Faith is one of those words (like "believe" or "God" or "truth") that I'm sure you know what it means. I'm also absolutely positive that you don't know what it means. It's a semantic null. It's not like the word "rock," where you could reasonably point it out to a child and go "There it is." It is both meaningful and meaningless. I will try and define it anyways, since it's pointless to go on about faith unless you know what I think I mean by the word.
Faith Defined v 1.0
It should be simple to define, right? Here's my first stab at it:
Faith is what you have when you don't care about the evidence.
Immediately, I bet you can see the problem here. What about all those people who say they have evidence to bolster their faith? Are they all insane, or deluded? Okay, I'll grant that some people think they have evidence for their faith. So we'll try faith, definition two:
Faith is what you have when it doesn't matter if you have evidence or not.
That's better. But now I have a problem with it. What does the word "evidence" mean here? You can always find evidence of your faith. It's easy: "God shows Himself by the wonderful fact that we exist." "I see God in the beauty of the seasons." Aren't these a kind of evidence? Isn't it meaningless to say that people of faith don't care about the evidence? Most of them must feel they have some reason to believe in their faith. Whatever that reason is, that is their evidence. I'll solve this one by digressing into empiricism for a minute.
A Digression into Empricism
Empricism is the idea that the universe can be investigated using our senses. There's a lot of other philosophical baggage that goes along with it, but that's basically it. What gets tricky is, first, what do we mean by "investigated"? For my purposes, investigations can take many forms:
- You can look at the thing. "Every fall, this kind of tree loses its leaves."
- You can test the thing in your lab. "When we overcrowded the rats and then lowered their food supplies, they became violent."
- You can predict the existence of the thing by observing what effect it is having on things around it. "The existence of some kind of dark matter was determined by observing its gravitational pull on other objects."
The other tricky part is the word "senses." Empirically speaking, we can extend our senses using our instruments. My bare eyes can't detect an electron, but an instrument can (after
freezing the electron, which is an amazing idea all by itself).
Faith Finally Defined
So let's do one final amendment:
Faith is what you have when the presence or absence of empirical evidence doesn't matter.
Now we've gotten somewhere. What does this definition imply? For starters, you may believe you have empirical evidence to bolster your faith. "I was at Fatima and saw the Virgin Mary talking to the children." But if someone debunks your evidence, you still have faith in the Virgin Mary. Faith holds on despite empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is wonderful, and it can bolster faith. But in the end, if some cranky skeptic type debunks your evidence, your faith holds on.
(return to The Morgan Dilemna)
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