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Religious faith is a concept that has been defined in various ways, from trust to the biblical definition found in Hebrews:
"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
The elusive nature of its definition makes it unclear as to what religious faith truly is. Can anyone shed some light on its true nature? Furthermore, according to the bible, why should it be considered better evidence than things that can be seen?
Faith is trust in something that cannot be seen, and it's based largely on spiritual experiences, not tangible evidence. It can be tested like trust can, but the proof is often spiritual experiences more than documentable, verifiable evidence.
But faith shouldn't be based purely on these spiritual experiences, but also include reason and empirical evidence. So faith fills the gaps in our empirical evidence. If you don't believe in the divine, that's replaced by educated guesses and intuition, and the religious person would say that intuition is the guiding force of the divine.
That's certainly one perspective. I personally think it's faulty, but I'm not really interested in getting into a debate on the plausibility of the divine, my intention here was to discuss the original topic about what faith is.
You can absolutely choose to live with the assumption that God doesn't exist, but you'll need to fill that void (the things science can't empirically test) with something else, likely with a healthy dose of "intuition." Secular humanism is a partial replacement, at least for morality and meaning.
I think secular humanism, like any secular philosophy or set of philosophies, can and should be used by religious people to help establish the boundaries of their faith and what is and isn't knowable through science. As a religious person, I believe morality is derived from our divine nature (i.e. we're all God's creations and should be treated as equals), and that rules out some secular philosophies (i.e. Objectivism) which I find to be natural conclusions when eliminating the divine from the equation.
Faith can be tested on an individual level, but that article smacks of testing God, which goes against biblical doctrine (see Matthew 4:7).
A good scientific study is a double blind study, and the study claims to be testing patients, when they're actually testing God. If God is all-knowing, God would certainly be aware of the study, thus breaking the double blind nature of the study.
And that's the problem with testing God, and why any form of test should be on an individual basis for their own personal relationship with God (that individual test is consistent with the Bible). And that's also why reason and empirical evidence are so important, to help separate what is likely from God from nonsense.
Give an example of a test of something intangible,
No, that is how we believe in anything. To do otherwise is gullibility or put in other words, deluding yourself.
You don't know what an atheist is do you? Tell me, do you see any difference between the statements I don't believe in god and I don't believe god exists? The difference should be obvious. I never said the second, I did say the first.
ok, This is your one and only warning as a moderator, put that Christian bullshit aside. That was a double-blind test funded by the Tempelton Foundation to test the efficacy of prayer. It was not a test of god and it is shameful that you would try to make it out to be so.
Whether living by the precepts of your religion helps you feel happier, or at least helps you perceive yourself as happier (see pew research study on this). So you could have faith that living by the precepts of your religion will help you feel happier. But it's hard to tell if the results are genuine (i.e. does living a religion cause happiness? Or does feeling like you're living a religion cause happiness? Or are religious people more likely to lie to claim their religion is the cause?).
As a practical example, look at Buddhism, where many (most? all?) schools encourage meditation as a spiritual exercise with the intended result of achieving inner peace and unification with the universe. Practitioners have faith that meditation will bring them closer to that goal, and that faith is strengthened the more they experience results.
There are secular reasons to explain these of course (e.g. networking effect of attending religious services, value of rest, etc). The difference is the reason they're practiced can build faith in the divine instead of just trust in a practice.
And some external tests:
I imagine these tests would not be definitive though, since it's hard, if not impossible, to establish causation for subjective things like "happiness" and "satisfaction."
I disagree. If we don't have much evidence and need to come up with an explanation, we guess. And if our guesses are proven consistent as new evidence becomes available, our confidence in that guess grows.
I'll use one of my favorite allegories here, Plato's allegory of the cave. It's not a perfect fit here, but I think it's applicable. There are two perspectives I'd like to look at:
Both find it difficult to believe things they haven't seen, and give a lot of value to things they can see. Both need to make guesses as to what's going on given the limited facts they have. The difference imo is in the type of evidence they're willing to accept to change their beliefs.
The study was to determine whether prayer helps in recovery. There's two ways (maybe more) this could be interpreted:
The second is probably the intent here, but it's easy to see the first get misconstrued (esp. since they had a group that got the placebo), and it seemed from context that's what you were doing. I apologize if I was putting words in your mouth, but that was my interpretation.
So, if we assume the second was the intent, all the study proves is that knowing someone is praying for you doesn't really change recovery outcomes, since the difference was within margin of error (the article's words, I didn't look into the methodology). It doesn't prove prayer to be ineffective in total (again, can't control for God), just that knowing someone is praying for you doesn't do anything. And the study also fell short in that it doesn't examine impact to the people doing the praying, since much of the point of praying for someone is to help the person doing the prayer (it's a small act of care for someone else).
All that word salad to say there are no examples of any tests of intangibles. Wouldn't it have been simpler to just say that?
You can disagree all you like but believing in anything without evidence is nothing short of gullibility. And before you pull out the oft-touted baloney that belief is a choice, go submerge yourself in a bathtub and try to breathe because you choose to believe that you can, then tell me that.
Once more, the study was a double-blind study on the effects of intercessory prayer and the result was that there was no effect found more than chance. SPEAKING AS A MOD, ONE MORE ATTEMPT TO CLAIM THIS WAS A TEST OF GOD WILL RESULT IN A TEMPORARY BAN.
He was told to repost the comment without his passive-aggressive last sentence. Guess he doesn't want to so it's time to lock this thread.