Any article or video on the web that mentions anything about religion usually has a predictably long thread of comments by users expressing their own opinions. Apparently, people have plenty of views on the subject (which personally, I hardly find surprising!)
One of the ideas that often makes its way onto these mile-long threads goes something along the lines of "Your belief is based on faith, and faith means ignoring any evidence on the subject, hence you, sir, are an idiot."
I disagree with this. I consider faith to be something that, in my experience, usually complements the known evidence. I have found it distinctly rare for a persons faith to go in the opposite direction of available evidence.
Imagine a scale running from top to bottom. At the top of the scale is "I believe this is true", at the bottom is "I believe this is false", and in the middle is "I don't know". People will be born, for most topics, with nothing on that scale. The default position for believing any topical item will be the neutral- the middle- "I don't know".
I then think that evidence in a persons life will start to fill that scale, starting from the middle, either upwards or downwards. But for most things in life, the evidence will never reach all the way to the top or bottom- to certainty- by itself. But so that decisions can be made, I think that people fill up the rest of the gap (in the direction that the evidence was already pointing) with faith.
The amount of faith needed to decisively believe something thus varies depending on the evidence. A man may have eaten apple pie every day of his life for the last year and loved it, which make the chances pretty good that he will like the apple pie being baked for him today. But although the previous experience provides a lot of evidence, it doesn't make it 100% certain that he will like today's pie. Today's pie could be burnt. The existing evidence might, for example, make it 95% certain that the man will like the impending pie. But if the man feels 100% certain that he will enjoy it, he must have filled up the last 5% of the decision scale with faith. Faith that the future will keep going in the same direction that past has pointed towards.
Or a woman could be about to do a bungee jump as part of a hen party. She's seen a few people do it today, before her, and none of them are dead. She's even seen quite a few videos of people doing it on TV, and none of them are dead either. But her fear of heights and complete lack of personal experience might mean that her evidence for the jump not resulting in human pancake is comparatively small. The evidence here could be a mere 10%. By itself, that's not going to bring about the decision to step off the platform! She can, however, top it up with a literal leap of faith- in this case, 90% of it- to make the decision that enables her to jump.
Notice that we can't ever have 100% evidence for an event that will happen at even the nearest moment in the future. We can only be certain of things, from evidence, that have already occurred. Like the man who liked apple pie: every pie so far might have been delicious, but that does not garuntee a good pie today, it can only make it very likely.
So, we excercise faith far more than we suppose in everyday life, and it usually points in the same direction as evidence, not the opposite.
I'll go a step further and say that I don't think it is possible to have faith in something unless there is at least a small amount of existing evidence for it. In 'evidence', I include emotions, and feelings like our internal moral codes, because as a species we do take these into consideration when making decisions.
Also, I think it must possible for there to be evidence branching out from the centre of the scale in both directions. In this case, I do not know what decides where faith will be provided to enable a certain belief. It could depend on which end of the scale has the greatest amount of evidence, or it could depend on something much deeper, such as the core of what we might call our 'free will'. I think this two-direction evidence situation on the scale reflects some of the tougher decisions we face. Examples could include physical evidence on one side of the scale against developed emotional trust in something on the other.
Faith and Evidence are as opposite as a Hammer and Nail. You might think the Evidence is holding your argument together, forgetting that you built it using Faith.
See another post about Debate...
Image source: http://www.blueberryforest.com/kitchen_grocery_play/haba-scales.htm
