My response to this would be yes. The scriptures have much to say about how faith can ebb and flow. So, it can be tentative for certain. People legitimately gain and lose faith.
You had faith in the chair to keep you safe, and it unexpectedly tilted toward the fire. Did you lose your faith in the chair? Or did you lose your faith in how the chair was being used? This is very important to recall, I believe, when evaluating reason in terms of keeping or abandoning faith. As with anything important, it is good to not overreact and draw a false conclusion. That said, if there were concrete evidence that, for instance, Jesus did not die on the cross, or was not raised from the dead, then Christian faith is worthless. The Bible says the same.
This is where belief (the way I see it) comes in to play. It is unreasonable to think that people are raised from the dead, apart from the miraculous. But The Resurrection is reasonable to consider because of the myriad reasons shared here.
Should faith be more persistent? In my experience, this comes as a function of pursuing faith, studying God’s word, praying, and seeing what happens next. Many of us see that faith becomes more persistent. It is not inherently so.
Respectfully, I disagree. First, I’m not talking about “feelings” per se. I’m talking about intuition. You are going to interview the candidate and ask questions. Based upon the responses (the words themselves), the tone, etc., you are going to make a determination. Choosing a restaurant is low stakes stuff. Trusting your babies to a stranger is as critical as it gets. To think that you would not use every indication, concrete or intangible, is silly. And, Grandma is not an option in this scenario.
Faith can become solid and persistent. Your chair, for instance, the one you sit in every day which has never let you down, has not become structurally deficient, been tampered with or sabotaged, warrants your persistent faith.
Christians’ faith can be that way, too, and actually should be, with or without extended experience. God is our Father, and like you (presumably) trusted your human father when you were small, so we too should trust God. God wants us to be childlike (not childish ).
I have considered many explanations, its just that I decided (reluctantly) that the supernatural explanation was the best description of my reality.
Yes, I do know that. I also know that certain drugs can produce similar effects as I referenced previously. All I can say is that I had already read the Bhagavad Gita before I read the Bible and I didn’t have any response like that. The only piece of literature that had produced anything like that kind of response prior to that was The Lord of the Rings. However I have had lesser but similar experiences like that since then when reading Christian literature. ( and interestingly, Sophies World)
Yes, the faith is validated if it is place din the correct object of the faith.
Yes, we can use reason to determine what to put our faith in, but even if we don’t use reason, we can still put our faith in the right things. Even if we don’t use reason, we can put our faith in the wrong things. Even if our reasoning is extremely bad, we might still chose to put our faith in the right thing. Faith isn’t really validated by how we decide to put our faith in things. It is rather, validated, by what we chose to put our faith in.
This is very much how “trust” works. My son, for example, is a toddler and trusts my wife and I. He doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter, and he certainly didn’t arive at this trust by reason. However, I’d like to think his trust is well placed. That is what makes it valid. If I was a crummy parent and father, perhaps he might trust us, but that would be poorly placed trust. How he comes to trust, or not trust, me has little to do with it.
Both sides are very important, and I’m glad you mentioned this Joshua. Trusting in the parents is shown to be valid over time. As well, trusting in a bad parent can be shown to be invalid over time. So it is with God. There are several choices out there. All are equally choices, but all may not be equally valid.
No. I can’t really see how atheism enters into it.
Why reluctantly?
Do you think other people’s experiences have a similar cause to your own? If so, how can you draw a Christian message from that experience? If not, why not? And why should you respond to Sophie’s World in a similar way? Is that not evidence that the Christian God is an unlikely explanation even for the totality of your experiences?
I’m also interested in your specific encounter with Exodus. To repeat,
I think you are confusing epistimology (how we know it’s true, which involves evidence and reason) with faith (what we are placing our trust in, which is independent of what we know is true). Is that possible?
There’s always an option. Stay at home. Take the kids. We never used a babysitter
I agree to disagree. I’m not going on “intuition” about it, that’s for sure. I’d need tangible reasons to trust the person.
But how else can we choose what to put our faith in besides a process of deciding? If how we decide is flawed, then we will have problems.
Who does not possess complete faculties of reason by virtue of his age. Small children don’t have a choice who to trust. Trust can’t be well or poorly placed in such a situation.
I don’t quite understand what faith is, so i wouldn’t rule it out How is what we place our trust in independent of what we know is true? Should we place our trust willy-nilly and then see how it turns out? Even then the implications of our trust are entirely connected to what is true.
Is there any point where you stop using reason to decide between them and rely solely on a faith independent of reason?
It’s not like that… it’s not a conscious decision to switch from one to the other. I’m sorry… there’s an inherent inability to properly articulate much of this, but not for a lack of trying.
I totally get that you’re saying it’s not like that. I just can’t see how it’s different than ordinary belief in that case. Thanks for trying! I’m trying to listen and process as well.
Thanks, and regarding the babysitter, I think we were talking past one another a bit… Again, may not have been a good analogy either. The point I was making, upon which we’d both agree, is that in speaking to a candidate, if we had a negative intuition because of something that this person said, did, or how they responded, that would not be “concrete” like the words in their responses. And that intuition, in that very critical situation, would be taken seriously despite the fact that it was not concrete data per se. Or, as you say, call Grandma!
The internet is fairly amazing – I remembered the gist of this analogy, but I did not remember the source. Hitting upon a reasonable set of search criteria, I found it without too much difficulty… from a book that I read sometime in the latter half of the 1970’s: He is There and He is not Silent. (Does that sound familiar, @jongarvey? )
Anyway, pertinent to the understanding the distinction between faith and belief, here is a screenshot of the analogy cited in another book (which looks like it might be worthwhile in its own right) as displayed in Google Books, followed by the URL:
Interesting. If I had a negative intuition, I might reject the person regardless of any other evidence. If I was presented with two nearly equivalent options, I might choose one on the basis of a positive intuition.
So OK, it’s not tangible, but limited. If I used intuition far beyond those parameters in this case, would that be wise? If I may ask, what’s the connection/analogy to faith again?
The analogy doesn’t help me though. It seems like a person proceeding on the basis of reasoned belief, in an unusual desperate situation with very poor prospects.
It is. The faith and trust part comes in in his letting go, ‘blindly’.
I certainly do not believe in the ‘blind faith’ that is so often bandied about. The father/child analogy certainly is still illustrative – the childlike faith in the beginning grows at maturity into a reasoned and reinforced faith, but trust is still involved. Children necessarily start with a childlike faith.
Oils brain cells of rusty memory… remembers borrowing a number of Schaeffer books back in the day… title seems vaguely familiar.
My only contribution to the thread is surprise at how the more skeptical posters seem to retain an outmoded attachment to positivism. How can one not realize nowadays just how much of everything we “know” is based on faith in some authority?
Children, as Josh @swamidass pointed out, can still have a true faith. And I echo my assertion that indoctrination is a good thing, if the doctrine is true.
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