If things that at first seem static turn out to change in the universe under changing conditions, that simply isn't a problem for science. Just look at the theory of relativity which superseded Newton's 'static' laws of motion and gravitation.
As for laws of nature originating with religion, the concept was first explicitly articulated in Europe in pagan Rome, but not in any religious context. It certainly didn't come from Christianity with it's volatile, opinionated and highly active and interventionist deity.
Biblical faith is specifically "the evidence of things not seen", so it's fundamentally different than an assumption.
"evidence of things not seen" is just poetic language for "faith is the thing that bridges the gap between what you are sure of and what you aren't".
An assumption is an act of faith. Its a decision to accept something that you don't have proof of. The dictionary lists belief as a synonym for assumption.
I think the mistake many people make, including Christians, is in believing that faith is something other than choosing to accept as true what you can't prove. There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually. Its just that in religious circles faith is a much discussed component.
Yes, I meant to confine my usage to biblical usage of the words specifically, and there are a host of assertions made about faith in the Bible that don't apply to everyday usage of the word "faith". For example, according to Romans, biblical faith "comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God", so the faith I'm referring to is belief in the word of God; by this definition, one can't have biblical faith in whatever one pleases. The word is not used in the more general sense of "assumption" in the New Testament (that I know of). (So when you read "Ye of little faith" or whatever, it's specifically talking about people who don't believe the word of God/Jesus, not just people who are not in the habit of making assumptions in general.) And I meant to use the word "believer" to refer to "one who has faith [in the biblical sense mentioned]".
So what I meant to say earlier is that when the Bible says that a believer should have "faith" in something, the believer can be confident that there will either be no visible evidence for that thing, or that there will be evidence to the contrary. Take Peter, for example, whom Jesus bade to come to him out on the water by faith. At that point, Peter was not only ignorant of whether the water would support him, but rather knew for sure that it wouldn't; and he walked anyway. Abraham is another example, to whom God promised that he would have a son after both he and his wife were past childbearing age (not simply when they didn't have a child yet). And again Abraham, when God told him to offer his son as a sacrifice, reasoned that since God said his lineage would be through Isaac, but Isaac hadn't had children yet, God would simply raise him from the dead, which was impossible by normal human means, needless to say.
More importantly, take the idea that believers are not only made righteous, but are made righteous by faith: since it is by faith, one should not be surprised to see evidence contrary to this claim, namely that one still sins. Paul wrote both "we wait for the hope of righteousness through faith" and "For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope, for why would a man hope for that which he sees?"
All that is to say that in biblical vernacular, I think that faith differs from an assumption simply in that a believer is not looking for confirmation, and is perhaps even looking for dis-confirmation of the thing which he believes, whereas an assumption is open to revision upon the discovery of proof or disproof. In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible.
> There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually.
Agreed. But in Christian circles, I think it needs to be made clear that the bible makes a lot of assertions about faith that don't apply to the dictionary definition of the word.
It seems to me that the way you're trying to distinguish between "faith" and "belief" and "assumption" has more to do with what a person is "assuming", "believing" or putting their "faith" in, and not the meaning of those words in and of themselves.
The example of Jesus and Peter is a good one. Peter needed to have faith. The reason for the need for faith was because the thing Jesus was asking of him wasn't normal and Peter didn't have explicit evidence of it. But Peter did have evidence that when it came to Jesus, physics weren't normal, and Jesus himself was walking on the water proving that Jesus had command of that ability. Peter wasn't blind at that moment, but he did have to assume (or believe) that if Jesus said he could walk on water, then Peter could walk on water also. There was extrapolation from evidence and relationship, but not full knowledge yet. And if Peter had sunk, his faith in Jesus would have suffered, and rightfully so if Jesus had let him down. But Jesus didn't let him down, and his faith in Jesus was shown to be justified.
When the bible says that we are saved "by faith" it is describing the mechanical process in simple terms. We know that the person who does the saving is God the Father. We know that the reason the Father is justified in saving us is because of Jesus sacrifice. But salvation doesn't occur until we enter into the agreement the Father has offered mankind for salvation, and to do that we have to "believe" in the fundamentals of the agreement. You won't enter into a contract if you don't believe the contract exists, if you don't believe the one offering the contract exists, if you don't believe that the contract is possible, and so on. When you choose to accept God's offer of salvation you have to do so by faith, because there is not 100% definitive proof of all that before hand. You are, in other words, choosing to accept as true something you can't prove with 100% certainty. And though the degree of faith being exercised is different, that is exactly the same thing that happens in empirical science, where nothing is proved 100% but things are shown to be true to some degree of probability (usually very high, but never 100%).
> In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible.
In this I think we disagree. My faith in scripture isn't blind, nor do I believe that the Bible is teaching us to continue in spite of evidence to the contrary. I believe because I find the Bible, to the extent that I can verify it, to be true, and I continue to believe because nothing has shown it to be false. Nothing explains the world as accurately as scripture does, and all of my life has born out the truths of scripture. The bible presents a theory of the world that I find to be more compelling than any other theory of the world. And all the evidence that I have seen continues to support that theory in my view. So I continue to believe.
But if the Bible is shown to be false, then it is folly to persist in its teachings. Even Paul said, "...if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die." (1 Cor 15:32). His point (if you look at the bigger context) is that if what Jesus is teaching isn't true, then we should take as much joy and pleasure in this life as we can, for there is little point in all the suffering Jesus calls us to otherwise.
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The thing I was trying to convey in my first post (perhaps a bit to abruptly) is that the idea that faith in scripture is somehow more than the simple definition leads to a misunderstanding of what God is trying to tell us in the Bible. When we inject more "meaning" than is there it complicates things that were meant to be simple.
Thanks for engaging with me on this!
Absolutely, when we are using the words casually, we can use the dictionary definition. But when we're discussing spiritual ideas, I think that we need to take into account all the stuff the bible says about faith, so that we don't say something that's inconsistent with the scripture, as I'll explain below.
I would almost say that faith is a subset of assumptions (i.e. all faith is assumption, but not all assumptions are faith), except that assumptions are usually about things that are unknown but possible, whereas faith can also be about something that is impossible by natural means.
> But Peter did have evidence that when it came to Jesus, physics weren't normal, and Jesus himself was walking on the water proving that Jesus had command of that ability. Peter wasn't blind at that moment, but he did have to assume (or believe) that if Jesus said he could walk on water, then Peter could walk on water also. There was extrapolation from evidence and relationship, but not full knowledge yet.
Agreed, but I think we both agree that there are different levels of faith. And I think the level of faith one has in a particular word from God is inversely proportional to the evidence we have supporting that thing, and directly proportional to the evidence we have against it. To the extent Peter had evidence, he did not have faith, and he had faith to the extent he had to defy his senses and trust Christ. Jesus said to Thomas, for example, "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." Unfortunately for Thomas, he did not have much room for faith (though he did have a little, since he could have chosen to believe that this Jesus was an illusion or a demon or something, as some others did). In another place, Paul said, "We walk by faith and not by sight" (emph. added), which implies that faith and sight are mutually exclusive, that one can't walk by faith _and_ sight simultaneously. (Tangentially, I think that the man who brought his son to be healed by Jesus, and cried, "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief" represents us all, and we simply differ in the 'ratio' or 'proportion' of "I believe" to "help thou my unbelief" we each have. It's greatly comforting to me that even though that guy said, "help thou my unbelief," it must have been good enough for Jesus, because he subsequently healed his son. Also, in this way of thinking, it follows that the "greater" the sinner, the greater the faith, because the more visible evidence he has against his own righteousness.)
> When the bible says that we are saved "by faith" it is describing the mechanical process in simple terms. [...] You won't enter into a contract if you don't believe the contract exists, if you don't believe the one offering the contract exists, if you don't believe that the contract is possible, and so on. When you choose to accept God's offer of salvation you have to do so by faith, because there is not 100% definitive proof of all that before hand. You are, in other words, choosing to accept as true something you can't prove with 100% certainty. And though the degree of faith being exercised is different, that is exactly the same thing that happens in empirical science, where nothing is proved 100% but things are shown to be true to some degree of probability (usually very high, but never 100%).
The problem that I see with this approach is that it doesn't exclude what the scripture excludes. The way you have described it, any covenant with God would require faith, because e.g. we would have to assume that the person with whom we are speaking is actually God and not Satan disguised as God, etc. etc. In particular, the Law of works, which is simply the agreement that we will do certain things and abstain from others and thereby earn righteousness, seems to fit your criteria for faith. However, the scripture rules this out when it says "The law [of works] is not based on faith; on the contrary, it says, 'The person who does these things will live by them'". The "law of faith", on the other hand, is not only believing God in general, but specifically believing the idea that God justifies the ungodly, and all the things that follow from that.
> But if the Bible is shown to be false, then it is folly to persist in its teachings.
Funny you should say that, because if the Bible is true, then it is also folly to persist in its teachings, so it's folly either way! As it says, "The cross is foolishness to them that perish", "It pleased God that by the foolishness of preaching men might be saved", "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise" (mark, the foolish things _of the world_), etc. So, I think we should expect the Gospel to be foolish to the world and to our natural selves. In fact, Jesus at one point said, "I thank you God that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to babes." (And of course I think the "wise and prudent" are not a group of specific people, but rather an _approach_ to knowing God that will not work; the way God allows himself to be known is rejected by people who desire wisdom (i.e. "The Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek wisdom", etc.).)
And I guess my point is that whether the Bible is shown to be false or not is relative to the person judging the evidence. If I am stupid, then someone might show me a bad, invalid argument and convince me that God doesn't exist. But you and I won't always be able to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments; we're all stupid at some point. Can only the people smart enough to defend against invalid arguments be saved? As we said, the gospel was designed for the simple and the foolish. So, in my opinion, to rely on sight "backing up" your faith is setting yourself up to be knocked down by anyone who can weave an argument better than you can untangle. Instead, I think we have to own our position of foolishness and believe rather than see, and that way we are invincible :) In this way of viewing things, we would call it faith when you are presented with an argument that appears valid to you that goes against the word of God, and yet you believe God anyway.
> Even Paul said, "...if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die." (1 Cor 15:32).
If you read verse 12 in that chapter, it says, "Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?" So I don't think it was about whether the teachings in general are false (and certainly not whether they are verifiably true), nor about whether there were people saying that Christianity is a lie (there were many of those), but rather that some people _within the church_ were teaching or promoting the idea that there is no resurrection of the dead (and maybe they were inspired by the Sadducees, a sect of Jews who didn't believe in the resurrection either). That is to say, Paul wasn't surprised that there are some people who don't believe the gospel, but rather that some people who said they did believe the gospel were preaching that there is no resurrection.
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Again thanks so much for taking the time to converse, I'm interested in hearing your perspective. I think it does both of us good to see where our ideas are clear and unclear, and how we can best explain them. There is a quote that I love which says, "Writing is nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is", and I definitely feel that in my writing here :)
> It’s a good test of whether someone has actually understood Hume’s argument that they acknowledge its conclusion is fantastic (many students new to philosophy misinterpret Hume: they think his conclusion is merely that we cannot be certain what will happen tomorrow.) ... [But] if Hume is right, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is as unjustified as the belief that a million mile wide bowl of tulips will appear over the horizon instead. We suppose the second belief is insane. But if Hume is correct, the first belief is actually no more rational. ... [T]he onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume's argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so).
Contrary to the other response to your comment, no amount of evidence should ever increase one's confidence, in a strictly rational sense. It is, in that sense, a matter of faith. Similarly, Sean Carroll on radical skepticism:
> There is no way to distinguish between [metaphysical] scenarios by collecting new data.
> What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities.
> Radical skepticism is less useful to us; it gives us no way to go through life. All of our purported knowledge [...] might very well be tricks being played on us. But what then? We cannot actually act on such a belief [...]. Whereas, if we take the world roughly at face value, we have a way of moving forward. There are things we want to do, questions we want to answer, and strategies for making them happen. We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.
It's like that quote from the movie The Incredibles: "When everyone's super, no one will be."
I stopped reading there because he doesn't understand that of which he speaks. This is actually a hotly debated topic among scientists in many fields, and it is definitely _not_ taken on faith.
These sort of arguments from the faithful really annoy me. It feels like they're protesting too much by insisting that I'm making the same mistake that deep down they know they're making.