Is Faith the Same as Trust or Baseless Belief?

An Empirical Question

In #Unbelievable Project

I was listening to the Unbelievable podcast debate between Tim McGrew and Peter Boghossian on the definition of faith, and whether it is a valid way of knowing. I have my initial response here, but want to look at another aspect of it in the current post.

Peter defines faith either as "pretending to know things you do not know" or "belief without evidence." From the OED we have faith defined as "complete trust or confidence in someone or something". Tim says that very few Christians (less than 1%) would use Peter's definition, with the vast majority using something similar to the OED. Peter claims that it is just the reverse. Which is it?

Research via Google

In an informal way, one can do research via google to get an overall sense for how a term is used. I make no claims this is exhaustive, or even particularly scholarly, but I would wager that if a term is used in less than 1% of the population in a certain way it is unlikely to appear in the first few google results.

I casually googled around, and found a few quotes. As you can easily verify, I found that the dominant definition does seem to be Tim's, but that the "belief without [sufficient] evidence" occurs more then 1% of the time, but not nearly 50%. In some of the cases, it is hard to determine which way (or both!) that they are understanding the term. Obviously a more systematic approach might be useful, but as with nearly all such empirical matters, the case is less black-and-white than proponents or opponents like to portray.

The two terms I tried were "faith in God", which universally gives Tim's definition in the first page of hits, and "you must have faith", which uses Peter's definition in at least two of the 15 or so top hits. One of these (http://www.strangenotions.com/do-atheists-have-faith/) says:

I think that the concept of faith can be understood, in many cases, as involving belief without a certain kind or amount of evidence—the kind or amount that would give us certain proof.

This is entirely equivalent to the "faith = probability" definition of Peter's, and the website author levels this against atheists saying that they have "faith". Another (http://hopefaithprayer.com/you-cant-believe-until-you-have-faith/) says:

Believing requires faith, and faith requires the action of believing.

Which, when you apply to the parachute example makes no sense at all, unless you interpret faith as believing without suffient evidence.

Using the word "faith" in an argument

I think it is clear that people do use the term "faith" in both ways, but let's for the moment accept Tim's definition. "Faith" then should never be used in an argument in any way, especially with people who don't believe in God. Why is that? Because, any analysis of utility theory has essentially two components - the probability part, where one has to present evidence for the different possibilities, and the utility part, which places the value on different outcomes. The atheist hasn't even gotten through the first part, so the utility part is a non-sequitur. Since faith, under Tim's definition, requires the utility part to have any meaning, then to bring faith into the argument before, or along with, the evidence is simply not useful. Doing so is much more likely to be interpreted by the atheist as a substitute for evidence, and make people like Peter assume that faith is belief without evidence.

Is "faith" a way of knowing?

As for the question about whether faith is a way of knowing, the answer has to be a clear "No." Even under Tim's definition, faith is not a way of knowing, but a label we give to the act of weighing the probability and the utility of unlikely (a-priori) possibilities, actions, and outcomes.

So let's ditch the word faith, which is a loaded term anyway, and use the word "trust" when we mean "trust" and "evidence" when we mean "evidence".