How much Faith is one supposed to have to move a mountain?

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Quite.

I think some of us are just reading into way too literally. I prefer a literal interpretation of the Bible, but that also means that idiomatic speech is literally idiomatic speech!

Peter was said to have "little faith." The thing is, you don't have to tell a seed, mustard or otherwise, how to grow. It already knows all it needs to know. Christians don't have to know much at all to begin their spiritual journey. Knowledge of the Father doesn't take much faith to get started. The point is that "little faith" will grow until it is something much bigger than itself. The Kingdom of God is described as a mustard seed...it starts with one person and branches out to include more people.

Jesus also never intended for people to demonstrate their faith by joining hands, circling a mountain, and praying for it to move. The only way faith can move a mountain is if God first wants that mountain to move. Jesus wanted His followers to believe that everything, no matter how great or small, was possible for God. If the faith and knowledge to move mountains can be contained in a mustard seed, then the faith and knowledge to win souls for the Kingdom of Heaven should be easy for us.

Agreed. More so, psychologists have noted how FAITH can make the difference in success and failure in a situation. Whether you believe in God or believe in yourself, people who overcome incredible adversity or challenges have often had that common element of FAITH that kept them going when every rational viewpoint would have said they should give up.

It helps when you explain stuff like this in detail. You're probably right some of us may be interpreting it to literally. How do I know what to take literally and what not to?

No faith is needed, just 50000 tons of TNT, nitro glycerine and Thermite!

You have faith in those items to get the job done!

Not really—there are tons of evidence that they work

It's normally fairly obvious. Parables told by Jesus may or may not have been literally true...we can't know for sure that Lazarus and the rich man were real people, for example. But we DO know the point of the story, the lessons we're being taught. The Bible for the most part interprets itself, which leaves little room for guesswork from a literalist POV. Where we run into is where we take even a literal interpretation subjectively. And by that I mean literal interpretations that are read a certain way to feed an agenda. Genocide, for instance, was waged on the Canaanites post-Exodus. You can't take God's punishment of those who abandoned him and justify the expansion of your own territory through "holy war." Nowhere in the Bible are Christians ever instructed to do such a thing for any reason.

The other thing to watch out for with literal interpretation is idiomatic speech. I believe it was David who threatened to kill everyone who urinated up a wall. This doesn't mean that there were any capital offenses relating to peeing on walls. It's a euphemism for men!

Jesus' own words are no exception. It was common practice of the day among Semitic peoples to speak in hyperbole. When Jesus said that we could tell a mountain to crumble into the sea, He was exaggerating--and exactly what problem would his listeners have had with a mountain? Jesus was merely describing the kind of mindset desired by God.

Indeed...and you have faith that the evidence is an accurate indicator of effectiveness.

Everything boils down to faith in something or another. You don't know with any certainty that those things will work. You most likely read it somewhere or had someone tell you. Have you actually tried it out on your own? And supposing you did try it out, what makes you think that the results will even be consistent? Most often testing conditions can't even be replicated perfectly. So you don't really know anything. You'd then be acting on faith.

Or even if you did try it out thousands of times, you'd be acting on faith if you assumed it would work the next time you put your theory into practice.

People will tend to avoid doing certain things if they have no faith in them. People who rely on evidence are placing their faith in the scientific method--you can't for instance prove the scientific method by using the scientific method. That would be fallacious circular reasoning. The method would rather be considered transcendent and/or axiomatic, and that seems to me the only way you can accept it . You aren't required to prove the method. You merely take it on faith that it works.

Who decides what is literal in the bible and what is allegory?
Given a choice between reading the bible and reading one of my nursing journals, I will choose my journals every time. I prefer to read studies based on evidence and scientific inquiry. The bible provides none of that.

------------> this much <------------

Figure out how to open the link above and you'll have nailed a significant mystery of the process! Won't necessarily take you there in one step but its the start of the journey.

Spot on.

I just know they will gef the job done, wonderful inventions fhanks to man and chemestry.

We must have faith in evidence?

This is kind of the default position for everyone. If we don't trust evidence, including our own memories, we can believe absolutely nothing about reality. In order to function at any level we must, in some capacity, rely on the feedback we receive through our perceptions - even if we have to filter and process it first to fit what we believe.

This holds true for science and religion alike. The only difference between these two is what counts as evidence.

It takes exactly 160 British Thermal Units of faith to move a ton of rock.

So just do the math.

And extropolate to whatever size mountian you have in mind.

The most fanatically faithful religous person can generate maybe 800 units on a good day. The average person, of little faith, maybe fourty.


Atheists-none at all.
Agnostics somewhere between zero and fourty.

No one is forcing you to have faith in it. But you do rely on it. That's faith.


Exactly. That's faith.


We have faith that our senses give us accurate feedback, that our senses can be trusted.

Filtering and processing it to fit what we believe is bias, though, so we have to be careful there.


Not necessarily. It's just that science and religion measure separate things. Not ENTIRELY separate...I mean, there are always overlaps when it comes to science and anything. Religion is about reconciliation with God...science is observation of the physical world. Behaviors of religious people, for instance, can be observed and studied scientifically. The way religious experiences affect brain chemistry, as another example, can also be observed and measured. So, yes, there are overlaps.

Religion often attempts to reconcile man with God by seeking the correct way to reach up to God and incur His favor. It's an impossible task, but it is what it is. So in attempts to ascertain exactly how to restore man's relationship with God, we need evidence that we're on the right track. If you say to a Christian "You should believe X," you'll need to show the Christian evidence that they should believe that. Gnosticism is unsubstantiated by the Bible and you'll be hard pressed to get evangelicals to buy into it. Catholics hold Mary to a special place in their religion with more reliance on church tradition than on the Bible, which leads to a huge misunderstanding on the part of protestants on what it is exactly Catholics DO believe about Mary among other things. Evangelicals like myself stick to a more sola scriptura tradition than any establishment church tradition. We prefer to make up our own minds.

Evidence regarding God, Jesus, etc. is taken from religious sources. Evidence regarding the physical world comes from observing the natural world--not textbooks. "Dr. So-and-so, Ph.D.-said-it" simply amounts to an appeal to authority. If you take the word of Dr. So-and-so, it's because you place your faith in his qualifications. You don't use physical evidence to substantiate Christianity--you use documented evidence from the time Christianity originated. And you don't use the Bible to form an observed, physical opinion on HOW the earth formed. Not even scientists KNOW the particulars of how creation went down--no one has made a time machine yet. All they can do is say that based on the physical evidence we HAVE, we THINK that THIS is the best explanation. The whole point of the Bible is God created the universe and it exists for God's pleasure. We can't make any truth claims on the details of creation beyond that. And neither can scientists make any truth claims on why God created the heavens and the earth, nor has science painted any portrait of the state of the soul after physical death.