Is Faith ever a good reason to accept something as true?

JulesKorngold

Argument Topic: Faith Can Be Rational

@Happy_Killbot said:  Faith is irrational, and it is never a good reason to accept something as true.
From the Gemini chatbot:

Faith can be a reason to accept something as true, but whether it's a good reason depends on the context. Here's a breakdown of different perspectives:

• Religious Faith: In religion, faith is central. It allows believers to accept tenets that may not be provable through reason or evidence alone. Faith provides a sense of purpose, meaning, and connection to something larger than oneself.

• Personal Faith: We often have faith in people or ideas based on trust and past experiences. For instance, you might have faith in a friend's good intentions even without concrete proof. This faith can be crucial for building strong relationships.

• Limitations of Knowledge: The world is complex, and we can't always have all the answers. Sometimes, faith allows us to believe in things that science hasn't fully explained yet.

Here are some points to consider when evaluating faith as a reason to accept something as true:

• Strength of Evidence: Is there any supporting evidence for the belief, even if not conclusive?
• Potential Harm: Could blindly accepting something on faith lead to negative consequences?
• Openness to New Information: Is there a willingness to re-evaluate beliefs if new evidence emerges?

Ultimately, the value of faith depends on the individual and the situation. In some cases, it can be a powerful source of strength and conviction. However, it's important to be aware of its limitations and to remain open to new information.

just_sayin

Argument Topic: Faith is used everyday

Because we don't know the future and don't have infinite knowledge, we operate on faith everyday.  If you drive a car, unless you tested every part every time you got into it, you operated in faith that it would work.  If you rode a bus, train, or subway - you operated in faith that it would get you to your destination.  Got on an elevator?  That was an act of faith.  Even if there was a plaque telling you it was inspected and passed, you do not have personal knowledge of the elevator's current condition.  If you turned on a light, you operated in faith, it is unlikely that you inspected the electrical lines coming into your home, the electrical lines, or breaker box before you turned the light on.  We would not be able to function without faith.  

The question is if our faith has a reasonable basis.  I would argue that my faith as a Christian has a more reasonable basis because of the evidence of the resurrection, than the faith of an atheist.  Whereas many atheist's claim, that life came from non-life,  which has no compelling evidentiary basis, and the science we do know strongly suggests problems with this and that it is not possible.  Yet, atheists believe life came from non-life, even though the evidence suggests that is not possible.  I just don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

MayCaesar

I am going to point out what I see as two flaws in your argument, as well as suggest an elaboration to one of your points.

First, from reading your comment, it is not clear to me what exactly you mean by "faith". The closest part to a definition you provided was this: "the mean by which someone has absolute conviction and trust that their own position is correct". This still makes it unclear what it is exactly; furthermore, there could be multiple entities satisfying the highlighted part. Unless you define any such mean as "faith", which would make the term mean something very different than how it is routinely used (for example, I have absolute conviction that 2+2=4 - is it an example of faith?).
Personally, I do not think that anyone ever trusts anything for no external reason. I think that faith is holding a belief solely on the basis of authority of its promoter. If you believe that something is true because your parents told you it is true, or your professor told you it is true, or your favorite fantasy book told you it is true - and not because you have thought it through and understood why it must be true yourself - then you are operating on faith. Adults operating on faith basically have never grown out of having to have a guardian telling them how they must live their life: they have never acquired mental independence. You see some of them saying things like "without religion you cannot have an objective basis for morality" - much like little children sometimes wonder, "When I grow up and no longer live with my parents, how am I going to know what I should do?" So in this respect they are still children.

Second, it is not exactly correct that "There are many possible beliefs and potential realities, that accepting any of them as true, even in the case of near certainty, is statistically speaking, almost definitely incorrect.". Different realities can have different probabilities assigned to them, and to one who holds a firm belief in something the reality in which that belief is true is obviously much more likely than any of the alternative realities (there could be one reality that is true with probability 80%, and a billion other realities each of which is true with tiny probability). In Bayesian statistics, one updates the strength of their beliefs based on observations: if you originally thought that the chance that your boss slept with his secretary was 50% and then you found packs of condoms of the same brand both in your boss'es office and his secretary's, then the chance has grown well above 50%. You do not have to disprove many other possibilities to become convinced that this possibility is most definitely true. There could be a billion of plausible explanations of how a few of your coworkers could be lying about the boss'es affair and how those packs of condoms made it into their offices at the same time (for one, the coworkers may have planted them) - yet the most obvious explanation appears to be by far the most probable one. At some point that explanation may become so likely that it makes sense to just accept it as unquestionable truth, since the added benefit of considering the outlandishly unlikely possibility that it is not the truth is far outweighed by the mental cost required to consider it.
I suppose your argument must implicitly rely on the above not being the case: on the evidence being far from sufficient to achieve such certainty, yet still accepting it as certainty. Yet that still does not warrant the conclusion that it "is statistically speaking, almost definitely incorrect". It can be very likely to be correct even in the absence of very strong evidence, as in the space of all possibilities those in which this is the case add up to higher probability than those in which it is not.
To illustrate that, suppose I were to tell you, "Yesterday I walked on Mars". Even in the absence of any other information you can be very much certain that my claim is false and that I walked on Earth, not on Mars. In the space of all possibilities there could be infinity of possibilities in which I somehow did walk on Mars, but none of them seems to square with what you know about the world.

Now, to the aforementioned elaboration. How to think about the space of possible realities is a major topic in philosophy. Various notions of proximity of two realities have been suggested. Strictly speaking, only one reality can be true, and any other reality would be false. However, intuitively, we can think of realities being very similar to ours, and those being very dissimilar. The reality in which everything is exactly as it is here, except my first name is spelled slightly differently, does not appear meaningfully different from ours, while the reality in which we all live on Mars, our bodies are made of titanium, and we cast spells daily like in Harry Potter books seems quite far away from ours. It makes sense to think of the probability distribution of the space of different realities as being concentrated in the neighborhood of our reality, and dropping off as we move away from it. This is important when it comes to performing extrapolation into unknown data regions. If I work for a company making jewelry for women that wants to estimate how many potential clients it can rely on if it expands onto the Vietnamese market, I certainly cannot know the exact number - but I can make a good estimate of it. Saying that company could have 40 million potential clients is reasonable, while 40 billion is not: the latter would require the reality to be quite different from what we know it to be. But is 40 million a better estimate than 35 million or 45 million? Suppose I am not allowed to look up any data: the company wants my estimation right now, within the next few seconds. Here we have to think about proximity of realities and our ability to estimate it. I can see the realities in which either of the three estimates would be the best one as possible in the relative informational vacuum I am in, but it is obvious to me that 40 billion almost certainly cannot be.

But let us not stop there and apply this to religion. This is where it gets interesting. There are two possibilities:
1. The reality in which god exists is dramatically different from the reality in which it does not.
2. The reality in which god exists is not very different from the reality in which it does not.
If 1 is true (as many theists claim it is), then there must be pretty easy experiments one can perform which would beyond a reasonable doubt demonstrate that god either exists or does not. Lack of such experiments is quite telling, and this possibility almost certainly has to be rejected.
Therefore 2 must be true (as many other theists claim it is). But if 2 is true, if the difference between worlds with and without god is fairly small, then what does positing the god exists accomplish other than unnecessarily clutter our model of the world? Suppose god actually existing and one praying to it every day has no effect other than increase their life expectancy by 0.1%: 0.1% is not 0%, but it is much less of a gain than the cost of daily prayer is. That is even if that is true, praying to god daily is extremely impractical. I do not think I have ever heard this argument from anyone: if anything, the opposite argument constituting some variation of Pascal's Wager is frequently made - but that argument seems to rely on 1 being true, and we have already considered and rejected that possibility.

Same can be applied to any other example of operating on faith, including the Wall Street executives you mentioned. If there is a large difference between their faith-driven beliefs being and not being true, then they should not need faith to hold them, or they must be strongly incentivized to change them. And if there is none, then, when it comes to this, they are just ivory tower philosophers, unnecessarily cluttering their mind with extra assumptions. It does not seem to be possible for me for operating on faith to be practically beneficial, despite the popular claim that people operating on faith are generally happier than those who do not operate on it. Happiness itself is relative, and someone may genuinely believe that they are happier than someone else because someone else's experiences are unavailable to them. If there was a way to somehow put everyone's psychological state on the same scale, then I would expect faith-driven people to be much more miserable than people not operating on faith systematically. I think it was Feynman who said that the mystery is what makes it all worth it, while certainty is boring.

jack

Happy_Killbot said:

Is Faith ever a good reason to accept something as true?

Hello Happy:

Lemme ask you this..  Where do we come from?  People of faith have a good reason.  And, who am I to tell them that they're wrong??  Especially since I don't know myself..

excon