What is faith?

If you have a faith, please share why you believe if you care to.

I do have a faith, yes. I'm learning to think more for myself about it than I used to and I blog a bit about that on the website I'm making and developing. I've added a link for an article called God is Good, the Small Print...if you'd like to read it. 

http://earlyinthemorning.co.uk/index.php/a-walk-of-faith/god-is-good-the-small-print

Yet there are lots of religious people who don't feel tied to a particular time scale who still believe in a creator. It should be obvious even to atheists that belief in a creator is more than a byproduct of a belief in life arising over a short time frame.

As a systems biologists let me asure you life is mechanistic. It is the metaphorical mechano parts. It's just that when you add enough parts the complexity makes things look a lot more flexible and unpredictable.

Modifying existing life, which is what the combination of random mutation and natural selection, that is evolution, does. 

Scientists have created very basic synthetic genomes, which they have placed in existing 'empty cells' to create a form of synthetic life. However, this is more like making your own Meccano parts from sheet steel and bolting them together, than creating life de novo.

The missing dimension in literalist faith is time. If you understand how long a billion years really is, then imagining that complex self-replicating chemical systems, which is what life is, could both arise and develop into myriads of forms is easy. If you have a literalist faith then you have to believe that the benevolent God, who created the buttercup, also created the tarantula hawk wasp that paralyses spiders, so that its offspring has living meat to eat and the onchocerciasis worms that cause blindness in children.

Martin said:

On a daily basis she changed the genetic make up of bacteria, introducing foreign genes into them, that changed their characteristics (they would synthesise proteins derived from other organisms).

In fairness to her the argument for intelligent design is hardly weakened by the fact that as a scientist you are yourself designing new life.

I think that individual faith is somewhat reliant on the ability to compartmentalise the mind. I'm a scientist, and worked in 'genetic engineering', I am also a Darwinist and know enough cosmology to be aware of the stupendous vastness of space and time. I do not have a compartmentalised mind, so this scientific knowledge makes it essentially impossible for me to have any religious faith. However, I had a colleague who was, and is, a fundamentalist Christian, with a belief in the literal truth of the Bible. She therefore could not acknowledge any validity in evolution. On a daily basis she changed the genetic make up of bacteria, introducing foreign genes into them, that changed their characteristics (they would synthesise proteins derived from other organisms). Though the changeability/mutability of organisms was demonstrated to her every day, she refused to acknowledge that, even over the eons of time science recognised, that similar changes could occur outside the laboratory, in nature. Her mind was completely compartmentalised, so that anything external, however logically valid, that would tend to make her challenge her beliefs was rigorously kept out of that part of her mind in which her faith resides.

Anything that takes away the belief we have in the characters being 'real'.

Oddly, spelling/typographical mistakes in novels do this for me too..

Yes, I find that jarring too. Now that computerised typesetting is so easy the arts of editing and proof-reading seem to have died. I was reading a recent history book about the Roman emperor Constantius II, when I came to the third or fourth mangled sentence, that I could extract no sense out of, I just gave up - I gave it a stinking review on Amazon!

My father-in-law was a print worker, he could fluently read type that was back-to-front and upside down. 

Faith is a promise..

Once you realise that we have much smaller minds than we think, and that creation / the universe / reality is WAY bigger and has far more sides than any single person can comprehend, and that religions are an attempt to explain something that is bigger than we can truly understand then different faiths become much easier to see as like your own.

Heck I was sitting in Waseems house yesterday looking at the evidence dotted about of their faith, and it was reassuring to note that we believe in the same God really, and hold much of the same shared Ideals, and I was happier sitting their as I am in some of the godless houses I have to endure sometimes. 

Martin said:

"The suspension of disbelief"

I remember that from my 'A' level English lit.

I use the phrase 'the suspension of the suspension of disbelief' when, for example, a character in a film etc talks to the camera.

Anything that takes away the belief we have in the characters being 'real'.

Oddly, spelling/typographical mistakes in novels do this for me too..

IrishInManchesterUK said:

Latin is known to be a language that is very powerful against demonic and satanic forces (just like Arabic in Islam)

Believed, not known ...

I really love those ideas.

I hope you come back!

out_of_step said:

I see faith as individual so can't see how it can be applied to everyone

Well, if we take a look at the 'major' religions, they talk about what will happen after death.

We surely can't all go to different places, have different post-life experiences?

Also, their teachings are aimed at everyone, at society as a whole.

So, if what all the major religions teach was all true, it would all be contradictory ...

I am so very sorry to hear that.

With regard to the aliens, my husband does see us as a sort of experiment by more sophisticated beings from another planet/galaxy who are, as you say 'watching us as we grow and evolve'.

That's good.

You should be feeling better soon then. I hate antibiotics. They are one of the necessary evils in the world lol.

Thank you.

It's actually only 3 days worth, + I'm on the last day today, which is good.

Feel better soon. The side effects should be better after a couple of days.

I would answer the title question with "The suspension of disbelief". This was an idea about how fiction works for the reader, the reader suspends disbelief in the story, and so enters the world the writer has created. I think that, with the addition of the word 'willing', it works for religious faith, "The willing suspension of disbelief". The original idea was Tolkien's, himself a devout Catholic.

Religion did not cover-up child abuse; human corruption did.

The Empire always tried to 'Reinvent the Wheel' throughout the rest of the world; imposing their take on Christianity, while leaving the mainstream churches supine towards the State.

It's a Culture-Grab. Aimed at Globalism.

I think I need both. I feel connected to the world amongst nature and amongst crowds of people at concerts. "The earth provides for us" - I agree however the beliefs that I have now feel at odds with the modern world and I cannot reconcile them. We take far more than what we need.