This creates the mistaken implication that there is some need for an affirmative belief to sum up to 100%, and I think it improperly relabels “uncertainty” as “faith.”
A perfectly rational being would assign some percentage chance to evolution being true, some percentage chance to each religion’s creation story being true, and some chance for any number of other theories that have not yet occurred to us. It would not feel bound to a binary, “Evolution right; creationism wrong!” that the human mind naturally gravitates to. It would be perfectly happy to think, “Evolution P=.999, Creationism P=1.2e-45″ or whatever values it determined were appropriate.
Similarly, there is no red gap that needs to be bridged by faith. The only thing one truly must have faith in (and please correct me if you can; I’d love to be wrong) is induction, and if you truly lacked faith in induction, you’d literally go insane.
Rather, the religious claim of, “Well, you need to have faith to believe X” is a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a proper degree of certainty. It’s like the DirectTV ad where the “competitor” says, “Direct TV has 1080P. We don’t. But neither we nor directTV broadcast in 1 million P! Look who just leveled the playing field!.” You can “win” almost any argument by raising the bar to the certainty standard, because if it’s an argument about reality, both sides will be infinitely far from meeting it. Implying that some degree of “faith” is necessary to fill the bar to 100 wrongly gives this argument credibility. The red part is occupied by likely alternatives, not by faith.
You need faith to believe that a fair coin flipped fifty times will always land heads. You do not need faith to believe that a fair coin flipped fifty times will not always land heads, even though it is possible. I think this gives a more accurate understanding of what is meant by faith.
This creates the mistaken implication that there is some need for an affirmative belief to sum up to 100%, and I think it improperly relabels “uncertainty” as “faith.”
My agreement with this statement goes beyond simply voting you up. While I can see people having “faith” in placeholder evidence for something not yet found, I do not think this is a useful description when talking with people of faith.
In terms of easing the discussion between people of “faith” and people of “evidence” I do encourage finding a way to translate “evidence” into the language of faith. I just think the OP was a little off. My first attempt would be something such as, “My faith comes from induction and past experience.” When they say, “Me too!” you now have a foot in the door to talk about evidence without using the word.
If they say, “My faith comes from fuzzy feelings and what my elders taught me,” they are being rather honest about their faith and could probably have an intelligent conversation with you about the subject. Namely, you can contrast and compare how accurate fuzzy feelings and elders were in your life and see how they respond. Again, you can talk about evidence without using the word.
If they say, “Faith is believing in the face of uncertainty” the conversation can drift into “completing the job of evidence,” which is what I think the OP was talking about. If evidence gets you 90% of the way there, but you are acting as if it were true, than there is some amount of “faith” involved. But, in my opinion, there should be a 90% faith in the evidence you found, not 10% faith in the evidence you didn’t. They may have 10% faith in the non-evidence, but I would argue that this is where the rationalist line should be drawn. This is more obvious when there is 99% that is missing.
I think it improperly relabels “uncertainty” as “faith.”
Perhaps. The way I see uncertainty as it pertains to one or another claim is that there will almost always be a reasonable counter claim and in order to dismiss the counter claim and accept the premise, that is faith in the same sense.
The only thing one truly must have faith in (and please correct me if you can; I’d love to be wrong) is induction, and if you truly lacked faith in induction, you’d literally go insane.
Intuition and induction are in my view very similar to what is understood as faith. I failed to make that clear, however I would use those interchangeably.
I recognize that faith is a touchy issue because it is so dramatically irrational and essentially leads to the slippery slope of faith. I view the issue similar to how the case was made for selecting the correct contrarian views, we are concluding approximately for what we do not know or for counterclaims.
Intuition and induction are in my view very similar to what is understood as faith.
I don’t see how this works. Induction is, basically, the principle of inferring the future from the past (or the past from the present), which basically requires the universe to consistently obey the same laws. The problem with this, of course, is that the only evidence we have that the future will be like the past is the fact that it always has been, so there’s a necessary circularity. You can’t provide evidence for induction without assuming induction is correct; indeed, the very concept of “evidence” assumes induction is correct.
Intuition, on the other hand, is entirely susceptible to being analyzed on its merits. If our intuition tends to be right, we are justified in relying on it, even if we don’t understand precisely how it works. If it isn’t typically right for certain things, or if it contradicts other, better evidence, we’re wrong to rely on it, even though believing contrary to our intuition can be difficult.
I don’t see how either of these concepts can be equated with a conventional use of “faith.”
Edited in response to EY’s comment below: I’m not meaning to compare faith in induction to faith in religion at all. The “leap” involved differs extraordinarily, as one is against evidence and the other is evidence. Not to mention every religious person also believes in induction, so the faith required for religion is necessarily in addition to that required by everyone to not get hit by a bus.
Induction is thinking that if the sun has risen every day for the last billion years, it will probably rise tomorrow.
Faith is believing that even though the sun has risen every day for the last billion years, it won’t rise tomorrow.
Trying to call induction a “religion” to excuse religion isn’t going to help you much; all it does is admit the two are comparable, and then simple observation shows that induction is the correct “religion” and faith proves false. Shall we see whether prayer heals this time?
I think you, EY and most use the term faith in a historical context related to religion rather than its definitional context as it relates to epistemological concerns of trust in an idea or claim
The best definition I have found so far for faith is thus:
Faith is to commit oneself to act based on sufficient experience to warrant belief, but without absolute proof.
So I have no problem using faith and induction interchangeably because it is used just as you say:
inferring the future from the past (or the past from the present), which basically requires the universe to consistently obey the same laws.
Religions claim that they do this. Of course they don’t because they do not apply a constant standard to their worldview to all events. It is not because of their faith that they are wrong, it is because of their inconsistent application of accepting claims and ignoring evidence.
The point of the system is to deconstruct why you see their claims of evidence as faith and vice versa. Hence the incorruptible example.
Faith is to commit oneself to act based on sufficient experience to warrant belief, but without absolute proof.
The problem with this definition is that it describes every action you will ever take. “Absolute proof” does not exist with respect to anything in the real world. You only have absolute certainty in a definitional context, e.g.”There are no married bachelors”—this is true by definition, but tells you nothing about the actual world. Given that the last statement applies to every single instance, your statement reduces to:
Faith is to commit oneself to act based on sufficient experience to warrant belief.
This statement sounds just like “rational action.” That’s why many of us take issue with your definition of faith; it does not appear to be a productive concept. Insofar as absolute certainty is impossible, if you’re using faith to get you to absolute certainty, you’re doing something very, very wrong.
The other problem with this definition is that it is not really compatible with the dictionary definitions, the most pertinent one of which is “belief in the absence of proof.”
This creates the mistaken implication that there is some need for an affirmative belief to sum up to 100%, and I think it improperly relabels “uncertainty” as “faith.”
A perfectly rational being would assign some percentage chance to evolution being true, some percentage chance to each religion’s creation story being true, and some chance for any number of other theories that have not yet occurred to us. It would not feel bound to a binary, “Evolution right; creationism wrong!” that the human mind naturally gravitates to. It would be perfectly happy to think, “Evolution P=.999, Creationism P=1.2e-45″ or whatever values it determined were appropriate.
Similarly, there is no red gap that needs to be bridged by faith. The only thing one truly must have faith in (and please correct me if you can; I’d love to be wrong) is induction, and if you truly lacked faith in induction, you’d literally go insane.
Rather, the religious claim of, “Well, you need to have faith to believe X” is a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a proper degree of certainty. It’s like the DirectTV ad where the “competitor” says, “Direct TV has 1080P. We don’t. But neither we nor directTV broadcast in 1 million P! Look who just leveled the playing field!.” You can “win” almost any argument by raising the bar to the certainty standard, because if it’s an argument about reality, both sides will be infinitely far from meeting it. Implying that some degree of “faith” is necessary to fill the bar to 100 wrongly gives this argument credibility. The red part is occupied by likely alternatives, not by faith.
You need faith to believe that a fair coin flipped fifty times will always land heads. You do not need faith to believe that a fair coin flipped fifty times will not always land heads, even though it is possible. I think this gives a more accurate understanding of what is meant by faith.
My agreement with this statement goes beyond simply voting you up. While I can see people having “faith” in placeholder evidence for something not yet found, I do not think this is a useful description when talking with people of faith.
In terms of easing the discussion between people of “faith” and people of “evidence” I do encourage finding a way to translate “evidence” into the language of faith. I just think the OP was a little off. My first attempt would be something such as, “My faith comes from induction and past experience.” When they say, “Me too!” you now have a foot in the door to talk about evidence without using the word.
If they say, “My faith comes from fuzzy feelings and what my elders taught me,” they are being rather honest about their faith and could probably have an intelligent conversation with you about the subject. Namely, you can contrast and compare how accurate fuzzy feelings and elders were in your life and see how they respond. Again, you can talk about evidence without using the word.
If they say, “Faith is believing in the face of uncertainty” the conversation can drift into “completing the job of evidence,” which is what I think the OP was talking about. If evidence gets you 90% of the way there, but you are acting as if it were true, than there is some amount of “faith” involved. But, in my opinion, there should be a 90% faith in the evidence you found, not 10% faith in the evidence you didn’t. They may have 10% faith in the non-evidence, but I would argue that this is where the rationalist line should be drawn. This is more obvious when there is 99% that is missing.
Perhaps. The way I see uncertainty as it pertains to one or another claim is that there will almost always be a reasonable counter claim and in order to dismiss the counter claim and accept the premise, that is faith in the same sense.
Intuition and induction are in my view very similar to what is understood as faith. I failed to make that clear, however I would use those interchangeably.
I recognize that faith is a touchy issue because it is so dramatically irrational and essentially leads to the slippery slope of faith. I view the issue similar to how the case was made for selecting the correct contrarian views, we are concluding approximately for what we do not know or for counterclaims.
I don’t see how this works. Induction is, basically, the principle of inferring the future from the past (or the past from the present), which basically requires the universe to consistently obey the same laws. The problem with this, of course, is that the only evidence we have that the future will be like the past is the fact that it always has been, so there’s a necessary circularity. You can’t provide evidence for induction without assuming induction is correct; indeed, the very concept of “evidence” assumes induction is correct.
Intuition, on the other hand, is entirely susceptible to being analyzed on its merits. If our intuition tends to be right, we are justified in relying on it, even if we don’t understand precisely how it works. If it isn’t typically right for certain things, or if it contradicts other, better evidence, we’re wrong to rely on it, even though believing contrary to our intuition can be difficult.
I don’t see how either of these concepts can be equated with a conventional use of “faith.”
Edited in response to EY’s comment below: I’m not meaning to compare faith in induction to faith in religion at all. The “leap” involved differs extraordinarily, as one is against evidence and the other is evidence. Not to mention every religious person also believes in induction, so the faith required for religion is necessarily in addition to that required by everyone to not get hit by a bus.
Induction is thinking that if the sun has risen every day for the last billion years, it will probably rise tomorrow.
Faith is believing that even though the sun has risen every day for the last billion years, it won’t rise tomorrow.
Trying to call induction a “religion” to excuse religion isn’t going to help you much; all it does is admit the two are comparable, and then simple observation shows that induction is the correct “religion” and faith proves false. Shall we see whether prayer heals this time?
I think you, EY and most use the term faith in a historical context related to religion rather than its definitional context as it relates to epistemological concerns of trust in an idea or claim
The best definition I have found so far for faith is thus:
So I have no problem using faith and induction interchangeably because it is used just as you say:
Religions claim that they do this. Of course they don’t because they do not apply a constant standard to their worldview to all events. It is not because of their faith that they are wrong, it is because of their inconsistent application of accepting claims and ignoring evidence.
The point of the system is to deconstruct why you see their claims of evidence as faith and vice versa. Hence the incorruptible example.
The problem with this definition is that it describes every action you will ever take. “Absolute proof” does not exist with respect to anything in the real world. You only have absolute certainty in a definitional context, e.g.”There are no married bachelors”—this is true by definition, but tells you nothing about the actual world. Given that the last statement applies to every single instance, your statement reduces to:
This statement sounds just like “rational action.” That’s why many of us take issue with your definition of faith; it does not appear to be a productive concept. Insofar as absolute certainty is impossible, if you’re using faith to get you to absolute certainty, you’re doing something very, very wrong.
The other problem with this definition is that it is not really compatible with the dictionary definitions, the most pertinent one of which is “belief in the absence of proof.”