We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Do you think that people you know who don't have faith in God have faith in someone or something else?
6 comments:
PO said:
I would say that human beings are fervently seeking inspiration. Especially when it comes to who we are. So, yes. Identity is always feeding on outside sources.
Thanks PO. If there's no neutral space, then it would seem that faith in someone or something is going to be part of being a human agent. If that's the case, recognizing what and who we have faith in will be important.
Jason said:
Whether or not we make faith claims explicitly, we all go about our day living through implicit answers to at least some of life's big questions, particularly axiological claims. Is there a purpose to life? Are there really morally good and bad actions? If so, where do those standards come from? What kinds of things are inherently valuable (charity, tolerance of others, selflessness, scientific endeavors, pursuit of Truth)? Furthermore, at a very basic level we all have at least some faith in our faculties of reason, our basic senses, and certain obvious metaphysical truths (other minds exist, the past is real, etc). It seems to me that none of these things listed can be assumed without some level of faith, so I'd argue that withholding faith in someONE does not negate faith in someTHING. Once again, we run into the either or dilemma where faith is taken to stand in the opposite corner of the ring from reason.
Thanks Jason. Interesting points and questions. I agree about the basic level of faith you mention, and refer to this as ontological. That is, all people we know have faith as a feature of being human. But it seems to me this is not a faith that we choose, as it's just part of who we are. In this sense we cannot choose to not have faith on the basic or general level. There is, however, faith that is a choice. We do choose to put faith in a particular someone or something or another particular someone or something. Since we don't have complete knowledge, we choose faith referents - more or less consciously. If this is the case, there is no non-choice option, but this cannot be reduced to the ontological.
Jason said:
I see your point about faith-by-choice being categorically different from the ontological brand of faith. I'd be very interested to meet a person who has successfully avoided any sort of non-ontological faith claims. I assume that, although they have different origins, these two kinds of faiths are both (virtually) inevitable in praxis. Do you think that's a fair claim? I think the term "faith" gets a bit of a strange treatment when talking about choices of faith, similar to the way that "theory" has a different connotation in science than in, for instance, crime solving. Faith can mean "affirming a proposition that seems to be more likely than not," in a probabilistic sense. Perhaps that would be included in the ontological category as that kind of evaluation is part of being human.
Yes, I think that's a good assumption. Further, if faith is an "affirming" it would seem to me that it is going beyond the ontological in that I'm not just 'having' but taking a stand (choice) for a "proposition that seems to be more likely than not." See Spiritual Rhythms on November 7 for more on faith.
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