To 'believe something' and to 'have a belief in something' are two different things. You don't need faith to believe anything that has evidence. You might need faith to believe the evidence, again a different thing.
Faith is quantifyable and shows how much or how little you believe your belief to be true. Faith is generally attached to a belief based in the unknown\uncertainty and queries the truth or validity of the belief.
No faith=no belief. Bit of faith=maybe true. Lot of faith=more than likely true. 100% faith=fact, in the individual, not neccessarily true.
I agree that feelings cannot be trusted to know if your faith is telling you the truth. However, faith is always based in a feeling and not thought. The feeling will be supported by thoughts but nevertheless, the core of faith for everyone of us is a feeling. Yikes! I think we are in trouble!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre  How are you (and they) defining faith? If faith is the feeling of certainty in a specific belief, then the belief must come first, of course.
But if faith is a general tendency to believe in things for which there is no evidence (not including personal experience or authoritative assurance), belief follows faith. It's not necessarily blind faith unless it means believing everything (or at least everything stated by a particular authority)
I suspect you're asking the question because people frequently use the same word in those two contexts without making it clear what they mean.
In my opinion both forms of faith fall short of true validation of a belief. The former is too reliant on feelings which can very easily be misleading, and the latter inhibits questioning of suggestions which could very possibly be damaging. |