On the other hand, I believe the (as yet unproven) Goldbach conjecture is true, and that doesn't involve trust in anyone. Weighing what's known about it so far, I became emotionally committed to the truth of it. But I wouldn't say I want it to be true. I'd be just fine if someone found a counterexample that rendered it false.

I agree that "When you call someone trustworthy, you're basically saying that you believed they'll do the right thing in cases where you think other people might not." One has to believe before they can trust, but trust is not a stronger type of belief. Trust is applied to a being, not to a proposition.

I also don't agree that trust gets us past doubt. Doubt is important to have about everything; people without doubt are too certain of their own abilities, reasoning, and conclusions. A lack of doubt can lead people to do dangerous things.

I apply an emotional commitment to belief, because belief is more than just evidence. I don't believe in evolution by natural selection; I know it's true because it's been logically and scientifically demonstrated. This emotional aspect of belief is similar to something which came up here years ago and which I don't recall if anyone disagreed with: you can't choose to believe something. You can search for evidence that something is true or false and eventually come to believe, but you can't just will yourself to believe. You can't will yourself to feel differently.

This is so true. My wife still has a very strong (though not longer black and white) faith and she sometimes mentions she wishes I could just flip that switch back to believing. In some ways I agree. Life was in many ways much easier with that switch flipped and everything put into their nice boxes.

There is a small part of me that wonders if there was a pill available that would switch my brain back to belief in God if I would take it to make my wife happier. Probably not, but there are days where it would be tempting.

I see faith as a verb.  You don't make yourself believe something you don't, but you put yourself out there and tend to it like a garden.  If you tend a garden, it will grow.  If you don't, it will die.  Faith is the same way.  Faith is not really belief, in my opinion, nor is it a feeling.

It is exercising the will to hope coupled with submission and action.  Like muscles, it must be exercised, even when especially when you feel the least like you believe.  If you want to be successful in your exercise, you don't exercise only on days like you feel like it.

Faith is like reaching out again and again.  Many times your hands will come back empty, but every so often, a gold nugget appears in your palm.  Of course, giving up and stopping the search means the gold nugget will never appear at all.

That's a great description Heath. Absolutely my experience of faith from when it was a part of my life.

Just at odds with the way I view the world these days, but I am married to someone who exists in that world of faith.

The way I see it now is that those gold nuggets still exist, but my understanding for how they got there is not mystical or faith-based. I guess that's the difference these days for me.

I remember Mother Teresa once said that she questions her faith every day and then just does what she needs to do anyway.



There was a good Time article about this and even a book:  Here is the article.  Definitely worth a read on this subject:  http://time.com/4126238/mother...sas-crisis-of-faith/

It reminds me of Christ on the cross saying "Why hast thou forsaken me?" to God when God withdrew His presence because Jesus had to know what that apartness felt like and still act as he should.

Yeah, it's like those who went through the holocaust. Either they have a renewed sense of faith in that they believe God carried them through that time, or the silence in the worst of horrors was enough to kill any faith they may have had. I am certainly in the latter group (though of course my experiences are not even a shadow of those who experienced true suffering).

Well the great thing about God is you can sort of mold him to be anything you want him to be. From an Atheist point of view you can simply leave God to fill in the gaps of the unknown. Say the chemistry interaction that happens within our brains.

How aspects of faith interpret such things in simply doctrinal in nature or aspects of theology if you will since God can encompass everything.

LDS doctrine paints God as our common father in Heaven, but the things of God are spirit, love, compassion, mercy, kindness, benevolence, in essence the fruits of the spirit. All that which is praise worthy and edifying. The opposite polar end of all that would be the things of the devil, that which bring us down and demoralize our will and spirit, taking away our joy, and best intentions.

It is however our duty to ask the hard questions and discover the unknown, to dig deeper than just the things at a superficial level which both Atheists & Theists can sin doing. Playing the God card or the Atheist card saying that he simply doesn't exist or we will figure it out once we get to heaven doesn't help our true cause to get down and discover more beauty whether it be in the name of Science & God which should be the ultimate merging point.

A journey of faith life is... and we will all go through various stages of faith from Atheist, Agnostic, Theist, & Gnostic and perhaps going a full circle several times before ultimately knowing what is to be which seems to ever change. Perhaps therein lies true joy, in discovering the mystery or finding out the true & living god and his beloved son whom he sent (John 17:3). Ultimately many things are simply semantics on how we define parameters to the paradigms that we live in.

(PS Hi everyone)

I absolutely agree with Heath's assessment. I think though the question is, is developing the 'faith muscle' ultimately a good thing or not? Faith by its nature is belief despite a lack of evidence, or even contrary evidence. Whether faith is good or bad, it is in many ways similar to a delusion in that regard, and has some of the same disadvantages.

Most atheists I've met put a very high value on finding objective truth. That evidence-based search for truth makes faith sometimes incompatible. I think most attempts at an 'atheist faith' are therefore doomed to failure. Even being a 'humanist' and believing humans are better and will overcome, if that optimism blinds us to factual results, it is counter to many of the dominant atheist philosophies.

I wouldn't say "belief despite lack of evidence."  That would bring in the role of the Holy Ghost, which is another topic, but essentially the Holy Ghost is there to help those truly searching know what is true or not after the test of faith.  So once you put in the work, you receive confirmation through the Holy Ghost.  Is that "evidence"?  To believers, it is.  To those who want scientific proof, they may need to wait awhile.

Joseph Smith once said something to the effect that everything related to God and God's plan of salvation and so forth are provable by science and philosophy, but that science and philosophy are too primitive to yet explain it, especially in our mortal human frames and limited understanding and perspective.

The other "evidence" issue is that once you engage in a bargaining agreement with God--by being baptized, obeying commandments, etc. in faith--then there is a return promise from God.

For example: Tithing.  If you exercise faith and pay tithing accordingly, the return promise could be additional joy, happiness, or other peace of mind, or it could be something substantial.  For example, my father lapsed a bit and then started paying tithing again.  Almost immediately, he had the distinct impression that he should take his old job back, even though he left just 3 months earlier.  He followed that impression, and just a few months later the job he left because of the impression went out of business suddenly (I think due to some wrongdoing of top management), and his old job would not have been available.  That would have left us destitute and my father jobless.

So when people describe faith as being a one-sided deal, I don't believe that at all.  I've seen it work the other way.  I've also seen people healed, and actually healed with my own hands someone in a matter of hours.  My son received his sight and hearing when he had been deaf and blind, and the doctors had no medical explanation for it.

So is faith left unrewarded?  Not at all. It is a step toward something far bigger than oneself or our mortal frames.

The challenge is some say that is due to Allah, or that is due to Jehovah, or that is due to <fill in the blank god/belief>

Only one (or none) of those things can be true so we need to take a step back a design a system to try and test those theories. When we do that it appears as if a Jehovah/Allah theory is no longer required, particularly when more mundane, and more more likely, reasons can possibly explain how those things happened.

And those things that caused them to happen were caused by whom?

Your question is assuming it has to be a whom. It doesn't.

In reply to Doulos (msg # 359):

That depends on how one defines "Whom" dosen't it.

Not sure what you mean. That word is pretty specific.

I don't think the theory testing idea is necessarily valid.

Let's say, for example, you are playing a video game or there is an AI character in a game world.  That AI can start looking for all sorts of ways to test its ideas about the creation of its "world," but because it is so locked in the system of the game, it can never really know what the person who created it was like.  Why? Because we don't live in the game world, and they have no way to exit or examine anything outside their game world.

I often think the concept of God or a Higher Power is very similar.  We are in our universe created by Him, and it can be a bit silly to try to understand someone not constrained by, or even present in, our "universe."

Fair enough. It seems similar to the idea that we are living in a simulation.

I find those types of thought experiments to be interesting intellectual discussions but of very limited value for actually living life since they cannot be tested or verified in any meaningful way. Relegating belief in God to that realm is probably fine with me.

I would argue it is silly to NOT try to understand someone not constrained by our universe. Yes, our access may be limited, but that does not we shouldn't even attempt it, nor that we should accept statements without support.

I think this is a good example of one of the things I find most frustrating about a lot of religions.  They insist that believing what they tell you is the single most important thing you can do.  It's absolutely critical that you believe their religion.  But at the same time they'll tell you that trying to understand it is futile, even silly.  It seems like a "it's very important that you believe this...but don't think about it too hard" kind of statement.

Not trying to knock anyone else here.  If this kind of thing works for you, that's great.  But personally, people asking me to believe something while simultaneously telling me that I shouldn't test it or even bother trying to understand it is off-putting.

In reply to C-h Freese (msg # 342):

A god's existence does not need to be disproven.  The fact there is no evidence for the existence of any god means we have no rational need to accept claims of their existence.

As for the claim that a god's existence cannot be proven... that is false.  If the christian god or any god exists, there is nothing at all stopping them from proving their existence or allowing for proof to be found.


Atheists don't have faith.  Faith is belief (at least in the religious context... you can have faith in a person, in which case faith means trust).  Belief is the act of accepting something as true despite lacking sufficient evidence to prove it to be true.

Atheists have the exact opposite of faith (skepticism).  Skeptical Atheists don't believe in anything.  They only accept that which has sufficient evidence to support it.


Now, you could get into epistomology and start claiming that even what we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear are nothing more than beliefs and assumptions, but that starts getting into asinine territory that breaks things down so much that there's no point in even attempting discussion.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:47, Mon 04 Sept 2017.

.  Since we have only "lately" [in scholastic math history terms] proven the existance of Infinitessimals, and their inversion into the Infinite.  So the language to deal with possible proofs of an infinite Prime mover and and infintesimal "Womb" being the Creator of the finite, is relativily new.
  As it is recorded that the Creator ordered mankind to name everything..  one would assume that to understand we must Name.

  Like young child to whom the whole world only exists of what is seen right now.  What we can see depends on what eyes are avialible to see.. and what systems to process that data.

The biggest problem with relying on Proof for Universal Truth.. is agreeing on the universal assumsions that don't need to be proven.

One of the skill sets required to live in our world is "completing the circle" ie finding the jaguar hidden in the brush.
This message was last edited by the player at 19:51, Mon 04 Sept 2017.

The idea of either proving or disproving the existence of deity is itself irrational.  For what is proof or evidence of something that lives outside our observational parameters?

Proving there is a god is like asking a computer program to prove there is a programmer.  It can show code in the computer just as we can show DNA.  It can show organization where there is no right to be organization, as we can show with the order of the universe existing in spite of entropy.

But even more fundamentally, in every religion where God has appeared to Man literally (which would be a form of proof, at least to that man), God's word has been that faith precedes the miracle (or "proof").  The idea of the need for Faith in a spiritual development means that it is irrational to demand proof, just as it is irrational to demand someone show lack of proof.

Someone who has not planted his own seed cannot demand to see the flower before planting and caring for the seed.  And in religious terminology, that same person will denounce other people's "flowers" (proof or evidence) as the product of delusion, as non-existent, or whatever because they have not planted their own seed and therefore cannot see the flower that has the potential to grow.

So promoting atheism by attempting to disprove religion is irrational, and so is attempting to demand proof before believing.  Belief/faith and knowledge cannot coexist.

You said it, not me. ;)

While I'd be interested in collecting information from researchers/scientists who are or previously were religious, I do feel like this is a catch-22.

In reply to Tycho (msg # 369):

Of course Belief/Faith and Knowledge can co-exist.. The question for us mortals is how badly do Faith and Knowledge rub up against each other, and how we end up dealing with it.. since Faith is one of the sources of the Assumpions that root Logic.