Re: faith

Posted by Nick Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Faith-tp7580633p7580692.html

Robert,

 

Your model of intellectual life – don’t speak until you look it up and shut up afterwards – is different from mine (obviously).  I am more of a protestant in such matters:  In matters of philosophy, each person has ultimately to figure it out for himself. 

 

Whatever SEP might dictate, I am still interested in how Russ might compose a sentence – faithful to his notion of faith – that speaks of faith he does not believe in or of a belief in which he does not have faith.  I guess its fair to say that in matters of small f faith, you are a catholic and I am a quaker.  I really don’t care about what the minister has to say;  I want to hear from the congregation. 

 

Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Robert Holmes
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 8:38 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] faith

 

It wouldn't hurt to review the entry on faith in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/faith/). In its second paragraph, it distinguishes between a broad definition of faith as trust or belief and the narrower notion of religious faith (think of the email traffic we could have saved if we'd looked this up earlier…). It goes on to explore different models of religious faith some of which the group has discussed and some of which it hasn't:

• the ‘purely affective’ model: faith as a feeling of existential confidence
• the ‘special knowledge’ model: faith as knowledge of specific truths, revealed by God
• the ‘belief’ model: faith as belief that God exists
• the ‘trust’ model: faith as belief in (trust in) God
• the ‘doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment beyond the evidence to one's belief that God exists
• the ‘sub-doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment without belief
• the ‘hope’ model: faith as hoping—or acting in the hope that—the God who saves exists.

In short, there's a reason baby Jesus invented Google. Every time you don't use it to inform a discussion, an angel dies.

 

—R

 

 

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 11:44 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

OK. Those seem like two distinct  meanings of "faith." I was talking and thinking of your second one.

 

-- Russ 

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