Conflating Faith with Non-Faith Concepts
Converted Markdown It’s somewhat frustrating when interacting with a religious person as an atheist. They will often claim “you take things in faith too”. But this fundamentally misunderstands and conflates crucial concepts. For example, faith in the religious sense is fundamentally distinct from: Assumptions, Axioms, Hinge commitments, Philosophical starting points, Definitions etc. Faith in the religious sense is often about something that happened, in the real world. These other concepts are distinct in that they need not be tied to some event happening in the world. Faith in the religious sense is also tied to testimony, and crucially, hearsay. This is clearly distinct as a mode of inference. It’s also tied to trust and reliability, but extremely distinct from the sense of risk and uncertainty in probabilistic reasoning, in a Bayesian sense, or in a modal logic sense in terms of possibility and impossibility. Some theistic philosophers will claim that belief in god (a...
