Comment by Gugteyikko on 24/01/2020 at 22:20 UTC

6 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

View submission: Individuals are required to make many decisions daily. Due to the limited capacity of human understanding, all decisions must be made bearing some level of ignorance. Thus all decisions employ a Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith at some point in their resolution process.

• First, I don’t like the conflation or different definitions of faith. I’m fine with each individual definition, they just need to be differentiated. I’ve never read Kierkegaard, but I accept the definition of faith as a kind of trust in induction. However, the catechism of the Catholic Church also uses faith in the following way when describing the Eucharist:

”’That in this sacrament are the truth Body of Christ and his true Blood is something that “can not be apprehended by the senses,’ says St. Thomas, ‘but only by faith, which relies on divine authority.’”

There are other examples of this usage of “faith” as a method to reach true conclusions in spite of having no evidence. In my experience, when people like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins point out problems with this definition of “faith,” their detractors almost always defend the other definition, as though it’s a relevant argument.

• Second, I don’t think I agree that I use even Kierkegaard’s definition as it’s presented in this article. I just don’t pretend to know those things. I don’t know that my waiter isn’t a murderer, or that the road ahead of me is stable, or that my parents weren’t cloned and swapped while I looked away.

I definitely **act as if** those things are true. But that’s just pragmatism. If you ask me I’ll say I don’t really know. However, not knowing for certain isn’t the same as being adrift in the void of uncertainty. I have some amount of evidence for the model of the world that I act upon, and until I get evidence to the contrary, it wouldn’t make any sense to start thinking or acting as if my waiter is a murderer.

Replies

Comment by reasonablefideist at 24/01/2020 at 23:43 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I feel like my user name obligates me to chime in here.

Regarding your first point: Good job pointing out a potential Motte and Bailey[1] You're right that there are two(at least) definitions of faith being floated around. Harris and Dawkins like to deal with the easy one to dismiss and many religionists do hold that view. Others don't and Kierkegaard was one of them. This writer seems to be making an effort to nail down a definition that aligns with Kierkegaards. That's a project worth undertaking and I think criticisms should be leveled at what he's defined, rather than the definition he's purposely moving away from or at the fact that multiple definitions exist.

1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/

Regarding your second: You're still stuck in the previous definition since your criticism is that you're acting from evidence or not really knowing. He's not defining faith as a lack of evidence or as "knowing", but as the movement of trust we make from not infallible evidence to action. All of his examples are to show that he's not talking about the no evidence definition, he's talking about the actual thing you do in those situations.