*Faith! Trust, and AS*

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This is intended to be a discussion about faith in general, not necessarily religious.

I was wondering what role faith has in life, and how to encourage it. For instance I was thinking that if one is to achieve more than mere survival, ( eating, sleeping, reproducing, etc, and the work needed to pay for these ) , and if one is not lucky enough to have an all-consuming passion for something, ( activity/interest) , which compels one to pursue it, faith might be an essential ingredient.

My understanding is that faith has precisely nothing to do with believing that something is true or probable, is not dependent on proof, nor on results, is not an objective calculation of likely success, but is "simply" an attitude to life, to one's own and other's endeavours. Is that true?

What causes it? Where does faith ( in anything) come from? Why do some people have it, and others little or none?

All suggestions/theories/useful links on the subject are welcome!

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Last edited by ouinon on 08 Oct 2008, 2:53 am, edited 4 times in total.

I developed faith because, from my experience, human logic will never be able to describe the nature of the universe, and what caused it to come into existence. Every answered question in scientific discovery raises three new questions to answer.

Note that I said human logic. No doubt there is a deeper logic behind the entire universe, but humanity as it is, with finite minds, will never be able to truly comprehend a cosmological infinity (as in the singularity that existed at the Big Bang). We can develop symbols to represent it, but would never be able to fully describe it.

That said, even though I am a christian, I still applaud the discoveries uncovered by scientific processes. I fully believe in evolution, and don't see it as counter to the Abrahamic creation story (since that story is non-scientific, it should not be interpreted literally, and I pity the people that do interpret it literally...)

Faith is simply believing something without evidence. People who subscribe to faith don't like to describe what it is because they know it doesn't sound good.

It's the least reliable method of finding the truth. I never use it.

I think that I agree with this, and in fact that was the only plausible ( to me) reason/argument given for faith in the wiki page about it.

I am interested by your saying that you "developed faith". What do you mean by that?

I "decided" to believe in god 10 months ago as a result of reading about two things; the evolution of fluid-intelligence in humans which looks for patterns and creates meaning, ( and which may in many people result in a real need for belief in a "first cause", so that don't spend the whole time trying desperately to figure out what absolutely everything means, which can be exhausting) , and about emergence, consciousness etc.

That data, in combination with belief in god, contributed to my realising that contra-causal free-will is an illusion.

But I was wondering whether "faith" in general is similarly dependent on data, just that it is invisible, forgotten, or buried data. Is faith "logical", a perfectly sensible/reasonable response to data, ( however partial or superceded), which have at some point received, or is it something that one can induce with certain approaches, irrespective of information received?

I was just looking up "faith and neuroscience" and there is a lot of research going on in the area, but nothing answered my question, mainly because it was mostly about purely religious faith.

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Faith is irrational belief in improvable concepts. Irrationality is a symptom of delusional thinking.

Rational belief is based on repeatably verifiable data. Rationality is a sign of realistic expectations.

A bit like marriage then?

Or scientists who invest years of their lives in researching/exploring ideas which they only have a hunch/intuition might work, for which they have no solid proof. That's faith, I think.
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No, that's questioning possibilities that might prove fruitful, not faith.

I mean that I wasn't "born again" in that overly emotional sense. "Born again" christians are the type that are blindly following the faith. Faith is something to be examined and tested, not something taken as indisputable. After all, even making the assumption that the original scripture is the inerrant Word of God, it has still been mistranslated over time. That's one of the reasons why Catholicism originally only wanted the Bible printed in latin (until vatican II), and Islam only allows the Qu'ran to be printed in Arabic...

Quite so! Thus demonstrating that for many people, a little irrationality is a good thing.


More like rational belief. For example, if the only knowns are A, B, C, and D, then the correlative process (or syllogism) to E may be derived by the rational belief that "If A+B=C, and B+C=D, then C+D=E".

Another rational belief allows astronomers to predict the next eclipse even though it has not yet happened. Still another rational belief allows me to predict that when I let go of an object in a non-rotating positive-gravity environment, it will immediately begin to accelerate towards the center of the positive gravitational field.

An irrational belief would then be one that considers the severed foot of a rabbit to provide favourable influence over random events (it wasn't very lucky for the rabbit, however). Another irrational belief involves reciting the same rote prayer once for each of a number of beads on a necklace to achieve an unrelated desire. Still another irrational belief allows people to absolve themselves of the most heinous of crimes by claiming that their actions were the will of their particular deity.

But that scientist needs to have faith in what they're doing in order to continue their work. They need to have faith that they will find the/a solution/the proof sometime before they die, otherwise they would give up.

Surely that is faith.

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So is the bible the word of god or not

I think that that is also a question of faith. I would like to know more about faith as shown by that scientist working in their lab/wherever year after year. Or anyone who presses on with some project without knowing whether it will ever be a success.

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I am wondering what the neurological basis of faith is.

Is it perhaps neurologically difficult for some/many Aspies, for instance?

I am obviously capable of belief; many of which I have never examined, but more often than not when I have fully examined one I have found that it is unfounded/uncertain. Which is why I have ended up believing in god; the increasingly obvious lack of reliability/certainty of beliefs in general was too exhausting for my fluid-intelligence's unceasing tendency to seek patterns, ascribe cause, create meaning/sense.

When I think that something is true, when I see a need for it, when I think something is logical I do tend to believe in it, but I have become aware of how most, ( possibly all) beliefs are based on fallacies or other unexamined beliefs/assumptions.

Faith seems to require exactly the sort of leap into the void which many AS find hard, because we want to understand every step in the argument, need each step to be pretty "solid" before we commit ourselves.

What is it like to have faith, to believe in something without complete/substantial/significant amounts of evidence for it? I believe in god because I am convinced that it satisfies a need in me, which subsequent experience has confirmed. But what does it feel like to believe that something is worth doing, investing time and energy in, even if you do not know if it is working, will succeed, or is of any use to you or anyone?

A sort of trust. Is it neurologically determined, or environmentally?

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Last edited by ouinon on 06 Oct 2008, 4:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

double post!
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Last edited by ouinon on 06 Oct 2008, 4:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

TBPH, I theorize that faith exists and persists because it helps people to cope with things that they dont have any control over.
Because if you discover that you have terminal cancer, and you rationally understand that there is nothing more than can be done medically and you are doomed to die in less than 12 months, such knowlege is likely to produce very a pervassive negative emotional reaction. Knowledge that you're no longer in control of your life is just Not enough in such extreme circumstances to help you adapt emotionally. If we had no emotions, its unlikely we would have faith at all.

Last edited by Haliphron on 06 Oct 2008, 4:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Faith is very important to me, even though I practice Christianity in non-conventional ways.