wellwisher:
When you are in school, you learn many things by rote, so you can take and succeed on tests. Nobody has the time and energy to prove everyone one of these claims to themselves, which is why you memorize. The proof that replaces experience is based on faith that the teachers have the experience and are being honest.
This is faith in the sense of
trust, which in this case boils down to trust in authorities and experts of various sorts. You trust experts to know what they are talking about and (a lot of the time) not to tell you lies. You trust them to do their jobs. You rely on them. You have no practical choice about that.
Trust in school textbooks is justifable on the basis of evidence: the stuff in the textbooks leads to reliable results in the real world. The experts who are trained in the details of what's in the textbooks (indeed, who
write the textbooks) are trusted to do their jobs honestly. If one of them doesn't do that - for example by writing lies in textbooks - that is usually picked up by other experts in the same field sooner or later.
I aimed in this thread to distinguish beliefs that do not rely on evidence from those that do. What you learn in school is (I hope, mostly) evidence-based. Faith in God isn't like that.
Any small child can work a cell phone. This is done at a superficial level. Behind this is the workings of the technology that underlies the phone. One's experience is shallow and one's faith runs deep in terms of the hidden things than make this work.
One doesn't require faith to use a cell phone. Your belief that the cell phone will let you make calls is immediately and directly subject to empirical proof or disproof. Either the thing works or it doesn't. Understanding how and why it works is a different matter altogether, but the fact that cell phones work means that the theory of cell phone technology can be trusted to produce reliable results.
The effect is like the child who is being held up by their father as they ride the bike. Some will think they are doing this all by themselves. They are unconscious that their bike riding is dependent on an unconscious and unspoken faith that dad will help them out. Being unconscious, they are not consciously aware dad is critical to the activity.
You're talking about trust again. The child trusts the father to assist if needed and not to let them fall off the bike. That trust is well placed, presumably, because the child has past experience of the father's care. That is, the trust is justifiable on the grounds of evidence. It isn't a "leap of faith" brought on by an absence of evidence.
If a child believes they are not be helped when in fact Dad is holding them up, then the child simply has a mistaken belief that is not justified by evidence. The child might even be said to have faith in his or her own ability to ride the bike unassisted. Dad knows, however, that this faith is not an evidence-based belief. The child doesn't
yet have the ability, but is showing signs of developing it.
The person who believes in God has their own black box, like the cell phone example. They only need to work the interface at church and are not required to know about the guts underneath; dad holding the bike.
The phone is a physical object that demonstrably works. On the other hand, there's no good evidence that the church interface you speak of even exists, let alone works. The belief in the God communication thing is therefore a faith-based belief, in the sense in which I am defining the term in this thread.
Nobody knows everything about everything, so we (collectively) take many things with faith, and operate only at the interface of things. There we can form a semblance of experience, grounded on faith in the unknown innards behind the interface. The bible toter may practice the bible interface and find his life is good. This confirms his faith in the innards, without ever really knowing for sure how digital signals are processed by God.
There's a lot to unpick in this flawed analogy.
As Dywyddyr pointed out, a cell-phone user doesn't need to know anything about the innards of the phone to use it. And no faith is required to verify that it works as advertised. Just make a call and you'll find out. If your call connects, you may find your life is good.
Compare prayer. The believer prays to God. Sometimes good things happen in his life afterwards; sometimes bad things. Does the believer have any justification for saying that he knows the praying worked? He may say he has faith that God hears and answers his prayers, but again this is not an evidence-based belief. It is a belief formed in the absence of reliable objective evidence - actually in spite of it, since scientific studies of the efficacy of prayer have been done and it has been found to be not better than placebo.
I take it you are older like me. Do you remember early computers where you needed to know some programming to use them. An interface alone was not sufficient ,but rather you needed to know the innards too; write the program. This made the computer something for the experts, where less faith is needed.
What happened there is that the experts made it easier for untrained people to use computers - the user experience gradually separated from the programmer experience. When the user adds up two numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, he trusts that the programmer has correctly coded the addition process so the software does its job correctly. But the ultimate proof is in the pudding: either the additions work in the spreadsheet or they don't. They can be checked by anybody capable of adding up. Thus, trust that Excel addition works is an evidence-based trust, not a faith-based belief.
To take it one step further, suppose that somebody who doesn't know how to add up uses Excel to add two numbers. They get a result, but they have no idea whether it is right or wrong. If they then rely on that result, can we say they have faith that Excel did its job correctly? I'd say there is an element of faith there, but actually this is more of an evidence-faith split of some kind when you look at what is going on. If this person was the first person ever to use Excel to add, then they would have no empirical reason for believing that the results were correct - unless they asked somebody who can add to check, of course. Therefore, they would be believing in the absence of evidence; they'd have a faith-based belief. In reality, of course, lots of people report using Excel and can confirm that its addition works correctly as a matter of course. So, the innumerate person could rely on evidence of Excel's reliability provided by expert adders, rather than - or in addition to - his own faith.
One part of my questioning in this thread asks something along these lines: if the innumerate person doesn't check the result via people who are competent to judge its accuracy, but instead relies solely on his own belief that Excel gives the correct result (and doesn't compare other users' experience of Excel), can that person then be justified in saying that he is very confident that Excel is giving the right answers? That is, does his faith justify his confidence?
Faith is the belief and trust in things not seen.
Is it wise to believe and trust in things that are not seen?
Suppose that you know nothing about how a cell phone works. I tell you that, in fact, the phone works because tiny little mice run around inside it, invisible to the naked eye. When you make a call, the little mice emit little squeaks that can be heard at a great distance away by other little mice in the phone you're calling (but these squeaks are out of the range of human hearing). Would you be inclined to believe me? If not, why not?
Would it be
reasonable for somebody to believe in the little mice in the phone, do you think?
What if 100 people all said that cell phones work because of the little mice? Would their testimony be sufficient to believe in the mice? Would it perhaps be a good idea to consult some kind of expert?