So Unknown Soldier now tells us that the “faith” that religious people use consists of confidence or trust in their conclusions based on logic and evidence. Of course, this is pretty much the same method used by the non-theists; ergo, both sides use faith! And it’s really mean of non-theists to say that “faith” means something else for religious people than it does for them.
Needless to say, but saying it anyway, this sort of rhetorical prestidigitation is deeply unpersuasive.
Once again — Unknown Soldier says he didn’t see this — the bible says, in Hebrews 11 verse 1, that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”
Now there are different translations of this passage. One, mooted above, speaks of “the certainty of things unseen.”
The certainty, no less! Even scientists never claim certainty in their conclusions, only more or lesser degrees of probability.
Check that again: “Faith is … the (evidence? certainty?) of things unseen.”
And what are these unseen things? God, of course, and heaven, eternal life, the whole shebang.
Now obviously the biblical claim of what constitutes faith bears nothing in common with Unknown Soldier’s definition of faith. Which raises the question: who appointed him the spokesman for how religious people define faith, and who appointed him the knower of how atheists believe the religious define faith?
Did he conduct some sort of scientific study on these matters? I bet not.
Here’s what I suspect is probably true: most religious people don’t really give a hoot about word-splitting definitions of abstractions like “faith,” “evidence,” “rationality,” etc. I think most of them believe what they believe because they were raised to believe it,
I think those Christians who do take a vital interest in these abstractions would hew more toward the biblical definition of faith and shun the one that Unknown Soldier puts into their mouths — which, if correct, shows the irony of this thread; that it is Unknown Soldier who is telling religious people who subscribe to A that really they subscribe to Not-A.
I commend the biblical definition of faith: “…the evidence/certainty of things unseen,” the idea that faith itself is the evidence/certainty of the conclusion. Is this definition circular? Of course. Is it irrational? Maybe not. Rather, if I were religious, I would support the biblical definition, but argue that this definition is not irrational but rather arational. That is, I would hold that religious belief is beyond rationality and irrationality; that it’s beyond evidence, logic, reason and the like —.that it’s mystical. Faith is Kierkegaard’s blind leap in the dark.
Religious belief is mythos not logos, though Jesus said he was the latter, but that’s mythos metaphor I”d say.
If a religious person argues like that, I’m fine with it. They may even be — who knows? — right. I only object when the religious try to clumsily support their faith with logos, with evidence and argument and science. This is where they go badly awry, and we see pathetic spectacles like religious people trying and failing to refute evolution based on science and math or argue for a young earth based on science and math. They go badly awry because they are wrong about the science and math, but more importantly because they have missed the point that their religion is mystical and arational and has no need of science or argument or logic or evidence.
