What does the one word - faith - mean to you?

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Faith is what fuels jihadists and the genocidal, it could be used for good such as healing the sick or for evil such as tricking the easily led to do horrible acts upon the unbelievers.

can a faithful attitude be good? certainly.

faith can be a very simple propaganda tool that is used to tell people it's ok to trust something that is completely unpragmatic.

i've noticed propaganda machines taking control of the concept and using it as part of their persuasion agenda.

at the root, it is a choice to accept a premise that appears to be true given a collection of logics and apparent causalities that are not able to be definitively demonstrated or measured. in my opinion the concept of faith is synonymous with the concept of hypothesis. I have the faith that something is true, or the hypothesis that it is. These are the same. The presumption that it is probably true.

Eliza Dushku

I think faith is a mental trait that most living things with brains have. I think faith is the main instigator for action. I think at its simplist level faith allows us to go about our day. For example, I get up in the morning and leave the house to go to work. I have no idea that I will reach the office (bus could not turn up, trains are cancelled etc) but I leave the house with faith that I will get there. Thats how I think about it.

Of course at the other extreme faith can define the entire life of someone. Like a nun or a monk or deeply religious person. They have faith in an idea and are willing to live their lives acording to it.

Faith forces us into action whether its simple action like starting our journey to work. Or complex behavioural actions like devoting our lives to an idea.

So it could be argued that without faith, nobody would ever do anything.

I read an interesting arguement once about a robot having faith. We could program a robot to analyse the input it gets from its environment in order to decide which action to take. Fine. But at some point we have to program the robot to accept it has received all necessary input and needs no further input to make a decision. It was argued then that the robot was acting on faith that it didn't need to update itself with more input and that the decision it has made is valid. Hope that makes sense

Faith- (noun) To believe in oneself; to know one can do it

sentences You must have faith in yourself. ; I have faith in my team to win.

As many have written here; Faith is a belief in something without evidence to support that belief.

I think it is useful to differentiate faith from trust. Trust results from an accumulation of evidence whereas faith is an acceptance of a concept without evidence.

One may have faith that there is a loving god who will provide for you, but you trust that the busses will come beause you have a schedule in hand.

I have a friend who converted to a rather deep form of Christianity and he said that the hardest part was being required to have faith. At one point in a conversation, he commented that he didn't understand what was wrong with homosexuality, but since the bible says it's wrong, it must be wrong.

My concern here is that it seems that many people use faith so that they can relinquish any responsibility to think for themselves. Also there is the problem that since faith is based on a lack of evidence, it allows people to justify all kinds of attrocities against each other since they need no evidence to support their world view.

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Robots and faith...

Robbie the Robot (good)

vs

Hal the Computer (evil)

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I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.

- Lee Iacocca

Hal's just terminally confused, and Robbie is arguably not good if he's being coerced by the First Law.

I'm really surprised at how often "faith" is equated to a lack of evidence. That isn't how I have ever interpreted it.

Hebrews 11:1


"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (King James Version)


I have never viewed faith to be blind at all. No evidence, no faith. Not in my personal view. To me, their is no such thing as "blind faith." Faith, to me, by nature cannot be blind. The phraseology, "Blind faith," to me, is as illogical as "blind sight."

Trust.

An aptitude for belief in a concept that has no scientifically verifiable proofs associated with it.

The ability to blind oneself to other proofs backed by mountains of evidence in support of your belief in said unverifiable proof.

Irrational and illogical views on something that does not fit in the fabric of reality.

The urge to obscure the vision of others who are swayed or convinced by verifiable fact towards the mysterious and illogical path of "faith in god".

A biological impulse that Homo sapiens have evolved over the course of their history angled toward community building and mutual organization. This impulse manifests itself in an urge to gather in awe and worship under any number of thousands or hundreds of thousands of different "gods", "higher powers", "ancestors", "ghosts", "beings", "aliens", or any number of other various forms associated with higher forms of evolution, forces of good/evil, or creators and wardens of the human species. This belief system is manifest in what we call "faith".

Any of those will do.

Faith is the enemy of reason.

Faith means choosing to believe something which there is no rational reason to believe.

Having faith means choosing to be a sucker.

As a Christian, I have faith in God. What this means is that I believe God exists.

Faith is an interesting concept. I think I would like to best illustrate it this way:

At this very moment, as you are reading my post, you are awake (not asleep). Well...should it be stated that you have faith that you are awake. Actually, this "awakeness" that you are experiencing right now could actually be a dream. But, you have faith (that is you believe) that you are awake.

I understand the meanings of the words faith and hope, yet I don't REALLY understand them. Maybe because they are abstracts.

Faith I simply don't understand because people must have SOME reason to believe what they do... or is it a gut feeling only?

Hope is even trickier. It's like i wish for something to happen, that I can understand. But thinking it will, without any evidence? I don't get it.

You can certainly make this philosophical argument but in doing so you leaving behind scientifically falsifiable territory. It is easy to make an argument that our sense of moving through time is an illusion and that all of reality is just a brief flash of thought in the mind of god. But can you test it? Is there evidence? Can you establish whether it is true or false?

This is like the concept of free will, if our experience of reality is such that we seem to have free will, we might as well behave as if we have free will because the alternative is no more than an intellectual exercise. To me, faith feels like an artificial construct since it seems to have no basis in reality. Even if the universe were created by a conscious being, until we have evidence to support this concept, it seems best to make conclusion only from that which we actually know to be true. To have a faith in a thing for which there is no proof or even evidence risks coming to conclusions that are grossly in error and potentially damaging.

Taking a scientific approach still has the potential to create havoc and damage but at least it has a self-corrective feature in that anyone who is so inclined can test reality to verify or falsify another person's results. Faith, by not relying on evidence, provides no system by which errors can be corrected over time.

Good additional comments here. I was talking about this recently with a few acquaintances online that are theists. Most hardcore theists that I know actually define faith as the object of action. What they mean by this is that you don't act without the faith that it should bring a certain desired result. You don't KNOW that that result will work out, but that's why it is faith.

I don't find that level of abstraction very useful. You could exchange faith, hope, or expectation, in that usage.