Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”)

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand.  Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one [...]

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Yesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods).  Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant [...]

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Last summer I wrote a number of posts through which I sought to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith and in the process distinguish the various virtuous ethical and epistemic practices for which faith is typically confused by means of ambiguous equivocations.  I attempted to distinguish the virtues of hope, loyalty, trust, intuitional [...]

Andy Thomson on Why We Believe in Gods

Your Thoughts?

Answering Accusations Against Atheists: The Charge That Atheists Have Faith Too

Chris tosses out his frustrations with activist atheists in reply to my post on Jon Stewart’s views on religion. In a post last night, I rejected his assumption that not liking the tactics or particular arguments that particular atheists use is somehow a reason to reject the essential atheist position that there are no gods. [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Tradition’s Advocate And Enforcer, Opposed To Merely Provisional Forms Of Trust

David appeals to MacIntyre to raise a really interesting question: What is your assessment of faith as the starting point of tradition constituted inquiry as understood by MacIntyre? This is accepting the standards of argument, explanation, justification internal to and partially constitutive of the extended argument that constitutes what MacIntyre calls a tradition. In this [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

May your strength give us strength, may your faith give us faith, may your hope give us hope, may your love give us love. In recent weeks I have distinguished and criticized numerous distinct belief formation and justification practices which go by the name of “faith.”  I have argued that it is neither rational nor [...]

Disambiguating Faith By Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Please don’t dismiss this post as too long to take a shot on reading through.  The debate it features promises to be candid and thorough and, I hope, thought-provoking for believers and unbelievers alike.  I hope you find it as worth your time to read as I found it worth mine to write.  It set [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

On Unreasonable Faith, there is thread chatting about doubt in the context of discussing  a quote from Descartes about the necessity to thoroughly doubt at least once in one’s lifetime.  In the ensuing discussion, Clergy Guy writes: Just wanted to chime in to say that I think one can have faith and doubts at the [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

In a previous post, I wrote the following of Rod Dreher’s decision to inculcate in his children a faithfulness that would safeguard their faith against intellectual faltering: I can say that it is utterly depressing you could be so self aware about inculcating your children to believe regardless of truth or falsity, to put faithfulness [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Earlier today, I challenged Rod Dreher’s recent post wherein he lamented the difficulties we have in overcoming our minds’ propensities for rationalizations.  In that same post he had argued from the experience of his own loss of Catholic faith that the intellect was an insufficient ground for religious beliefs and that the will needed to [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason

In reply to Rod Dreher’s recent post explaining his decision to train his children’s wills to be faithful since the intellect was not a firm foundation of faith, I critically characterized his position as essentially boiling down to the following: So, the solution is not to train your children to be intellectually scrupulous but to [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

In a previous post, I discussed how theist Rod Dreher was led to some introspection and cultural criticism based on reading he was doing  about the pervasiveness of distortive rationalizations in our thinking.  In that context, he tried to compare religious and atheistic rationalizations as similar in kind, as both kinds of faiths.  In that [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Rod Dreher confronts psychological research which illustrates the pervasive role of rationalization in our thought processes, which leads us reflexively to seek out information that confirms preexisting beliefs rather than challenges them among other techniques for seeing only what we want to see.  Turning to the implications of the realities of rationalization for the religious [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Can Rationality Overcome It?

Evangelos asks another excellent question in reply to my latest installment of the ongoing “Disambiguating Faith” series: I hope you can do an entry on the practicality of rationality. As you know, human beings are by default not rational beings; as a psychology professor once told me, “our brains have evolved for survival, not calculus”. [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

In previous posts (which you will not need to have read to understand this one, but which I recommend you catch up on if you have the time now or later), Adam has tried to argue that irrational ways of thinking may be indispensable means of getting at truth.  In response, I have tried to [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

In this third reply to Adam (you can read the first two here and here, but need not in order to follow this post), I will examine his following suggestions: When I asked if it is rational to cease rationality, what I meant was the following. Since it is only rational to explore all possible paths [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

In reply to my latest installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series in which I replied to Adam’s query about whether an episode of House M.D. provided an example in which a choice to think irrationally (to eliminate symptoms when diagnosing an illness) might prove the more rational course. I argued that if eliminating symptoms helped [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Guessing

On Facebook (where you can also be my friend if you’d like), Adam replies to the latest installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series with this question: Hate to be corny, but in an episode of House M.D., every rational road runs out and a case is seemingly unsolvable. Finally, by eliminating a symptom (which is [...]

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

We hold beliefs with various degrees of justification and the demands of rationality dictate to us that we proportion our degree of belief to the degree of our justification.  If I am looking at evidence for two sides of a position and I find that 60% of the evidence seems to favor side A, whereas [...]

Disambiguating Faith: The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Faith is a form of loyalty. But more than that, faith is a form of trust which does not calibrate itself to objective standards of trustworthiness but trusts people despite their limitations as provably trustworthy people or even despite counter-evidence to the notion that they are worthy of trust at all. Even more than that, however, faith [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

Tuesday, I began my series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith, to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Tradition

Earlier this week I began this series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith in order to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Yesterday I began my series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith, to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

The word faith is an ambiguous one and its various connotations get hopelessly confused with each other in ways that muddle many arguments about the ethical and epistemological justifications for holding beliefs on faith.  Because of this, I want to write several posts here which disambiguate faith’s various senses and evaluate the worth of each [...]