Board index ‹ Faith and Knowledge

[Josh Stew]

What is faith?

[jimwalton]

Faith, according to the Bible, can be defined in various ways:

• Faith is "complete trust or confidence in someone or something." This is the commonplace use of the word apart from any religious significance, such as when a person has faith in a chair to support his weight or has faith in his employee to do a job well.
• Faith is "firm belief in something for which there is no proof." This is the definition unbelievers often use to ridicule believers, insisting that they, unlike religious people, trust only in that which is demonstrable. This is not the biblical definition of faith. (I've included it in this list because of its popular appeal, but it's not one of the ways the Bible defines faith.)
• Faith is "belief in, trust in, and loyalty to God." This is an explicitly religious definition, in many ways similar to the theological definition of faith as involving knowledge, assent, and trust. Faith here is pictured as going beyond belief in certain facts to include commitment to and dependence on God.
• Faith is "a system of religious beliefs." This is what is meant when one speaks of "the Protestant faith" or "the Jewish faith." What is largely in view here is a set of doctrines. The Bible uses the word in this way in passages such as Jude 3.

I use faith, as Hebrews 11.1 does, in the first sense: confidence based on evidence. Here's my explanation:

In the Bible, faith is evidentiary. I define Biblical faith as "making an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make that assumption reasonable." In my opinion, belief is always a choice, and is always based on evidence. When you sit down in a chair, you didn’t think twice about sitting down. You believe that the chair will hold you. Faith? Yes. You've sat in chairs hundreds of times, but you can't be absolutely sure it will hold you this time. Things do break on occasion. But you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for you to make that assumption, and you sit down. That's faith, and it was a conscious choice based on a reasonable body of evidence.

Almost all of life works this way because we can never know what lies ahead. Every time you turn a door knob you are expressing faith, because 10,000 times you've turned a door knob, and it opened the door. So you turn the knob and move forward. Does it always work that way? No. Sometimes you turn the knob and the door doesn't open. But you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for you to make that assumption, and you walk forward in faith.

We know chairs hold people. That's past experience and learning. We know turning door knobs open doors. We know that when we turn a key a car starts. But every time we turn a car key, we do it because we believe it will start. The evidence is compelling, and it was a conscious choice. We don't know for sure that the car will start, and unfortunately sometimes it doesn't. Then we use our knowledge to try to figure out what to do about it. We dial our phone (as an act of faith, assuming it will work and help us reach another person), and try to get help.

You'll notice in the Bible that evidence precedes faith. There is no "close your eyes and jump off a cliff" and good luck to ya! God appears to Moses in a burning bush before He expects him to believe. He gave signs to take back to Pharaoh and the Israelite people, so they could see the signs before they were expected to believe. So also through the whole OT. In the NT, Jesus started off with turning water into wine, healing some people, casting out demons, and then he taught them about faith. And they couldn't possibly understand the resurrection until there was some evidence to go on. The whole Bible is God revealing himself to us all—and I mean actually, not through some exercise of faith.

My faith in God is a conscious choice because I find the evidence compelling. It's an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for me to make that assumption. When you read the Bible, people came to Jesus to be healed because they had heard about other people who had been healed. They had seen other people whom Jesus had healed. People had heard him teach. Their faith was based on evidence. Jesus kept giving them new information, and they gained new knowledge from it. Based on that knowledge, they acted with more faith. People came to him to make requests. See how it works? My belief in God is based on my knowledge of the credibility of those writings, the logic of the teaching, and the historical evidence behind it all. The resurrection, for instance, has evidences that give it credibility that motivate me to believe in it. My faith in the resurrection is an assumption of truth based on enough evidence that makes it reasonable to hold that assumption. Jesus could have just ascended to heaven, the disciples figured out that he had prophesied it, and went around telling people He rose. But that's not what happened. He walked around and let them touch him, talk to him, eat with him, and THEN he said, "Believe that I have risen from the dead." The same is true for my belief in the existence of God, my belief that the Bible is God's word, and my understanding of how life works.

[Clueless]

Thank you for a very informative reply! I especially appreciate the biblical examples you gave to further express that, as you put it ‘evidence precedes faith’.

However, I respectfully disagree with your opinion that faith is a conscious choice. In short, we believe what we are convinced of. And I’ll utilize your chair analogy to further illuminate this point.

I sit in the chair because I’m convinced it will hold me. Yes there is evidence in the form of the history I have with chairs but I’m not actively contemplating all this data to determine wether or not it will hold me. Even as children we don’t wait for the evidence. We climb, and if we fall that’s okay but we sit because we are convinced it’s okay to do so. There’s no deeper logical examination into this action. The same with turning a door knob. Unless you are a very anxious person you don’t deeply contemplate these actions, you just do them.

[jimwalton]

> I disagree with your opinion that faith is a conscious choice. In short, we believe what we are convinced of.

Hmm, I'm not understanding. When i become convinced of something, I am making a conscious choice. It is our ability to reason that allows us to consider the data, recognize patterns, give weight to evidence, deliberate over plausible conclusions, and then make a conscious choice about which hypothesis subscribes best to what we consider to be truth.

> I’m not actively contemplating all this data to determine wether or not it will hold me

I disagree. If we came upon a shape we didn't recognize as a chair, we would instantly wonder if it would hold us or not. We might even test it with our hand, giving a little bit of weight, and then a lot, and then tentatively sit on it with part of our weight until we chose to trust it based on the evidence. But when I see something I recognize in a chair, my mind comprehends what I'm seeing, "instantly" contemplates all the data (structure, quality, form, material), and I sit, having assessed it will hold me just fine. It may not, as we have all known chairs that break, but I exercise faith when I sit down.

> Even as children we don’t wait for the evidence.

It's true that children don't have the depth of resources and evidence to make the same decisions based on analyses and experience as older children, teens, and adults do. Children have a much more less-established view of reality.

[Realm Research]

> I define Biblical faith as "making an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make that assumption reasonable."

What criteria do you use to determine that a belief is "reasonable"?

> In my opinion, belief is always a choice, and is always based on evidence.

By choice do you mean you advocate doxastic voluntarism (https://iep.utm.edu/doxastic-voluntarism/)?

[jimwalton]

> What criteria do you use to determine that a belief is "reasonable"?

A belief is reasonable when there is enough evidence to consider the object of that belief true. When you sit down in a chair, you didn’t think twice about sitting down. You believe that the chair will hold you. Faith? Yes. You've sat in chairs hundreds of times, but you can't be absolutely sure it will hold you this time. Things do break on occasion. But you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for you to make that assumption, and you sit down.

> By choice do you mean you advocate doxastic voluntarism?

There are some beliefs we choose (such as whether Trump is an idiot; whether Biden is an idiot; whether Hillary is a criminal; whether Biden broke the law with Hunter, etc.). We weigh the evidence and make a decision: doxastic voluntarism. There are some beliefs we don't choose: that the sun rises every day. One cannot simply persuade oneself to believe something other than reality.