Thursday, March 16, 2017

Faith is neither scientific nor ubiquitous

     Faith in a particular god (or God or GOD) is tantamount to many religious beliefs. The bible most notably defines faith in Hebrews 11 (NIV): 

“Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see”.  

     In addition to this, many theologians and modern christian apologists (professional defenders of religion) have (re)defined faith in the following way: "the remaining bit of confidence for a belief when evidence doesn’t provide 100% certainty.". In doing so, modern apologists have seemingly accomplished a major goal of making faith an integral part of non-religious beliefs as well.  The idea of faith is now synonymous with a ubiquitous scientific concept: “confidence”. As we recognize, only deductive claims (that are both sound and valid) can be known with 100% certainty. All scientific claims are known with something less than 100% certainty (albeit 99.999999999999+%) due to the requirement of evidential falsifiability. Because of this fact, the apologist can now assert that faith is integral aspect of science itself. 

     To many this may feel like a frustrating “checkmate” position as this massive “movement of the goalposts” actually seems to be reasonable. In reality, this doesn’t present a problem whatsoever as the simple question remains:

What is the actual evidence for the god belief? 


     No matter how much confidence (or this newly redefined faith) we have in a belief, our beliefs cannot be rationally considered as Truth unless there is actual evidence to support the claim. In other words, no matter how faith is defined, Truth requires evidence. 


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