tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7110460687773644977.post1771650030213853155..comments2023-09-02T07:14:49.753-04:00Comments on Atheism And The City: Quote Of The Day: Gotta Have Faith!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7110460687773644977.post-49263710861354123402021-04-25T14:06:00.505-04:002021-04-25T14:06:00.505-04:00Your quotation of my blog post seems very---how sh...Your quotation of my blog post seems very---how shall I put this?---selective. If you had included even a few more words, it would become clear that this is not at all what I was trying to say. The rest of the paragraph reads:<br /><br />"By faith! The skeptic may scoff here, and say that faith is belief without evidence, but that is not the definition used in the passage above. It says that faith is confidence about what we hope for, but do not see. Unless we identify sight (conceived broadly as anything which can be directly experienced in terms of our 5+ senses) with evidence (things which allow us to conclude something about the world)--an identification which would incidentally also make Science impossible--the passage does not say that the ancients were commended for believing without evidence. But the example of the biblical heroes does give some pointers about what type of evidence was relevant to them."<br /><br />In this paragraph I quite explicitly <i>denied</i> that faith means belief without evidence. Rather, it is belief without "sight". For example, nobody has ever directly seen a neutrino (since they are invisible) but we still have good evidence of their existence, coming from events in particle accelerators. That is why I said that Science also involves belief in things we cannot see.<br /><br />As for the sentence "It says that faith is confidence about what we hope for, but do not see", I can understand grammatically why you might have misinterpreted the phrase about hope, but to clarify: I did not mean: "It's okay to believe whatever you like, as long as you wish it is true." Rather, I meant: "There is good reason to think that certain theological propositions [which, as it happens, Christians put their hope in] are true, even though they are not directly visible". In other words, I wasn't saying that our emotion of hope is <i>itself</i> the justification for the belief. Rather, the hope is a response to whatever evidence a given individual has (whether historical or personal) that God exists and is reliable.<br /><br />Even if you don't agree with me that the objective historical evidence for the Resurrection is compelling (as is your right, since each person has to decide this for themselves) you can at least acknowledge that <i>I</i> think it is. And---speaking as the most credible authority for what I personally think----I don't at all agree with the fideistic proposition that you have attributed to me. So I think a retraction is called for. Thanks!Aron Wallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10552077344304954390noreply@blogger.com