Depends how you define central. There are several different definitions of Faith if you look on Google. Personally, I think the fact that you choose to get up every morning, in some ways makes this more central than religious faith, which people think about far less frequently. Although I do of course get what you are pointing at.

What I am pointing at in this post, is that people take things on faith all of the time, that impact their quality of life, without realizing it.

As an example, if you were to question your reasons for why you get out of bed in the morning when you do, even something that mundane could potentially have a huge impact on your life.

You may for example decide to get up slightly earlier or slightly later, and this could potentially allow you to get something else done in the morning, or increase your wakefulness during the day, and have a domino of good consequences effect you throughout the day.

Another point I was making is that willingness to questioning your faith related to getting out of bed in the morning - in the way that I'm using the word - is in my experience highly correlated with willingness to question your Faith in the most common usages of the word:

"complete trust or confidence in someone or something." and "strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual"

Even if the case is not a central example, that I have found a very strong correlation between this example and other more standard examples causes me to think that I am considering the concept correctly.

Keep in mind that we live in a country with "One nation under God" written on the money supply - we're in a religious country, even though there is for the most part separation of church and state. Physics is taught in high schools in the same country, so odds are that the majority believe both in God and Physics.

The point of the playing with words is to show that all four of those words are pointing at roughly the same concept. Each of the words has their own bias.

The different people who use the different words generally think that their way of thinking is superior, so I'm trying to demonstrate that this is not the case, and that it is a bias to think that your perspective is superior when you are simply looking at the biases of the other perspectives and not your own.

The points at the end were meant to illustrate the "everyone is biased" theory. Basically, if I can work with rationalists and get the sorts of results that I do by removing biases, then that implies that they have a lot of biases which they are not aware of and/or aware of how to fix until talking with me.

The solution I'm alluding to is to be more open minded about what the possibilities actually are. That simply taking a different perspective (plus a lot of positive reinforcement) can make the difference between not being able to get out of bed and having your dream job.

I'll write this up more clearly and eloquently in the morning after I sleep on it, but hopefully this at least helps a little for now?

The other two commenters who beat me to it named the most common logic I hear from people who believe in miracles. I have never heard anyone attribute it to the laws of physics being incorrect.

What he said about microwaves is noteworthy.

My understanding was that he gave the example to show why there is a problem with all religion and mystical thinking - that it is less reasonable than how rationalists and scientists think.

If what Viliam said was true regarding all mystical thinking, then he would have been giving what would be more or less a proof of how rationalists are more reasonable in their thinking than religious people.

That's why his comment was interesting.

The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false. My guess is that in truth, the vast majority of people with spiritual beliefs do believe int he laws of physics. I gave one concrete example to make my case.

Thus, he was only disproving an example of one particular type of belief, and not really saying much at all about all religious/mystically inclined people.

Thus, the point he was making is not very useful, in that disproving one person - be they mystic or rationalist, or one type specific type of mysticism is easy.

You missed that point initially and your comment is continuing to make the same mistake that Viliam initially made, in that you are writing based on your personal belief about what "religious people" think.

Taking what you said one piece at a time:

In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?

So, I assume the reason you’re asking this is because you assume that belief in physics and mystical beliefs are incompatible. This is a false assumption.

As one of my favorite examples of this being false, I happen to be friends with someone who is a Tibetan grand master of Reiki, who is also a quantum physicist, with a Ph.D from Oxford. She is obviously extremely spiritual, identifies as a believer in the laws of physics, and knows what the laws of physics are in far more detail and with greater understanding than almost anyone who may read this blog.

I believe the base rate of "a random machine doing seemingly miraculous things" is pretty low, otherwise we would be surrounded by magical machines built on theories often incompatible with the official physics. And I mean, magical machines that would work as obviously and reliably as my microwave oven does, or as my mobile phone does... not just something supposedly providing some invisble and hard-to-measure effects.

Okay, so this is more elaboration based on the first assumption made, which I already addressed.

Now my personal life, and my everyday beliefs, that seems like a different kind of game. I see people with different beliefs, having not significantly worse or better results than myself. (A colleague of mine told me recently that he heard that the theory of evolution was disproved. Doesn't have any impact on his programming skills, which is what he gets paid for. But a better example would be some idea outside of science.) I don't have this kind of feedback for the correctness of my ideas. Thus it would be incorrect to put the same degree of faith in them.

Okay, so this is said to contrast the initial statement, again, doesn’t need a response now.

Unfortunately, I have no mind-reading abilities, so I don't know what the obviously successful people believe in. I can listen to what they tell me, but there are problems with this.

Perhaps time to start asking? :)

First, people compartmentalize (and that's the charitable approach; sometimes they also just plainly lie), so what they tell me they believe may not be the same thing they actually believe or alieve. (For example, reading the books by Kiyosaki will not give me the recipe for how to be as rich as Kiyosaki. The true secret of Kiyosaki is more likely something like: Just pretend to know the secret of being rich, and let other people pay you for whatever soundbites you have for them. It's not like someone would ever do a double-blind study to verify your teachings.)

Agreed that the true secret may be different than that given. Agreed that people also sometimes compartmentalize. True of everyone whether a rationalist or not. Gathering data and finding ways to test for truth and compartmentalization seems like a good idea.

Second, there could be a selection bias; even if most of the successful people believe the same thing, there may be even more unsuccessful people believing the very same thing. For example, "follow your passion" or "just buy a lottery ticket" may make a few people incredibly rich, and yet, it may be a poor strategy on average. But we will only hear the stories of the winners. "Yeah, I used to be a chicken like you, but then I decided to follow my gut, and played a few rounds of the Russian roulette, and look where I am now! If you are so smart, why aren't you as rich as me?”

True. Also, a strategy could be good, but not the only ingredient necessary.

Funny religious story:

There’s a big flood, and a priest is stuck on top of a roof as the water is gradually covering up the ground and the buildings. He is praying reverently. Eventually the water is up pretty high on the roofline, and a boat comes by.

They invite the priest to come with them. The priest says "no no no, God will save me!"

This happens a couple more times as the water gets higher and higher, and he eventually drowns.

When he eventually meets God, he asks “Why didn’t you save me? I still had work to do!”

God responds: “I sent you three boats, why didn’t you get on one?!”

One moral of this religious story is that you need to take opportunity when it comes to you, not assume its going to happen through magic.

Another aspect I find important is that it can take many different elements to get the results you want. In the reality of the story described, it requires praying + action. Praying alone was enough to get the opportunity, but only praying didn’t do anything at all for him.

Hence what I was getting at in my previous post about how over-simplification is really not useful and only leads to false confidence.

I do appreciate the request for more clarity of purpose and useful suggestion.

I think that there is quite a lot that is implicit if you are reading this from an open rather than defensive perspective. However, I am in agreement that I could be much more explicit and that this would be of benefit. Rather than giving an off the cuff response, I will think this through and craft something more useful. Thanks!

Thank you for giving me something challenging to work with that I cannot instantly respond to :) I will process and respond over the next day or two.

I can tell you a couple of elements the response will include. One is that men of science tend to over-extrapolate. Ie: that your microwave works means certain things, which are more probable to relate to other certain things. However, you can take these chains of logic out very far to where they become very flimsy, but justify the flimsy parts with the word SCIENCE.

Another element is something I will refer to casually for now as "solving the problem from the middle." You can have a very logical and concrete beautiful thing that looks like a solution in the middle of a puzzle, that does not really relate to the beginning or end.

This is the classic logic fallacy that I see Less Wrongers engage in, such as the straw man argument in this comment.

He makes a beautiful point that everyone agrees with including me, that doesn't have anything to do with the larger topic at hand. Because he does so in a way that is tangentially related to what I was actually saying, it appears to be a part of the larger topic at hand, it appears on the surface that he knows the answer.

Point #1:

Yes.

You are making the point for me very well about how much of everything we do is not rational thought or grounded. You can call it habit, or you can call it faith that getting out of the bed is the correct thing to do.

Whether you re-think your logic or not every morning or not does not make much difference in whether or not the action is faith based in my book. You are acting on the belief/perspective/point of view that getting out of bed is the appropriate thing to do.

Point #2:

Hedonistic examples are simple and thus easy to describe. I could lay out more complex belief systems, but then I'd have to write a book rather than a blog post.

I think there's something else you might be getting at here, but I'm not really sure what you're trying to show through this statement, so if you want to be more direct or ask a question, I'd be interested.

Interesting. I personally find current usage more useful than original meaning, although both can be good to know.