A Very Clear Post About the Definition of Religious Faith

Whenever you want to get a lot of response from religious people, ask something basic yet broadly-defined and colored by perspective. At the Christian Libertarians group on facebook, someone asked what faith was. The responses were varied as you’d expect with such a word with varied usage. I was surprised there wasn’t the guy that said, “Anything other than what the Bible says is wrong!”, but if you read carefully someone came close.

Here was my response to the question:

‎”Faith” is any a priori proposition, something we use as a premise for inferences. Other people have mentioned something similar. “Religious faith” is an assumption about truth concerning the supernatural, i.e., “God exists”, “God is a blue octopus”, or “God doesn’t exist”.

Usually these assumptions cannot be proofed true or false (else they would be conclusions and not assumptions); they are subject to a rational actor’s internal epistemological workings and not demonstrable.

Of course, now I that I read it, I’m second guessing it. Religious faith can be demonstrably true or false but that is dependent on another actor’s “internal epistemological workings”. Person A can demonstrate—through, say, the presentation of evidence via reliable authority—that a defeating belief for Person’s B belief in God is wrong. To wit, if Person B disbelieves in God primarily because they believe Christians killed millions of witches in the Medieval period, though it is a non-sequitur, Person B might come to a belief if Person A presents them with evidence by authority that the “9 million women” belief is out-of-this-world untrue.

In this scenario, Person A isn’t dissolving a belief about God and replacing it with another belief about God, Person A is removing a barrier to further epistemic action such that Person B, believing God doesn’t exist because of an historical mass murder, is now able to exercise better epistemic due diligence concerning God’s existence.

I still somewhat maintain, as Plantinga does, that beliefs about God—any belief save for maybe strong agnosticism— is a priori, like sense perception or the rules of logic, unable to be arrived to rationally (or scientifically, if you really want to shoehorn the religion vs. science dichotomy). In this way, most beliefs about God are unscientific^* yet not in the way skeptics like to frame the debate.

*An interesting note about unscientific belief. 99% of what we believe about what science has taught humanity is taken a priori (faithfully), via the reliable authority of scientists and journalists. Unless we do the (instrument aided) sense perception and inductive logic** that entails experiments ourselves, reliable authority is as close as we’ll ever be.

**Don’t forget Hume’s infamous problem of induction, a further element of faith involved with knowledge brought about by the scientific method.