Keeping the Faith
I would like to register a complaint concerning the use of the word “faith” as a synonym for “religion.”
This is incorrect. Faith, technically speaking, is a belief in the absence of supporting evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. Faith is the opposite of reason. It has nothing to do with what you believe, but why you believe it.
If you believe that two plus two equals four because you have spent some time counting things, and one pair of things with another pair of things keeps coming out to four things, that’s reason. If you believe two plus two equals four strictly because your kindergarten teacher told you so, or because it makes balancing the checkbook easier when you imagine it to be true, or because a universe wherein arithmetic is variable is too horrible to contemplate, that’s faith – whether or not your belief is correct, and regardless of whether it could be logically verified or contradicted with sufficient effort.
If you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God because the skies rolled away and a host of angels singing “Holy, holy, holy” descended while a booming voice came from the heavens, that’s reason. If you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God strictly because your priest told you so, or because people are nicer when you get them to believe, or because a world without a caring creator is too horrible to contemplate, that’s faith – whether or not He exists, and regardless of whether his existence could be proven or disproven.
Faith has become synonymous with religious belief largely as a response to discoveries challenging the Bible’s factual accuracy. Once the church was the upholder of reason, since reason was understood to prove God’s existence, and to allow us to understand His desires better. As we learned that the universe may have taken somewhat longer than seven days to create, discovered that other cultures have equally persuasive holy texts, and refined our understanding of ideas like infinity, which underlay theologians’ arguments, some Christians have shrugged and given up their fathers’ religion; others have adapted to a more metaphorical doctrine, and some simply decided to believe no matter what scholars might conclude.
This last group, unable to justify their beliefs with verifiable facts, are engaged in the philosophical equivalent of covering their ears and shouting “Lalalalalala I can’t hear you!” And, being told that they were arguing from faith, embraced faith, took it as a valid foundation for belief, and have used the word interchangeably with religion for so long that the malapropism has supplanted the original meaning. Irresponsible atheists no doubt helped the process along by declaring all religious belief equally shoddy and founded on nothing but faith.
Language evolves. That’s hard for a traditionalist to accept, but I can grit my teeth and – generally – deal with the fact. I have a very hard time with the loss of a word’s meaning, however, when there is no synonym to fill the gap. Philosophical arguments with friends or Jehovah’s Witnesses keep tangling themselves on the snag of “faith,” which people take to mean “theism” even after I take the time to define faith very carefully for the purposes of the argument. Unfortunately, I have no other option; there is no other word for belief in the absence of supporting evidence. And when people have become so used to misusing the word that they can’t keep an argument straight, the misuse has gone too far.