This is somewhat tangential to the post, for which I apologize, but it’s in response to a number of different comments, so I figured I’d just respond to the post itself.
For my own part, I see no reason to treat the theological use of “faith” as something with sharp linguistic borders that separate it from other uses of the same word.
In the privacy of my own mind, I use “faith” to denote an emotional sense of confidence in a proposition, connotatively one that overcomes countervailing emotions.
For example, when I was recovering from my stroke, I experienced a lot of pain, anxiety, anger, fear, and depression. All of those things made it very difficult to actually engage in my therapy, take my medication, and do the other things that I needed to do in order to complete my recovery. And that motivational framework reinforced itself by adding weight to the prediction that I wasn’t going to recover my full capabilities anyway. (After all, only ~10% of major stroke patients do, according to some sources.)
Something that helped was to explicitly invoke an emotional state that presumed I was going to recover, which made doing work towards my recovery feel much more like a worthwhile thing to do.
I have since then talked to a number of theists who went through similar experiences, and it seems pretty clear to me that the emotional state that I invoked is pretty much the same one they refer to as “faith.”
In their case, it was explicitly “faith in God,” though for many of them “God” didn’t seem to mean much of anything in particular… it was more a parent node for everything they valued or endorsed. In my case, it was faith in my eventual recovery, without reference to God or any similar umbrella node.
But the common thread is an emotional state that exists with respect to a concept X, which increases the weight of X and, consequently, of behavioral impulses consistent with an expectation of X.
So I mostly consider epistemological discussions of faith—both in the secular and the theological sense—to be misguided. Faith isn’t a belief, it isn’t anything like a belief. It’s a function that alters the motivational structure around my existing beliefs, just like fear and hope and love and hate and anger and other emotions are.
Of course, we have this cognitive habit of reifying the objects of our emotional functions. If I’m scared of X, there’s a strong tendency to think and behave and talk as though X really exists, even in the absence of evidence, or in the face of counterevidence. Ditto if I love X, or hate X, or am angry at X, or have faith in X, or whatever.
And I accept that the epistemological model of faith in particular (though this is also true to a lesser extent for other emotions) has become pervasive at least in modern English usage, to the point where I pretty much cannot use the word without invoking an epistemological frame. That is, if I use the word “faith” in most communities I’m inviting a conversation about evidence and certainty, rather than a conversation about motivation and commitment, and I know that and act accordingly.
Related, sure… though, again, I would say that people frequently mistakenly interpret “that feeling of certainty” as a fact about the world, rather than about themselves.
This is somewhat tangential to the post, for which I apologize, but it’s in response to a number of different comments, so I figured I’d just respond to the post itself.
For my own part, I see no reason to treat the theological use of “faith” as something with sharp linguistic borders that separate it from other uses of the same word.
In the privacy of my own mind, I use “faith” to denote an emotional sense of confidence in a proposition, connotatively one that overcomes countervailing emotions.
For example, when I was recovering from my stroke, I experienced a lot of pain, anxiety, anger, fear, and depression. All of those things made it very difficult to actually engage in my therapy, take my medication, and do the other things that I needed to do in order to complete my recovery. And that motivational framework reinforced itself by adding weight to the prediction that I wasn’t going to recover my full capabilities anyway. (After all, only ~10% of major stroke patients do, according to some sources.)
Something that helped was to explicitly invoke an emotional state that presumed I was going to recover, which made doing work towards my recovery feel much more like a worthwhile thing to do.
I have since then talked to a number of theists who went through similar experiences, and it seems pretty clear to me that the emotional state that I invoked is pretty much the same one they refer to as “faith.”
In their case, it was explicitly “faith in God,” though for many of them “God” didn’t seem to mean much of anything in particular… it was more a parent node for everything they valued or endorsed. In my case, it was faith in my eventual recovery, without reference to God or any similar umbrella node.
But the common thread is an emotional state that exists with respect to a concept X, which increases the weight of X and, consequently, of behavioral impulses consistent with an expectation of X.
So I mostly consider epistemological discussions of faith—both in the secular and the theological sense—to be misguided. Faith isn’t a belief, it isn’t anything like a belief. It’s a function that alters the motivational structure around my existing beliefs, just like fear and hope and love and hate and anger and other emotions are.
Of course, we have this cognitive habit of reifying the objects of our emotional functions. If I’m scared of X, there’s a strong tendency to think and behave and talk as though X really exists, even in the absence of evidence, or in the face of counterevidence. Ditto if I love X, or hate X, or am angry at X, or have faith in X, or whatever.
And I accept that the epistemological model of faith in particular (though this is also true to a lesser extent for other emotions) has become pervasive at least in modern English usage, to the point where I pretty much cannot use the word without invoking an epistemological frame. That is, if I use the word “faith” in most communities I’m inviting a conversation about evidence and certainty, rather than a conversation about motivation and commitment, and I know that and act accordingly.
But I nevertheless consider it misguided.
Would you say, then, that “faith” as you’ve defined it (related to motivation and commitment) would also be related to the feeling of certainty ?
Related, sure… though, again, I would say that people frequently mistakenly interpret “that feeling of certainty” as a fact about the world, rather than about themselves.
This is essentially correct according to LDS theology.