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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Faith and theory - Less Wrong
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Comments (39)
Calling something a "semantic stop-sign and applause light" can be an important first step towards a definition. But it's not a definition itself, not even a merely "practical one". A practical definition needs to explain how the concept of faith works as a semantic stop-sign. Just which peculiarities of human cognition does faith exploit? And how, in practice, can we keep it from exploiting them?
Why a definition of a word must include explanation of biases which correlate with its use? If I haven't heard the word "faith" before, after reading Yvain's definition I would be able to use it and understand what other people mean by it, which is exactly what I expect to learn from definitions of words.
Yvain's "definition" is as follows: It starts by saying that "faith" is a "semantic stop-sign and applause light". That alone would be inadequate, of course, because it doesn't distinguished faith from other semantic stop-signs and applause lights, of which there are many. So Yvain goes on to distinguish faith from the rest as follows: Faith is that which, when people who claim it are asked to explain what they mean, they proceed to give one of the items on Yvain's list of different ways that different people
Well, I suppose that that's a definition in some sense. But, as Yvain would agree, it's not a definition in the sense sought in the OP. The OP seeks a description of the contents of the concept that sits in the minds of faith-holders. Yvain, as I read him, is denying the existence of any such concept. For Yvain, "faith" is just a sort of verbal defensive behavior. In fact, if you knew only Yvain's definition, you would think that the word "faith" was only used to defend one's beliefs from attack by others.
This appears to me to be an inaccurate picture of what is going on in the minds of faith-holders. So, insofar as Yvain's definition encourages this picture, the definition is inadequate.
It seemed quite accurate to me, but that can be because I am not much familiar with religious thinking. Can you provide an example of relatively recent use of "faith" outside an apologetic argument?
Here's a page from a book that I got to by following a citation to the Wikipedia article on Faith. I'm looking at the first complete paragraph.
The text is written by a Christian for Christian readers. As near as I can make out, the page is not arguing that the reader is required to have faith, or that the writer's faith can survive all criticism. So, I wouldn't call it apologetics. The tone is more like, "So, we all have faith here. That's not at issue. But, just what kind of animal is this faith thing that we have? Where does it come from? What role does it play in the fate of our souls?"
You are right. They don't use the word to defend their beliefs, even if I can't figure out for sure what "faith" is supposed to mean there. It seems still to play the role of a sort of stop-sign, with approximate meaning of "acceptance of Catholic dogma".
Still, I am not sure whether there is a concept behind "faith" distinct from "belief immune from scrutiny". I have found a Christian definition where they basically say that faith is a belief which is
That seems to vindicate the naïve atheist view of faith as a belief firmly held in spite of evidence.