Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they aren't right. My father smoked most of his life. At one point he quit for almost 2 years. But one night he was at the bar drinking with friends and he bummed a cigarette. He didn't quit again until he was literally too sick to go to a store to buy cigarettes. He died in 2001 at age 59 from heart failure. My father always told me never to start smoking. That made him a hypocrite, but it was certainly good advice to follow.
I have identified as agnostic since I was 16. My own crisis of faith was not an emotional reaction, but really more the result of an intellectual thought process. My 10th grade English class was reading Greek mythology when I began wondering about the similarities between ancient Greek religious beliefs and my own Catholic faith. Why did they believe in these fanciful tales that pretty much everyone rejects the truth of today? I came up with 3 reasons. First, it was what they were taught by parents and teachers. Second, it was what everyone around them believed. Third, it provided explanations for phenomena that they couldn't otherwise understand. For example, the reason that the sun moves across the sky is because Apollo pulls it with his chariot. Then I asked myself why I believed in God? I decided that it was for the same 3 reasons. I also decided that those reasons weren't sufficient to justify believing. There were all kinds of stories in the Bible about miracles, but there had also been many stories of miracles performed by the Olympian Gods. God was a possible explanation for where the Universe, Earth, and life had come from. But just because Science can't answer those questions currently, doesn't mean that God is the correct answer. Occam's razor and all that.
I can't say for certain there is no God, but I think it's extremely unlikely. I actually considered Pascal's wager before I had ever heard of it. Isn't it safer to believe in case God exists? But I decided that if what I had been taught in Catholic school about God was correct, if I lived a good life treating others as I would want to be treated, I don't think that God would damn me to Hell because I didn't go to church on Sundays. After all, God gave me the ability to reason. If he wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me. I have avoided the atheist label, both because I can't disprove God's existence and because I didn't like the attitudes of most high profile atheists. At least that was true of the people famous for their disbelief. I hate the way certain atheists delight in mocking the faithful for their belief in "superstition." Bill Maher anyone?
I have struggled most of my adult life with depression. It took many years before I realized that was what my problem was. It wasn't until recently that I connected my first symptoms of depression during my junior year of high school with my crisis of faith the year before. In retrospect, it's hard to believe I missed the connection. I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality. Faith that God will give you the strength to overcome adversity might be the only reason a person might try to overcome it instead of giving up because they see their situation as hopeless. Faith can also provide comfort. We lost my mother a few years ago. I so wish that I believed I would see her again. My own health is generally poor. My one saving grace is that I never smoked. But I suffer from complications from diabetes and a back injury sustained when I was rear ended at a red light. Today, I am retired on disability. I live alone and haven't dated anyone in over a decade. I have siblings as well as 2 nieces and a nephew. My nieces live in CA. My nephew I get to see every couple of weeks. As much as I love them, I wish I had more to live for. I honestly wish I could believe in God again. But my rational mind keeps telling me that the more I desperately I want something to be true, the more skeptical I should be. Maybe I should rethink Pascal's wager.
"If (God) wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me." No, not in the least.
What you describe is not Faith, it's fact. I don't have to 'believe' in a hamburger, I can hold & snarf any number of hamburgers. God is not hamburger...nor is He interested in providing 'proof' to Man beyond the proof in which we swim.
Reminds me of the David Foster Wallace story (from a graduation speech): "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
Faith is not belief in the presence of proof indisputable (like God's fingerprints on a tree.....or His footprint in the garden) but belief in the absence of CSI forensics.
You wish to believe...so BELIEVE. We see Beauty; we feel Love; we are haunted by a sense of ineffable transcendence: what is all that other than 'proof'? As CS Lewis put it, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.” Mark Helpin, "A Soldier of the Great War"
You say your 'rational mind keeps telling me' to be skeptical. To what purpose?
“Reason excludes faith.... It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.” (Helprin, again.)
I'm familiar with the argument that faith is belief in the absence of evidence. But I fail to see how that is an argument in favor of believing something. I realize many people would say it is arrogant to demand that God prove to me that he exists. But I am not demanding anything of the sort. If my Catholic school teachers were correct about God, I believe that he wouldn't condemn me for an honest lack of belief. I am not demanding proof. I am just pointing out that he has that option if he wants me to believe. If I am surprised to discover that there is an afterlife that includes Heaven and Hell, I will hope that I lived a good enough life, treating others well, that I have at least earned a place in purgatory if not Heaven.
One of my favorite TV shows was Lucifer. The premise is that the Devil decides to abandon Hell and take a vacation on Earth running a bar in LA. He ends up as a consultant to the LAPD. In the first season, a priest enters his bar to ask a favor. He wants Lucifer to help prevent a boy from becoming a drug dealer. Lucifer initially refuses, but he ends up befriending the priest. At the end of the episode the priest is shot and dies in Lucifer's arms. Before he dies he says to Lucifer "I didn't understand why God put you in my path. But now I realize he put me in yours." It was at that point I realized the show nominally about the Devil, actually had a very Christian message. No one is beyond salvation, not even the Devil. I am not sure that the Catholic Church would agree the Devil could be reformed, but it sounds like something the God I was taught about would want. Hopefully, I can be saved even if I lack faith. The alternative is everything ends. Either way, I am OK with it.
It's not an argument to believe anything. That is exactly the point. Faith is belief in the absence of evidence, in the absence of Proof (as in Proof, with a capital P) but not in the absence of what our heart tells us is true.
It is knowing without the sworn affidavit, absent the notary, without a single repeatable experimental finding. Still, we know.
I'm not saying you're demanding anything. Nor am I suggesting that God would condemn you for a lack of anything. Who am I to offer a Guide to God's thinking, assuming God thinks? I'm not even particularly concerned about your salvation, or lack thereof -- that issue is not mine.
But when you say you starve for Belief.. when you tell us you suffer in its absence...then I say Believe. When you hesitate or back away from such a leap because you've somehow come to feel that Belief is a 'sucker's game' (not to put words in your mouth but that seems like what you'd say)....I say Believe anyway! Choose it; embrace it. The only one to say you're a 'sucker' is you. So don't say it. Just Believe. Have Faith. Choose Faith.
Look at the glories of the world which surround you. The beauty of the ineffable. The sweetness of a single note, the Mother's softly lingering touch of her child's sleeping face...and Believe.
I'll leave you with one last Helprin quote, also from A Soldier of the Great War:
"...and even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.”
“I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality.”
I agree with your thoughts on the powerful role faith plays in many peoples lives, but if your faith is “justified by reality” then it is no longer faith. For me, thats the problem with Pascal’s wager. It assumes one can choose to believe. Choose to have faith. If you are inclined to interrogate religious beliefs, but still want to have faith, you have to be able to eventually satisfy your doubts with the answer - “God is mysterious”. That answer will just never do it for me.
Indeed you can choose to Believe. Why not? We do it all the time in countless little ways every day. I believe that my car will start, despite an absolute lack of understanding of the mystery of the internal combustion engine. I believe that when I take my seat on a plane that somehow, mysteriously, that massive chunk of steel will rise and safely take me to my destination. When I'm sick and the doctor says, 'Take this!', I swallow it gladly with faith that, mysteriously, my ailments will vanish.
These are little leaps but we all make them....and sometimes we tell ourselves it's OK that I don't know how the electricity finds its way into my coffee grinder-- but someone does! At least that's what I believe.
The thing is, life itself is a mystery. Love is a mystery. It's a mystery why, when we hear someone sing 'Nessun dorma' by Puccini that our eyes fill with tears. It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger. Existence is mystery; consciousness & self-awareness is mystery. It's mysterious as to why we worry such questions that have never haunted a single cow.
Of course God is mystery...what else could He be?
When we mortals struggle to understand Calculus, and need a specialist to fix a leaky pipe....how could we possibly think God would be MORE comprehensible?
None of the examples you give are examples of faith. I don’t have faith my car will start, I have evidence. That evidence being the fact it has started the previous 1000 times I have tried. Which is why I am 99.9% certain my 2019 truck will start and about 50% confident my 1970 nova will start. I have a track record to base my confidence (or lack thereof) on. It also means little that I do not have the technical expertise to understand how an engine works or a plane flies. I know that they were designed and engineered based on the scientific method and have to meet standards of proof. If I was buying a car and noticed it didn’t have a motor, I would ask the salesman how exactly it was going to run. If his answer was “it works in mysterious ways”, I would not believe him. I see no evidence for Gods existence so even if I wanted to believe, I could not. I could choose to hope, but I could not choose to believe.
You almost certainly require explanations for every one of the examples you gave. You want the doctor to explain the reason he is giving you the pill, what the pill will do, and what the possible side effects might be. You also might want a second opinion to check the reasoning of the first doctor. You are aware of the safety records of air flight in general. That it’s safer than driving a car. You also require that the pilot is qualified and know that the airlines are regulated so they have to provide certain levels of maintenance. You don't make these decision based on faith, you make them based on probability.
Life is full of mysteries, I agree. But science routinely takes mysteries that are credited to God and reveals their natural cause. It has been doing this for hundreds of years.
“It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger.”
My friends father was a loving and caring man. He certainly felt the way you described above about his children. At work one day, he fell off the back of a truck and had serious trauma to his head. He recovered, but noticed that he no longer felt the same way about life. He felt no real empathy and was almost entirely emotionally detached from his family and friends. This is a well documented and established effect of certain types of head trauma. If that feeling we get about our children is due to our spirit and connection with our creator, are you saying my friends dad damaged his spirit when he fell off that truck? Or is it more likely that our brains are why we feel that way about our children and my friends dad damaged his frontal lobe when he fell off that truck?
And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence.
The fact that our car has started before builds my faith, my conviction, that so it will always be. The fact that the plane has lifted me, mysteriously, before gives me faith it will again. And if in fact we put some Primitive/Pre-Scientific upon that same plane, he too would share that faith (increasing with every trip) absent any scientific understanding at all of the principles of aerodynamic lift. The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.
Science explains a lot, no question...to a point...but with each explanation we simply reach another question: why is "X" so? Why does a spark ignite? Why is a vapor flammable? Why does steel work in the way it does? And with each question answered we simply push the question that much further:: why matter? why energy? why consciousness? why beauty? why love?
Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain. And certainly an injury to such an organ can impact that processing. But the fact that a blind person cannot appreciate the Mona Lisa does not make da Vinci's work somehow less transcendent. The fact that your friend no longer felt an empathy he felt before does not mean that his very human feeling was unreal....it only means he was no longer equipped to recognize it as he had.
The lack or the destruction of an ability to perceive does not change the truth of what had been perceived. Your friend was, quite obviously, very much aware of what he had lost...just as the blind man who lost his sight would be aware of what he is missing, even if he can no longer perceive it.
The evidence of God surrounds us .... just as the infinite beauty of the universe surrounds us. That you can't see it...or, perhaps, refuse to see it...even in the grip of a newborn's hand, even in the heart-piercing chords of the 'Nessun dorma', even in the shattering kiss of an eternal love, even in a million other things that fill our days and our dreams. Even if, in some misguided post-modern surety we dismiss it all as "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato"... that doesn't change the truth of what is.
So of course we can choose to Believe...to make that little leap... given the evidence, given the mysteries which always and forever will surround us.
This is a semantic argument. You have changed the accepted meaning of the word “faith”.
You state that evidence builds your faith and then in another response state (correctly) “Faith is belief in the absence of evidence” - How can both of those things be true? In the presence of evidence faith is unnecessary. So evidence doesn’t build faith it supersedes it.
You also keep calling well understood and proven processes “mysterious”. Flight is not mysterious. Electricity getting to your coffee grinder is not mysterious. Medicine curing ailments is not mysterious. Just because you don’t understand the process does not mean it is mysterious. I understand you have to establish their mysterious nature in order for them to make any sense in an analogy to faith in God, but they just aren’t. Those things are in an entirely different category.
—“The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.”
If there is evidence that planes reliably fly then it is simply false to say “it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.” Let’s replace the word faith with the correct definition (that you provided) of the word faith. — I have decades worth of evidence that planes fly, but “it is (belief in the absence of evidence) that allows me to buy a ticket. Does that make sense?
—“Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain.”
I didn’t say any of that. This description makes no sense to me. You believe “transcendent feelings” exist independent of us and they are somehow filtered through our brains? What form do these transcendent feelings take when they are outside of our brains, before they are “filtered”? It makes far more sense to me that our brains are the originators of these feelings.
The last argument is more sermon than rational claim, and would be better received by a congregation. I have heard it countless times and the fact still remains, the beauty of nature or vastness of space is not evidence of God. It is beautiful and vast. It inspires awe and can even bring a person to tears. The jump from there to “god did it” is not a “little leap”. It is a gargantuan and unnecessary one.
And lastly you say “And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence”
Of course it's a semantic argument. But it's an accurate semantic argument. You also confuse evidence & proof.
'Faith' is complete trust, a strong conviction. The fact of faith has nothing to do with proof, per se, but accumulated evidence may reinforce "strong conviction". I have faith my wife loves me...and every loving act she performs does indeed reinforce that trust with the evidence of her act, but I have faith in her love even in the absence of that evidential act...and utterly in the absence of proof, for love itself is unprovable. There is no litmus test for Love.
Equally we can say that faith in the existence of God is buoyed, or reinforced by all kinds of evidence -- the glory of the universe, the shock of beauty, the transcendence of love, your child's first smile -- but none of those 'clues' proves God. Evidence may reinforce faith but evidence, per se, proves nothing, it simply nudges.
You say 'electricity getting to your coffee grinder' is not mysterious. But in fact it is mysterious to any of us who have no knowledge or insight or 'proof' of the process. Instead, in the absence of that proof, we have 'complete trust' that the coffee grinder grinds when we plug it into an outlet.
The fact that I can't prove electricity does not alter my faith in electricity. The fact that I can't prove God does not alter my faith in God. And just as we might say, an Electrical Engineer or Physicist can prove electricity....so too might some insist that Aquinas or some learned Theologian can equally prove God. In either case, I don't really care. The arcana of such exercises are beyond me. In either case, my Faith remains.
Let me see if I can clarify my meaning, re: "transcendent feelings'...because you're right, that construction was sloppy.
Consider: a newborn reaches out and curls his hand around his father's finger. At the most mundane of levels it's just a simple touch, 'perceived' by the skin, the nerves and transmitted to the brain where the pressure and warmth of that touch are combined with the visual data processed through the eyes, and the olfactory data processed through the nose (that fresh-baked scent of babies) to arrive at 'brain central' where our various knowledge references interpret all that raw data to tell us: it's a baby's grasp. Tears come to our eyes....the same tears, chemically speaking, which are generated when just that afternoon we heard Pavarotti sing the 'Nessun dorma'. That is the transcendent feeling and it is, indeed, processed by the brain.
It obviously does not exist outside us...not in the same way the baby's little fist does, or the scent, or the warmth -- those are all independent phenomena. But the combination of all those things upon a dog, though perceived by the dog as the child's touch, are not transcendent. Why? Why would our brains attach some kind of extraordinary meaning, to that mundane combination of stimuli such that we cry, and our heart yearns? Why, to your point, would we see nature as 'beautiful' or the universe as 'awesome'? Dog's don't. Why do we? Why & how would the human's mammalian brain create such perceptions when they serve absolutely no utilitarian purpose? Why do we feel this sense of wonder, dread, and veneration ... how can the universe seem 'sublime'?
But never mind. The answer matters little. Faith requires, actually, that it matters not at all. Belief, always, is a matter of choice. And it is a choice exercised with eyes wide open. Either we have faith in God, in Truth, in an absolute Morality, a transcendent & eternal justice, in Love, in Beauty, in Awe....or.... as I said.... we dismiss it all as that 'fragment of an underdone potato' and say God is an unnecessary leap.
I'm reminded of a passage from De Lubac...just encountered it a few days ago, in fact: "So, in the matter of God, whatever certain people may be tempted to think, it is never the proof that is lacking. What is lacking is taste for God. The most distressing diagnosis that can be made of the present age, and the most alarming, is to all appearances at least, it has lost the taste for God. Man prefers himself to God. And so he deflects the movement which leads to God; or since he is unable to alter its direction, he persists in interpreting it falsely. He imagines he has liquidated the proofs. He concentrates on the critique of the proofs and never gets beyond them. He turns away from that which convinces him. If the taste returned, we may be sure that the proofs would soon be restored in everybody’s eyes, and would seem—what they really are if one considers the kernal of them—clearer than day."
Best wishes going forward.
Sorry for the long response...too much time on this already.
Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they aren't right. My father smoked most of his life. At one point he quit for almost 2 years. But one night he was at the bar drinking with friends and he bummed a cigarette. He didn't quit again until he was literally too sick to go to a store to buy cigarettes. He died in 2001 at age 59 from heart failure. My father always told me never to start smoking. That made him a hypocrite, but it was certainly good advice to follow.
I have identified as agnostic since I was 16. My own crisis of faith was not an emotional reaction, but really more the result of an intellectual thought process. My 10th grade English class was reading Greek mythology when I began wondering about the similarities between ancient Greek religious beliefs and my own Catholic faith. Why did they believe in these fanciful tales that pretty much everyone rejects the truth of today? I came up with 3 reasons. First, it was what they were taught by parents and teachers. Second, it was what everyone around them believed. Third, it provided explanations for phenomena that they couldn't otherwise understand. For example, the reason that the sun moves across the sky is because Apollo pulls it with his chariot. Then I asked myself why I believed in God? I decided that it was for the same 3 reasons. I also decided that those reasons weren't sufficient to justify believing. There were all kinds of stories in the Bible about miracles, but there had also been many stories of miracles performed by the Olympian Gods. God was a possible explanation for where the Universe, Earth, and life had come from. But just because Science can't answer those questions currently, doesn't mean that God is the correct answer. Occam's razor and all that.
I can't say for certain there is no God, but I think it's extremely unlikely. I actually considered Pascal's wager before I had ever heard of it. Isn't it safer to believe in case God exists? But I decided that if what I had been taught in Catholic school about God was correct, if I lived a good life treating others as I would want to be treated, I don't think that God would damn me to Hell because I didn't go to church on Sundays. After all, God gave me the ability to reason. If he wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me. I have avoided the atheist label, both because I can't disprove God's existence and because I didn't like the attitudes of most high profile atheists. At least that was true of the people famous for their disbelief. I hate the way certain atheists delight in mocking the faithful for their belief in "superstition." Bill Maher anyone?
I have struggled most of my adult life with depression. It took many years before I realized that was what my problem was. It wasn't until recently that I connected my first symptoms of depression during my junior year of high school with my crisis of faith the year before. In retrospect, it's hard to believe I missed the connection. I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality. Faith that God will give you the strength to overcome adversity might be the only reason a person might try to overcome it instead of giving up because they see their situation as hopeless. Faith can also provide comfort. We lost my mother a few years ago. I so wish that I believed I would see her again. My own health is generally poor. My one saving grace is that I never smoked. But I suffer from complications from diabetes and a back injury sustained when I was rear ended at a red light. Today, I am retired on disability. I live alone and haven't dated anyone in over a decade. I have siblings as well as 2 nieces and a nephew. My nieces live in CA. My nephew I get to see every couple of weeks. As much as I love them, I wish I had more to live for. I honestly wish I could believe in God again. But my rational mind keeps telling me that the more I desperately I want something to be true, the more skeptical I should be. Maybe I should rethink Pascal's wager.
"If (God) wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me." No, not in the least.
What you describe is not Faith, it's fact. I don't have to 'believe' in a hamburger, I can hold & snarf any number of hamburgers. God is not hamburger...nor is He interested in providing 'proof' to Man beyond the proof in which we swim.
Reminds me of the David Foster Wallace story (from a graduation speech): "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
Faith is not belief in the presence of proof indisputable (like God's fingerprints on a tree.....or His footprint in the garden) but belief in the absence of CSI forensics.
You wish to believe...so BELIEVE. We see Beauty; we feel Love; we are haunted by a sense of ineffable transcendence: what is all that other than 'proof'? As CS Lewis put it, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.” Mark Helpin, "A Soldier of the Great War"
You say your 'rational mind keeps telling me' to be skeptical. To what purpose?
“Reason excludes faith.... It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.” (Helprin, again.)
We should too.
Best wishes on your journey!
I'm familiar with the argument that faith is belief in the absence of evidence. But I fail to see how that is an argument in favor of believing something. I realize many people would say it is arrogant to demand that God prove to me that he exists. But I am not demanding anything of the sort. If my Catholic school teachers were correct about God, I believe that he wouldn't condemn me for an honest lack of belief. I am not demanding proof. I am just pointing out that he has that option if he wants me to believe. If I am surprised to discover that there is an afterlife that includes Heaven and Hell, I will hope that I lived a good enough life, treating others well, that I have at least earned a place in purgatory if not Heaven.
One of my favorite TV shows was Lucifer. The premise is that the Devil decides to abandon Hell and take a vacation on Earth running a bar in LA. He ends up as a consultant to the LAPD. In the first season, a priest enters his bar to ask a favor. He wants Lucifer to help prevent a boy from becoming a drug dealer. Lucifer initially refuses, but he ends up befriending the priest. At the end of the episode the priest is shot and dies in Lucifer's arms. Before he dies he says to Lucifer "I didn't understand why God put you in my path. But now I realize he put me in yours." It was at that point I realized the show nominally about the Devil, actually had a very Christian message. No one is beyond salvation, not even the Devil. I am not sure that the Catholic Church would agree the Devil could be reformed, but it sounds like something the God I was taught about would want. Hopefully, I can be saved even if I lack faith. The alternative is everything ends. Either way, I am OK with it.
It's not an argument to believe anything. That is exactly the point. Faith is belief in the absence of evidence, in the absence of Proof (as in Proof, with a capital P) but not in the absence of what our heart tells us is true.
It is knowing without the sworn affidavit, absent the notary, without a single repeatable experimental finding. Still, we know.
I'm not saying you're demanding anything. Nor am I suggesting that God would condemn you for a lack of anything. Who am I to offer a Guide to God's thinking, assuming God thinks? I'm not even particularly concerned about your salvation, or lack thereof -- that issue is not mine.
But when you say you starve for Belief.. when you tell us you suffer in its absence...then I say Believe. When you hesitate or back away from such a leap because you've somehow come to feel that Belief is a 'sucker's game' (not to put words in your mouth but that seems like what you'd say)....I say Believe anyway! Choose it; embrace it. The only one to say you're a 'sucker' is you. So don't say it. Just Believe. Have Faith. Choose Faith.
Look at the glories of the world which surround you. The beauty of the ineffable. The sweetness of a single note, the Mother's softly lingering touch of her child's sleeping face...and Believe.
I'll leave you with one last Helprin quote, also from A Soldier of the Great War:
"...and even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.”
“I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality.”
I agree with your thoughts on the powerful role faith plays in many peoples lives, but if your faith is “justified by reality” then it is no longer faith. For me, thats the problem with Pascal’s wager. It assumes one can choose to believe. Choose to have faith. If you are inclined to interrogate religious beliefs, but still want to have faith, you have to be able to eventually satisfy your doubts with the answer - “God is mysterious”. That answer will just never do it for me.
Indeed you can choose to Believe. Why not? We do it all the time in countless little ways every day. I believe that my car will start, despite an absolute lack of understanding of the mystery of the internal combustion engine. I believe that when I take my seat on a plane that somehow, mysteriously, that massive chunk of steel will rise and safely take me to my destination. When I'm sick and the doctor says, 'Take this!', I swallow it gladly with faith that, mysteriously, my ailments will vanish.
These are little leaps but we all make them....and sometimes we tell ourselves it's OK that I don't know how the electricity finds its way into my coffee grinder-- but someone does! At least that's what I believe.
The thing is, life itself is a mystery. Love is a mystery. It's a mystery why, when we hear someone sing 'Nessun dorma' by Puccini that our eyes fill with tears. It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger. Existence is mystery; consciousness & self-awareness is mystery. It's mysterious as to why we worry such questions that have never haunted a single cow.
Of course God is mystery...what else could He be?
When we mortals struggle to understand Calculus, and need a specialist to fix a leaky pipe....how could we possibly think God would be MORE comprehensible?
None of the examples you give are examples of faith. I don’t have faith my car will start, I have evidence. That evidence being the fact it has started the previous 1000 times I have tried. Which is why I am 99.9% certain my 2019 truck will start and about 50% confident my 1970 nova will start. I have a track record to base my confidence (or lack thereof) on. It also means little that I do not have the technical expertise to understand how an engine works or a plane flies. I know that they were designed and engineered based on the scientific method and have to meet standards of proof. If I was buying a car and noticed it didn’t have a motor, I would ask the salesman how exactly it was going to run. If his answer was “it works in mysterious ways”, I would not believe him. I see no evidence for Gods existence so even if I wanted to believe, I could not. I could choose to hope, but I could not choose to believe.
You almost certainly require explanations for every one of the examples you gave. You want the doctor to explain the reason he is giving you the pill, what the pill will do, and what the possible side effects might be. You also might want a second opinion to check the reasoning of the first doctor. You are aware of the safety records of air flight in general. That it’s safer than driving a car. You also require that the pilot is qualified and know that the airlines are regulated so they have to provide certain levels of maintenance. You don't make these decision based on faith, you make them based on probability.
Life is full of mysteries, I agree. But science routinely takes mysteries that are credited to God and reveals their natural cause. It has been doing this for hundreds of years.
“It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger.”
My friends father was a loving and caring man. He certainly felt the way you described above about his children. At work one day, he fell off the back of a truck and had serious trauma to his head. He recovered, but noticed that he no longer felt the same way about life. He felt no real empathy and was almost entirely emotionally detached from his family and friends. This is a well documented and established effect of certain types of head trauma. If that feeling we get about our children is due to our spirit and connection with our creator, are you saying my friends dad damaged his spirit when he fell off that truck? Or is it more likely that our brains are why we feel that way about our children and my friends dad damaged his frontal lobe when he fell off that truck?
Sure they are.
And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence.
The fact that our car has started before builds my faith, my conviction, that so it will always be. The fact that the plane has lifted me, mysteriously, before gives me faith it will again. And if in fact we put some Primitive/Pre-Scientific upon that same plane, he too would share that faith (increasing with every trip) absent any scientific understanding at all of the principles of aerodynamic lift. The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.
Science explains a lot, no question...to a point...but with each explanation we simply reach another question: why is "X" so? Why does a spark ignite? Why is a vapor flammable? Why does steel work in the way it does? And with each question answered we simply push the question that much further:: why matter? why energy? why consciousness? why beauty? why love?
Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain. And certainly an injury to such an organ can impact that processing. But the fact that a blind person cannot appreciate the Mona Lisa does not make da Vinci's work somehow less transcendent. The fact that your friend no longer felt an empathy he felt before does not mean that his very human feeling was unreal....it only means he was no longer equipped to recognize it as he had.
The lack or the destruction of an ability to perceive does not change the truth of what had been perceived. Your friend was, quite obviously, very much aware of what he had lost...just as the blind man who lost his sight would be aware of what he is missing, even if he can no longer perceive it.
The evidence of God surrounds us .... just as the infinite beauty of the universe surrounds us. That you can't see it...or, perhaps, refuse to see it...even in the grip of a newborn's hand, even in the heart-piercing chords of the 'Nessun dorma', even in the shattering kiss of an eternal love, even in a million other things that fill our days and our dreams. Even if, in some misguided post-modern surety we dismiss it all as "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato"... that doesn't change the truth of what is.
So of course we can choose to Believe...to make that little leap... given the evidence, given the mysteries which always and forever will surround us.
This is a semantic argument. You have changed the accepted meaning of the word “faith”.
You state that evidence builds your faith and then in another response state (correctly) “Faith is belief in the absence of evidence” - How can both of those things be true? In the presence of evidence faith is unnecessary. So evidence doesn’t build faith it supersedes it.
You also keep calling well understood and proven processes “mysterious”. Flight is not mysterious. Electricity getting to your coffee grinder is not mysterious. Medicine curing ailments is not mysterious. Just because you don’t understand the process does not mean it is mysterious. I understand you have to establish their mysterious nature in order for them to make any sense in an analogy to faith in God, but they just aren’t. Those things are in an entirely different category.
—“The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.”
If there is evidence that planes reliably fly then it is simply false to say “it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.” Let’s replace the word faith with the correct definition (that you provided) of the word faith. — I have decades worth of evidence that planes fly, but “it is (belief in the absence of evidence) that allows me to buy a ticket. Does that make sense?
—“Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain.”
I didn’t say any of that. This description makes no sense to me. You believe “transcendent feelings” exist independent of us and they are somehow filtered through our brains? What form do these transcendent feelings take when they are outside of our brains, before they are “filtered”? It makes far more sense to me that our brains are the originators of these feelings.
The last argument is more sermon than rational claim, and would be better received by a congregation. I have heard it countless times and the fact still remains, the beauty of nature or vastness of space is not evidence of God. It is beautiful and vast. It inspires awe and can even bring a person to tears. The jump from there to “god did it” is not a “little leap”. It is a gargantuan and unnecessary one.
And lastly you say “And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence”
I have no idea what this means
Of course it's a semantic argument. But it's an accurate semantic argument. You also confuse evidence & proof.
'Faith' is complete trust, a strong conviction. The fact of faith has nothing to do with proof, per se, but accumulated evidence may reinforce "strong conviction". I have faith my wife loves me...and every loving act she performs does indeed reinforce that trust with the evidence of her act, but I have faith in her love even in the absence of that evidential act...and utterly in the absence of proof, for love itself is unprovable. There is no litmus test for Love.
Equally we can say that faith in the existence of God is buoyed, or reinforced by all kinds of evidence -- the glory of the universe, the shock of beauty, the transcendence of love, your child's first smile -- but none of those 'clues' proves God. Evidence may reinforce faith but evidence, per se, proves nothing, it simply nudges.
You say 'electricity getting to your coffee grinder' is not mysterious. But in fact it is mysterious to any of us who have no knowledge or insight or 'proof' of the process. Instead, in the absence of that proof, we have 'complete trust' that the coffee grinder grinds when we plug it into an outlet.
The fact that I can't prove electricity does not alter my faith in electricity. The fact that I can't prove God does not alter my faith in God. And just as we might say, an Electrical Engineer or Physicist can prove electricity....so too might some insist that Aquinas or some learned Theologian can equally prove God. In either case, I don't really care. The arcana of such exercises are beyond me. In either case, my Faith remains.
Let me see if I can clarify my meaning, re: "transcendent feelings'...because you're right, that construction was sloppy.
Consider: a newborn reaches out and curls his hand around his father's finger. At the most mundane of levels it's just a simple touch, 'perceived' by the skin, the nerves and transmitted to the brain where the pressure and warmth of that touch are combined with the visual data processed through the eyes, and the olfactory data processed through the nose (that fresh-baked scent of babies) to arrive at 'brain central' where our various knowledge references interpret all that raw data to tell us: it's a baby's grasp. Tears come to our eyes....the same tears, chemically speaking, which are generated when just that afternoon we heard Pavarotti sing the 'Nessun dorma'. That is the transcendent feeling and it is, indeed, processed by the brain.
It obviously does not exist outside us...not in the same way the baby's little fist does, or the scent, or the warmth -- those are all independent phenomena. But the combination of all those things upon a dog, though perceived by the dog as the child's touch, are not transcendent. Why? Why would our brains attach some kind of extraordinary meaning, to that mundane combination of stimuli such that we cry, and our heart yearns? Why, to your point, would we see nature as 'beautiful' or the universe as 'awesome'? Dog's don't. Why do we? Why & how would the human's mammalian brain create such perceptions when they serve absolutely no utilitarian purpose? Why do we feel this sense of wonder, dread, and veneration ... how can the universe seem 'sublime'?
But never mind. The answer matters little. Faith requires, actually, that it matters not at all. Belief, always, is a matter of choice. And it is a choice exercised with eyes wide open. Either we have faith in God, in Truth, in an absolute Morality, a transcendent & eternal justice, in Love, in Beauty, in Awe....or.... as I said.... we dismiss it all as that 'fragment of an underdone potato' and say God is an unnecessary leap.
I'm reminded of a passage from De Lubac...just encountered it a few days ago, in fact: "So, in the matter of God, whatever certain people may be tempted to think, it is never the proof that is lacking. What is lacking is taste for God. The most distressing diagnosis that can be made of the present age, and the most alarming, is to all appearances at least, it has lost the taste for God. Man prefers himself to God. And so he deflects the movement which leads to God; or since he is unable to alter its direction, he persists in interpreting it falsely. He imagines he has liquidated the proofs. He concentrates on the critique of the proofs and never gets beyond them. He turns away from that which convinces him. If the taste returned, we may be sure that the proofs would soon be restored in everybody’s eyes, and would seem—what they really are if one considers the kernal of them—clearer than day."
Best wishes going forward.
Sorry for the long response...too much time on this already.