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I'm not sure that is true. "evidence of things not seen" is just poetic language for "faith is the thing that bridges the gap between what you are sure of and

• tines 6y ago
  EDIT: There are too many places where "I think" should be placed in the following paragraphs, so just insert it wherever I make an assertion. I am exploring these things as well and I don't want to make it seem like I think I have all the answers. As it says, "we know in part, and we prophesy in part." I am a Christian and I'd love to talk about this stuff with you so I hope it reads friendly. Yes, I meant to confine my usage to biblical usage of the words specifically, and there are a host of assertions made about faith in the Bible that don't apply to everyday usage of the word "faith". For example, according to Romans, biblical faith "comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God", so the faith I'm referring to is belief in the word of God; by this definition, one can't have biblical faith in whatever one pleases. The word is not used in the more general sense of "assumption" in the New Testament (that I know of). (So when you read "Ye of little faith" or whatever, it's specifically talking about people who don't believe the word of God/Jesus, not just people who are not in the habit of making assumptions in general.) And I meant to use the word "believer" to refer to "one who has faith [in the biblical sense mentioned]". So what I meant to say earlier is that when the Bible says that a believer should have "faith" in something, the believer can be confident that there will either be no visible evidence for that thing, or that there will be evidence to the contrary. Take Peter, for example, whom Jesus bade to come to him out on the water by faith. At that point, Peter was not only ignorant of whether the water would support him, but rather knew for sure that it wouldn't; and he walked anyway. Abraham is another example, to whom God promised that he would have a son after both he and his wife were past childbearing age (not simply when they didn't have a child yet). And again Abraham, when God told him to offer his son as a sacrifice, reasoned that since God said his lineage would be through Isaac, but Isaac hadn't had children yet, God would simply raise him from the dead, which was impossible by normal human means, needless to say. More importantly, take the idea that believers are not only made righteous, but are made righteous by faith: since it is by faith, one should not be surprised to see evidence contrary to this claim, namely that one still sins. Paul wrote both "we wait for the hope of righteousness through faith" and "For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope, for why would a man hope for that which he sees?" All that is to say that in biblical vernacular, I think that faith differs from an assumption simply in that a believer is not looking for confirmation, and is perhaps even looking for dis-confirmation of the thing which he believes, whereas an assumption is open to revision upon the discovery of proof or disproof. In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible. > There isn't anything particularly mystical about faith conceptually. Agreed. But in Christian circles, I think it needs to be made clear that the bible makes a lot of assertions about faith that don't apply to the dictionary definition of the word.
  • walljm 6y ago
    I am a Christian also and I'm happy to discuss! :) Hopefully, we'll both walk away with a deeper understanding. It seems to me that the way you're trying to distinguish between "faith" and "belief" and "assumption" has more to do with what a person is "assuming", "believing" or putting their "faith" in, and not the meaning of those words in and of themselves. The example of Jesus and Peter is a good one. Peter needed to have faith. The reason for the need for faith was because the thing Jesus was asking of him wasn't normal and Peter didn't have explicit evidence of it. But Peter did have evidence that when it came to Jesus, physics weren't normal, and Jesus himself was walking on the water proving that Jesus had command of that ability. Peter wasn't blind at that moment, but he did have to assume (or believe) that if Jesus said he could walk on water, then Peter could walk on water also. There was extrapolation from evidence and relationship, but not full knowledge yet. And if Peter had sunk, his faith in Jesus would have suffered, and rightfully so if Jesus had let him down. But Jesus didn't let him down, and his faith in Jesus was shown to be justified. When the bible says that we are saved "by faith" it is describing the mechanical process in simple terms. We know that the person who does the saving is God the Father. We know that the reason the Father is justified in saving us is because of Jesus sacrifice. But salvation doesn't occur until we enter into the agreement the Father has offered mankind for salvation, and to do that we have to "believe" in the fundamentals of the agreement. You won't enter into a contract if you don't believe the contract exists, if you don't believe the one offering the contract exists, if you don't believe that the contract is possible, and so on. When you choose to accept God's offer of salvation you have to do so by faith, because there is not 100% definitive proof of all that before hand. You are, in other words, choosing to accept as true something you can't prove with 100% certainty. And though the degree of faith being exercised is different, that is exactly the same thing that happens in empirical science, where nothing is proved 100% but things are shown to be true to some degree of probability (usually very high, but never 100%). > In other words, the goal of a believer is to persist in blind faith until death, but the goal of an assumer is for his/her assumption to be made obsolete by fact as soon as possible. In this I think we disagree. My faith in scripture isn't blind, nor do I believe that the Bible is teaching us to continue in spite of evidence to the contrary. I believe because I find the Bible, to the extent that I can verify it, to be true, and I continue to believe because nothing has shown it to be false. Nothing explains the world as accurately as scripture does, and all of my life has born out the truths of scripture. The bible presents a theory of the world that I find to be more compelling than any other theory of the world. And all the evidence that I have seen continues to support that theory in my view. So I continue to believe. But if the Bible is shown to be false, then it is folly to persist in its teachings. Even Paul said, "...if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die." (1 Cor 15:32). His point (if you look at the bigger context) is that if what Jesus is teaching isn't true, then we should take as much joy and pleasure in this life as we can, for there is little point in all the suffering Jesus calls us to otherwise. --- The thing I was trying to convey in my first post (perhaps a bit to abruptly) is that the idea that faith in scripture is somehow more than the simple definition leads to a misunderstanding of what God is trying to tell us in the Bible. When we inject more "meaning" than is there it complicates things that were meant to be simple. Thanks for engaging with me on this!