April 15, 2002

  • Faith, Hope, and Evidence


    It never hurts to know what you're talking about when you sit down to write an essay.  Sometimes, I get ahead of myself a little.  So I thought it might be fun to go to my dictionary and see what I could learn about some words that I like to use.


    Faith (fayth) n. reliance or trust in a person or thing


    Evidence (ev-i-dens) n. anything that establishes a fact or provides reason to believe something


    Last week I defined faith off the top of my head as "belief based on evidence".  From the definitions I found in my handy dandy Oxford American Dictionary - I see that my definition was a tautology.  It is impossible to separate belief from evidence if evidence is anything that provides a reason to believe.


    I think that we have grown accustomed to a much narrower view of evidence.  We think of evidence as being limited to the material exhibits offered in a court of law.  Or we may think of evidence as the result of a particular scientific experiment or mathematical equation.  But evidence includes far more than than these.  For example, behavior constitutes evidence.  If I say that I have an agreement with you to pay x amount for a particular item, and you cash my check for that amount, our behavior testifies to our agreement even though there is no written contract.


    In my comments section last week, someone quoted the Bible verse, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."  In what way does faith, an abstract concept, constitute substance or provide a reason to believe?  Faith becomes substantive when it is translated into action.  Faith goes beyond intellectual assent to a proposition.  I can say all day long that I believe something to be true, but the only way I can prove that I believe it is to act on my belief.


    We hear people all the time who say they believe one thing but prove through their actions that they believe another.  We even have sayings that reflect our awareness of this principle, "put your money where your mouth is, put up or shut up" - I'm sure you can think of more and better examples.  I can say all day long that I believe my chair wil support my wieght, but if I never sit on the chair my lack of action calls into question whether I ever believed my statement.


    With every experience our attitudes are either confirmed or challenged.  When our attitudes are challenged we need to examine the belief that underlies that attitude.  Have we misplaced our faith?  Or have we misinterpreted the principle?  Have we imagined a cause and effect relationship where none truly exists?  Is it a general principle that we've tried to apply to a specific circumstance?  How many times have parents in Christian churches heard the proverb "train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."  Not only the Bible but modern psychology endorses this principle.  In general, children will live in accordance with the way they were taught and raised.  But the Bible never promises that a particular child will behave in a particular way.  On the contrary, the Bible teaches that individuals make their own choices and that every person has free will.  The parent who blames God for his or her child's rebellion, has chosen to misinterpret complementary spiritual principles.


    It may be in there, but I've never found a verse in the Bible that says, "Leave the thinking up to someone else, just feel confident that everything will work out."  I have found a verses that say "love the Lord with all your heart, soul, MIND, and spirit", "come let us REASON together," "always be prepared to give the REASON for the hope you have." 


    Faith is not a blind emotional state conjured up as armor against harsh reality.  Faith is the reasonable and willful consistency between our actions and values.  Faith is not grounded in desire for the future, it is rooted in past experience. 

Comments (19)

  • I wish you could talk to MY Mother...we have these discussions about a friend of hers almost daily, and it gives ME a migrane, for what she and her friend have faith in is not only NOT correct in the literal reading of the verses they choose to use for "proof", but it is not correct in the spirit of what is said either. And they both string faith, hope and charity together till I could scream. Of course, they may have evidence of things I have NOT seen, but if they do they are keeping it very quiet!

  • You seem to always be so content with your life and in tune with your feelings and beliefs!  This is wonderful!

  • I wish I could tell you how much your blogs mean to me.  You are inspirational, and so very understanding.  You have restored my hope in religious blogging this week. 

  • Oh, I am loving this.  I hope you continue for a while in this vein.

    KB

  • Truth is not about belief, though... or is it?  Is the act of proving something is true as much about believing that you are providing evidence that is (irrationally) conclusive? 

    If your beliefs are built up by your experience, through some kind of confirmation process, and your experiences are guided by your beliefs, then isn't what you have there a basically self-referential existence?  And isn't that fundamentally what all human beings have in the end?

    I'd like to refer you back to my apples/oranges/bananas analogy... what you say here tends to make me believe there is no fruit but bananas.  Too squishy and subjective for me. 

    Got to have... my... orange juice!

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  • A very good way of approaching life is to find out how many different beliefs there are on Earth...and pool all of these resources together to form one gigantic whole. (Take value from all forms; not just one.)

    Christianity - and I'm not condemning anyone in particular, just drawing parallels - has a habit of calling people Christians...in other words, just the fact of being called Christian means that they are already perceived as being a good people...so, they never have to make any groundwork towards improving themselves. (They have, so to speak, already arrived.)

    There are more values in this world than can be totally encompassed within the Christian faith...for, what about the people in this world who are not Christian, by faith - do Christians forever ignore them as misguided - and going down the wrong path in life?

    In the long run, the path is irrelevant - it is how you relate and care for people. Some people have no faith at all - and that condition is the worse way to approach life...for it leads nowhere.

    I think that anyone with a brain will realise that there is some kind of divine intelligence at work in the universe...for how do all the planets revolve at different speeds? How did the universe come into being? What created the magnetic pull of the universe? (It didn't all happen by magic - it was by design.) That is why atheism is nonsense!

    Just my opinion!

  • I read it. I'm thinking on it. I'm sure you're very aware of my lack of faith in the first place though.

  • This is a facinating blog that made me think alot. I like how you say "I can say all day long that I believe something to be true, but the only way I can prove that I believe it is to act on my belief. "

    I've thought about principals that I believe yet have a hard time living. For instance, Loving your neighbor. I feel very strongly this is a correct principal, in essence I have faith in it yet sometimes I live it, sometimes I struggle yet succed and sometimes I flat out don't. Is this because I don't really have faith in it, or perhaps am lacking sufficient faith.

    If I keep trying to live this principal, progressivley getting better and better and living it wholely will my faith through watching the benefits and outcomes of living this principal actually grow? I believe so.

    Does at some point, in any particular principal lived, does faith become knowledge and no longer faith?

    Great Blog

  • Great blog to return from vacation to.

  • Ah - much better.

    Although blanktyblank makes a good point, too. (where have I heard that sort of thing before?)

  • Great post. You really opened my mind here and made me think.

  • Excellent.  And people are allowed to have faith in whatever they chose to believe in and hope for.  What you believe to be true and have experienced as such may never be taken from you -- it resides within your experience.   Well, anyway, good treatise.

  • Wow   this was quite a blog. I enjoyed it so much! Thanks for taking the time to give us all great reading.   Wonderful!

  • I get it - now I need to lay down.

  • Faith is the reasonable and willful consistency between our actions and values... wow, I have never seen a better definition of this abstract word.

    I've got to start coming around here more often.

  • Grioghair, just because you can't wrap your mind around the idea that the universe might be eternally creating and destroying itself without a form of consciousness doesn't make the idea of God inevitable, any more than the contrary.  The "truth" about this may be unknowable.  We are limited creatures.

  • Very good idea, looking up the works...

    I just looked up the meaning of life. It was less than I had hoped for.

  • I believe that faith may be informed by past experience, but is BASED on PRESENT experience.

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