you wouldn't feel that more were pretending than not.
I don't feel that more are pretending than not. You are misunderstanding what I write, in ways that contradict my explicit statements, and at this point I'm finding it difficult to escape the conclusion that for some reason you are so anxious to see me making the mistake you wrongly think I am making that it matters little what I actually say. And, while totally misunderstanding what I write, you are being patronizing at me about it. This is slightly annoying, and I hope you will not be too badly annoyed because I am now going to be patronizing at you in turn; I have at least the excuse of actually being right.
Here is a scale drawn in beautiful ASCII. I have marked on it the left and right endpoints L and R, and two other points on the scale A and B.
L--------------------------------A-B----R
Suppose someone says: It seems to me that on this scale point A is, if anything, just slightly further towards the "left" end of that scale than point B.
I claim that (1) they are correct, (2) both A and B are in fact nearer R than L, and (3) there is no inconsistency between 1 and 2.
In case I have not yet made it sufficiently explicit:
None of that is any different from what I said before, and in particular the bits that explicitly contradict the view you are trying to foist on me are all there in the grandparent of this comment too. But perhaps I have now made it clear enough not to be misunderstood?
I don't think you know what the word "faith" means to religious people.
Until age 36 I was actively religious myself (Christian, as it happens). My wife and plenty of my friends still are. I have run Bible studies and (to my shame) helped to lead Christian children's holidays. I have (this proves nothing but may be some kind of evidence) more theology books still on my bookshelves than, I would guess, at least 95% of actively religious university graduates (I include the last two words because otherwise the comparison would be kinda unfair). I am, furthermore, not actually an idiot. As a consequence, I have a pretty good idea of how religious people use the words "faith" and "belief". (Part of the answer: Different religious people, on different occasions, use them quite differently.)
You can get a (very incomplete but perhaps still informative) idea of some of what I think religious people sometimes mean by "faith" from this thing that I wrote around the time I stopped being a Christian. Or you could read C S Lewis's essay "On obstinacy in belief" which touches on these matters, not because I agree with everything he says (that would imply still belonging to his religion, which I don't) but because it's a pretty good exposition of some things religious people say about faith and belief, and I'm very familiar with it, and therefore what it says is part of my understanding of how religious people use those words.
In an I-hope-not-too-futile attempt to forestall a possible objection: No, I am not saying that, e.g., what C S Lewis is describing is a matter of pretending to believe things one really doesn't, and if you think I should be then you need to read what I wrote again until you stop thinking it, or else ask me for further clarification.
I have at least the excuse of actually being right.
I see you; do you see me?
None of that is any different from what I said before, and in particular the bits that explicitly contradict the view you are trying to foist on me are all there in the grandparent of this comment too. But perhaps I have now made it clear enough not to be misunderstood?
I think you're wrong, and I think the reasons you are wrong are subtle. You think I'm wrong, and you appear to think the reasons I am wrong are obvious. Assume, for a moment, that I, also, am not an idiot.
...
I grew up in an atheistic household.
Almost needless to say, I was relatively hostile towards religion for most of my early life. A few things changed that.
First, the apology of a pastor. A friend of mine was proselytizing at me, and apparently discussed it with his pastor; the pastor apologized to my parents, and explained to my friend he shouldn't be trying to convert people. My friend apologized to me after considering the matter. We stayed friends for a little while afterwards, although I left that school, and we lost contact.
I think that was around the time that I realized that religion is, in addition to being a belief system, a way of life, and not necessarily a bad one.
The next was actually South Park's Mormonism episode, which pointed out that a belief system could be desirable on the merits of the way of life it represented, even if the beliefs themselves are stupid. This tied into Douglas Adam's comment on Feng Shui, that "...if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on" - which is to say, the explanation for the belief is not necessarily the -reason- for the belief, and that stupid beliefs may actually have something useful to offer - which then requires us to ask whether the beliefs are, in fact, stupid.
Which is to say, beliefs may be epistemically irrational while being instrumentally rational.
The next peace I made with belief actually came from quantum physics, and reading about how there were several disparate and apparently contradictory mathematical systems, which all predicted the same thing. It later transpired that they could all be generalized into the same mathematical system, but I hadn't read that far before the isomorphic nature of truth occurred to me; you can have multiple contradictory interpretations of the same evidence that all predict the same thing.
Up to this point, however, I still regarded beliefs as irrational, at least on an epistemological basis.
The next peace came from experiences living in a house that would have convinced most people that ghosts are real, which I have previously written about here. I think there are probably good explanations for every individual experience even if I don't know them, but am still somewhat flummoxed by the fact that almost all the bizarre experiences of my life all revolve around the same physical location. I don't know if I would accept money to live in that house again, which I guess means that I wouldn't put money on the bet that there wasn't something fundamentally odd about the house itself - a quality of the house which I think the term "haunted" accurately conveys, even if its implications are incorrect.
If an AI in a first person shooter dies every time it walks into a green room, and experiences great disutility for death, how many times must it walk into a green room before it decides not to do that anymore? I'm reasonably confident on a rational level that there was nothing inherently unnatural about that house, nothing beyond explanation, but I still won't "walk into the green room."
That was the point at which I concluded that beliefs can be -rational-. Disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for them, and just accept the notion that there may be something interesting going on underneath the surface.
If we were to hold scientific beliefs to the same standard we hold religious beliefs - holding the explanation responsible rather than the predictions - scientific beliefs really don't come off looking that good. The sun isn't the center of the universe; some have called this theory "less wrong" than an earth-centric model of the universe, but that's because the -predictions- are better; the explanation itself is still completely, 100% wrong.
Likewise, if we hold religious beliefs to the same standard we hold scientific beliefs - holding the predictions responsible rather than the explanations - religious beliefs might just come off better than we'd expect.