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Heber13 wrote:
Way, As I read through your last post of beliefs vs faith, what I hear you saying is faith is active, belief is passive, and the danger with belief is being more confident in something we don’t try and gain experience of but simply wish for it to be true, which can be very dangerous to our souls.
Am I hearing you right?
exactly. as well, faith is (should be) aware of its lack of knowledge, whereas belief often forgets that we don’t know.i love the “experiment on faith” in Alma 32. if we just realized that the experiment gives you confidence and knowledge just in the thing being tested.
so, if I perform an experiment on the book of mormon–and we all have–we read, and we pray if the things we are reading come from god, and we conclude, through spiritual experience that the things we read came from god. we cannot conclude with that test that every origin story of the book came from god. we cannot know that it is the most correct book. we cannot know if it contains the fulness of the gospel. all we have tested is that the specific things we read testify of christ, make us feel good, they enrich our soul, the motivate to good works and action. and, since we are taught that things that testify of christ and motivate to good action are from god, then we conclude, logically, that the things we read are from god. this is a type of reason.
we have knowledge of the phenomenology of the book: what it says can be known. how it makes us feel to read it, this, too, can be known. to conclude that it comes from god requires acceptance of the premise that things which testify of christ and motivate to do good come from god. we don’t know that, but trust it. a known + a trusted premise = a trusted conclusion. we still don’t know, but we trust it — therefore we have faith in the concept that what we read comes from god, and we have a testimony, a first hand withess of how it made us feel.
by removing the word “believe” from our language: i have faith that the book of mormon comes from god (from what i read), and i know that these things i read uplift me, gave me a spiritual experience, and motivated me to live differently. This is what I would define as “faith” and a “testimony”.
now we have another premise that we asj investigators to accept. “can god lie?” or “can any man have written this book?”, and the investigator, with missionary “testimony” *believes* that god cannot lie and god must have written the book. such things are unknown, untestable, and thus unprovable. they are not reasonable. faith + testimony + unknown = unknown. no amount of faith and testimony can overcome an unprovable, untestable hypothesis.
when i say “i believe thay no man could have written this book”, its a guess. there is no justification for that belief. and in contaminating the faith proposition, we have nothing–in stating an opinion as belief we got nothing.
now lets go further. JS and BY, and all the prophets through SWK believed that native americans were lamanites. all of them. yet, they absolutely are not, because lamanites would have israelite DNA. if that DNA is so dilute it cannot be found, then In what way are native americans lamanites in any real sense of the word? native americans either are or are not material descendents of lamanites. since native american dna is not israelites, then we can objectively prove that the book of mormon is not a literal history of the vast majority of native americans. it is objectively provable, testable, anf indeed the answer is “false” — native americans are not descendents of the lamanites. period.
now, apologists can back pedal all day long, introducing limited geography, and narrow scope of ancestry — so narrow we’re talking about Russell’s teapot.
no amount of belief or faith can change the fact that native americans are not lamanites, therefore the fundamental origination story of the book of mormon is either false, or cannot be taken literally. by separating belief from faith, and being specific on the thing known through the test on faith, the lact of factuality of the origin story won’t wreck true faith. that’s my point
Good points, Wayfarer. We should have faith (act on things that are unseen but are true) and feel free to believe what we want but not mix the two. What I find difficult in talking with other highly religious people is the skipped steps they take. They go from “If the Book of Mormon is true, then Joseph was a prophet and the restoration was true and prophet’s today have the priesthood power to speak for God, therefore voting against Prop 8 is God’s will.”
It is like I am with them until they reach a point they skip ahead and have faith in something they believe but haven’t followed the Alma process in, they just stop testing things and have confidence anything from church leaders is knowledge, they believe it, but they have no faith in it. And that limits their progress, IMO.
Heber13 wrote:… therefore voting against Prop 8 is God’s will.”
… just to avoid confusion for those who aren’t familiar with Prop 8, I think you meant to say
Heber13 wrote:… therefore voting
forProp 8 is God’s will.”
Quote:They go from “If the Book of Mormon is true, then Joseph was a prophet and the restoration was true and prophet’s today have the priesthood power to speak for God …”
And in this they are amply justified by any number of GC talks, Deseret Book publications, fervent missionaries and their mission presidents, SS lessons, SM talks, etc.Thanks Doug, that was what I meant. I’m not sure if this will help Wayfarer but here is a science explanation on belief. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_6-iVz1R0o&feature=youtube_gdata_player Might enjoy the ending on a mediocre day. I got a huge laugh out of it.
🙂 I see knowledge as knowing something with 100% surety. Faith is you have some certainity of something, that is it is based on some evidence in your mind.
Hope to me is to desire something to be true but have no evidence of it.
Quote:So my question: can a person have faith without belief?
Can one have evidence something is true without believing it?
well…. can one see evidence that the church is true without still believing it is true? sure
We had lessons in church today on Faith. The instructor asked the class what is the opposite of faith.
It made me ponder.
What would you all say is the opposite of faith?
Heber13 wrote:We had lessons in church today on Faith.
The instructor asked the class what is the opposite of faith.
It made me ponder.
What would you all say is the opposite of faith?
a know-it-all who does nothing.faith is the willingness to act knowing that you don’t know.
See, we are going to have trouble discussing this topic because the area of faith/belief and knowledge is not formally defined to my knowledge. AS an academic, you have to clearly define your terms to have a meaningful discussion, and everyone has to agree on what those terms mean within reason. I think that’s why you and I, WF, couldn’t get anywhere enlightening in the thread of about whether things have to be true for you to have faith in them — given Alma’s definition of faith. For me, belief is simply a state of mind where you think a certain state of affairs exists. But for me, that belief can be utterly false, or true. It doesn’t matter — what matters is that you believe it. Faith, on the other hand, is a belief in something which is literally true AND bears on salvation. Knowledge is a stronger that belief and stronger than faith, but to actually define it in a religious context hasn’t been attempted in our discussions as far as I can tell.
Until we can agree on the difference between faith, belief, and knowledge (and perhaps even hope) I think we’re going to have a really hard time pinning down whether you can have faith without belief.
I think the opposite of faith is certainty (which is different than knowledge) – particularly the type of certainty, like wayfarer said, that breeds complacency. It’s kind of the “all is well in Zion” mentality. SilentDawning wrote:See, we are going to have trouble discussing this topic because the area of faith/belief and knowledge is not formally defined to my knowledge. AS an academic, you have to clearly define your terms to have a meaningful discussion, and everyone has to agree on what those terms mean within reason. I think that’s why you and I, WF, couldn’t get anywhere enlightening in the thread of about whether things have to be true for you to have faith in them — given Alma’s definition of faith.
For me, belief is simply a state of mind where you think a certain state of affairs exists. But for me, that belief can be utterly false, or true. It doesn’t matter — what matters is that you believe it.
Completely, 100% with you to this point.SilentDawning wrote:Faith, on the other hand, is a belief in something which is literally true AND bears on salvation. Knowledge is a stronger that belief and stronger than faith, but to actually define it in a religious context hasn’t been attempted in our discussions as far as I can tell.
This is where we differ, you are correct, the problem is the terminology, and it’s much more complicated and difficult that we realize: from language to language, the words do not match. But in the field of epistemology, there is some help.First, belief is something you hold to be true, ranging from a comfort with something to a feeling of absolute certainty. I will go with your definition exactly:
Quote:Quote:Quote:Quote:
4 By faith Abel offered
7 By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved
8 By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed
9 By faith he sojourned
17 By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered
20 By faith Isaac blessed
21 By faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed
24 By faith Moses… forsook
28 Through faith he kept
29 By faith they passed through
31 By faith the harlot Rahab … received
32 And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: Who through faith subduedwroughtobtainedstoppedQuenchedescapedwaxed valiantturned to flight the armies of the aliens
In every one of these cases, the willingness to act is the imperative behind faith. In gree, this concept of faith is a verb: episteo, which is often translated as ‘believe’, since there is no direct translation of episteo.
Until we can agree on the difference between faith, belief, and knowledge (and perhaps even hope) I think we’re going to have a really hard time pinning down whether you can have faith without belief.
It’s not so much that belief has to be part of faith — it problem can be: certainly I would like to believe in some of the things we teach about the Plan of Salvation, and I do believe some of them. But the problem with ‘believe’ is that it so quickly becomes a ‘feeling of certainty’ without action. If I believe in a premortal existence — something which doesn’t inform or require action — then what’s the point of faith in premortal existence? Can’t act on it. Can’t hope for it, because it’s already past. Can’t trust it — what would that mean? Same with “Father in Heaven”. I like the concept. because ‘father’ is an historical perspective (the fathering act has already happened), then all that is left is the nurturing act. Can a non-father nurture a child? sure. Can a non-son revere someone as if they were a father? Sure. What’s faith got to do with it? If there is a divine presence I pray to, that I sense is real, tangible, and literal — i may ‘believe’ that such a presence is my ‘father in heaven’, but this belief has nothing to do with the truth of it, nor with my actions. belief that HF is our HF is less relevant than the idea that I have faith that the ACT of praying to ____ has a positive effect and is relevant.