A few things: Firstly, dictionaries are meant for the average Joe. They’re a bit sloppy when it comes to the nuances in a philosophical discussion.
You were the one who insisted on the “common usage” of the term. If that isn’t reflected by the most common (number one) definition in multiple dictionaries, then you will need to explain where we might find it.
If you are looking for the most common general philosophical definition of “faith,” here you go: “The concept of faith is a broad one: at its most general
‘faith’ means much the same as ‘trust’.”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Contrast that with the use of faith, such as in the phrase “blind faith”. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of “blind trust”. In fact, I rarely hear the word “faith” used to describe confidence in a friend or something well-understood.
Surely we can agree that how often we may have heard the words “faith” and “trust” used in certain contexts cannot be the criterion for definitions.
But even if you insist on the strict definition, I can accommodate that. For example, someone earlier said that I “have faith” that a plane won’t crash while I’m on it. I preferred to call this “trust”.
The entire genesis of this discussion was due to your objection that posters weren’t using the word “faith” as it is commonly defined. See:
I am guilty of assuming that people use standard definitions of words, yes.
Your Post.
So now you prefer to use the word “trust”, despite the fact that a standard definition of “faith” is trust in someone or something.
To accommodate you, I’m more than happy to call it “confidence” if you like.
Do you realize that the word “con
fidence” is based on the Latin root “
fides,” which means faith? I suggest we just use the common dictionary and philosophical term: faith, since that’s what you insisted upon - until now.
Regardless of whether or not there is a specific word for the belief in something that is not grounded in evidence, it is important to understand (or admit) that belief in a deity falls under that category, whatever you choose to call it.
If you believe that Catholic philosophers generally use the term “faith” to mean belief without evidence or reason - a blind faith - then you are badly mistaken. If that were true, I wouldn’t be a theist, and I will venture to say that neither would most of the Catholic posters here. Consider:
To believe in God is to make a practical commitment—the kind involved in trusting God, or, trusting in God. (The root meaning of the Greek pistis, ‘faith’, is ‘trust’.) This, then, is a model of faith as trust—but of trust not simply in the sense of an affective state of confidence, but in the sense of an action. On this fiducial model of faith, the volitional component of faith takes central place, with the cognitive component entailed by it. The fiducial model is widely identified as Protestant. Swinburne, for example, calls it the ‘Lutheran’ model, and defines it thus: ‘the person of faith does not merely believe that there is a God (and believe certain propositions about him)—he trusts Him and commits himself to Him’ (2005, 142). Yet, as noted earlier, Aquinas takes the ultimate object of faith to be God, ‘the first reality’, and, furthermore, understands ‘formed’ faith as trusting commitment to God, motivated by, and directed towards, love of God as one’s true end (see Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 4, 3; O’Brien 1974, 123–7). It is true that Aquinas attributes faith to the devils—but this ‘faith’ amounts only to their belief that what the Church teaches is the truth, arrived at not by grace but ‘forced from them’ reluctantly by ‘the acumen of their natural intelligence’ (Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 5, 2; O’Brien 1974, 155 & 157). So Aquinas’s account of ‘saving’ faith is also a fiducial model.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Even the Church admits that “faith is above reason”. If faith were evidence-based, it wouldn’t be!
154 Believing is possible only by grace and the interior helps of the Holy Spirit. But it is no less true that believing is an authentically human act. Trusting in God and cleaving to the truths he has revealed is contrary neither to human freedom nor to human reason. Even in human relations it is not contrary to our dignity to believe what other persons tell us about themselves and their intentions, or to trust their promises (for example, when a man and a woman marry) to share a communion of life with one another. If this is so, still less is it contrary to our dignity to “yield by faith the full submission of. . . intellect and will to God who reveals”,26 and to share in an interior communion with him.
CCC.
Faith in God (trust that God will do what he says He will do) is a supernatural elevation (grace) of the human will and intellect. In that sense, faith is above reason; however, it in no way creates a dichotomy between faith and reason. There are all types of reasons and evidence to trust God ie. to have faith in Him; just as there are reasons and evidence to have faith in one’s spouse or peers. Those reasons and evidence are given everyday on this forum, whether you agree with them or not. The Catholic Church has never taught that faith in God means a blind faith that is unsupported by reason and evidence. Until you understand this, you are going to continue misusing the term.
