Leaps of Faith

Yazata

Yazata

Valued Senior Member
This arose in the 'atheism and science' thread and it deserves some discussion. But since that thread is already approaching 500 posts and has twenty topics going all at once, I decided to start a new thread over here.

Mind Over Matter said:
I have struggled with this same thing. Just do a "scientific experiment" in which you choose to believe (I suggest believing Catholicism, since over many years of such experiments this is what I have found yields results).
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How does one "choose to believe" something? Is that even possible?

And having done so, can an individual believe and not believe in the same thing at the same time? Put another way, is it possible for deep and true religious faith and inner skeptical reservations to coexist?

Then observe the results.
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Why? In order to determine... what? The individual already believes, since they've already made the leap of faith back at the beginning. So the procedure appears to be circular, designed to provide some kind of subjective verification of the truth of things that the individual already believes to be true.

It has often been said that one cannot understand faith until one has faith. Just try it.
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That makes it sound awfully easy. I don't know, maybe there are people out there who can simply will themselves to believe things.

But if such an inner movement really is possible, wouldn't it be possible to perform it with any idea whatsoever? So how does the leap of faith differ from madness?

A writer who favored and even idealized taking the leap of faith but felt the insanity of it very strongly was Soren Kierkegaard. He discusses this stuff passionately in his book 'Fear and Trembling'.
 
I think it is perfectly normal to be in a state of belief and disbelief at the same time.
 
tashja said:
I think it is perfectly normal to be in a state of belief and disbelief at the same time.
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About the same thing?

Belief does seem to have different weights. We are extremely certain about some things. Other things seem pretty likely, but not certain. Other ideas that we talk about are speculative and little more than shots in the dark.

In those latter cases, I guess that we could say that we both believe and don't believe, though I would prefer to say that we don't believe but are entertaining the possibility. Speculative scientific hypotheses might belong in that class.

But is it possible to have religious faith that way?

I'm an agnostic, but I accept that there's some very small possibility that Christianity is true. The same possibility exists for just about every religious path or philosophical speculation out there, I guess.

But that kind of token acknowledgement of a remote possibility doesn't seem to be what people are talking about when they talk about 'faith'. Something more robust seems to be required. Some kind of inner cognitive commitment seems to be implied.
 
Yazata said:
About the same thing?

But is it possible to have religious faith that way?
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Yes. Faith is very personal. How can we tell if a person has 'faith', or is simply suffering from a bad case of presumption or even foolishness? :shrug:
 
Yazata said:
How does one "choose to believe" something? Is that even possible?
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In his "The will to believe", William James would say yes.
It's worth reading, if you haven't done so already. He addresses numerous predictable counterarguments.


I will experiment with the possibility though that the notion of "choosing a path" is actually an attempt to retroactively justify what one is doing/has done.

For all practical intents and purposes, people generally do not choose a path as a whole at once (other than in cases of divine intervention, durress, mental illness or cultist pressure), but make relatively small day-to-day choices which eventually add up to "choosing a path" - or not.


But if such an inner movement really is possible, wouldn't it be possible to perform it with any idea whatsoever? So how does the leap of faith differ from madness?
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In the afore-mentioned essay, James worked out some criteria for that.



A writer who favored and even idealized taking the leap of faith but felt the insanity of it very strongly was Soren Kierkegaard. He discusses this stuff passionately in his book 'Fear and Trembling'.
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I'd be careful about Kierkegaard, given that he wrote some of his texts in character (including Fear and trembling), not as himself. So his work needs to be taken with that caveat.
 
Yazata said:
In those latter cases, I guess that we could say that we both believe and don't believe, though I would prefer to say that we don't believe but are entertaining the possibility. Speculative scientific hypotheses might belong in that class.

But is it possible to have religious faith that way?
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I don't think so.


But that kind of token acknowledgement of a remote possibility doesn't seem to be what people are talking about when they talk about 'faith'. Something more robust seems to be required. Some kind of inner cognitive commitment seems to be implied.
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Agreed. It appears that religious faith is primarily about being faithful, loyal, devoted, committed (the etymological meaning of "to believe" is 'to hold dear'); in this sense the issue of knowing the objective truth doesn't enter the scene.
 
I think this is an experiment that is worth doing. It's the same way many people come to faith and also why others reject it. But if the faith is absolute, then the mind must necessarily reject challenges to that faith. The faith must be tentative. In other words, this is not the same faith that Christianity preaches.
 
The benefit of having emotional security might be why some people have faith, plus that they would go on forever in an afterlife. This is really a trade-off between freedom and having strings attached, but they are happy with it. Martin Gardner felt like this.
 
Some Protestant groups might hold that faith is something that must be lept into, but that is not a Catholic position. For a Catholic, Faith is rational. It is logical.

Faith, in this context, means holding something as certain because of the authority of the One Who has revealed it. One certainly must engage the will and open themselves to the truth, but that is also truth of conplex philosophical proofs. Philosophy means the love of wisdom, and one who does not honestly seek truth can find ways of obscuring his vision and never finding it. For one that does seek the truth, it is available for him; not through some irrational leap of belief, but truth a logical acceptance of the truths of the Faith as revealed by God. The Church has never asked anyone to act irrationally, or accept something without proof.
 
Mind Over Matter said:
Some Protestant groups might hold that faith is something that must be lept into, but that is not a Catholic position. For a Catholic, Faith is rational. It is logical.
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Claiming it is rational is not the same as it being rational.

Faith, in this context, means holding something as certain because of the authority of the One Who has revealed it.
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The usual word for that is gullible.

The Church has never asked anyone to act irrationally, or accept something without proof.
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Of course they have: their only "proof" is their word. :rolleyes:
 
You can coose to pretend to believe something. You might be so good at pretending, that you end up fooling even yourself.
 
Worth mentioning that the only leap of faith a Muslim takes is that there is only one God. And the Qu'ran says religion is perfect, man corrupts it. As such, children have a perfect understanding of God- it comes naturally.
 
Mind Over Matter said:
If we never choose to believe anything all beliefs are beyond our control.
If all beliefs are beyond our control why should we value any beliefs?
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Can you choose to believe that you can fly? Peter Pan says all you have to do is believe... Can you do it?
 
No one can chose to believe in anything. You either have enough supporting evidence to convince you that something is correct and/or legitimate or you don't. Beliefs are not the result of conscious choices that we make. We don't decide to believe in something. Our beliefs are systematically beat into us by evidence. We simply form conclusions based upon the best available evidence at our disposal.
 
MZ3Boy84 said:
No one can chose to believe in anything. You either have enough supporting evidence to convince you that something is correct and/or legitimate or you don't. Beliefs are not the result of conscious choices that we make. We don't decide to believe in something. Our beliefs are systematically beat into us by evidence. We simply form conclusions based upon the best available evidence at our disposal.
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I think you got something there sparky. I think of it as a lack of free will . I would add that our social environments beat it into us too. If you grow up Muslim you are more likely to think like your peers by the social pressures that surround your daily lives . Same for what ever religion you grow up with. I don't know if people really realize how much religion plays in the rhetoric of the language of there own country . You can't hardly talk with out a connection to past conveyance of information by the words of the culture you are immersed in. Forced by culture of your surroundings . The beliefs find you and spew from your mouth by being part of the community . Or you can be a lone wolf and blow the shit out of em wid de uzzie. That don't make very many friends though
 
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