Is Faith a form of Delusion?

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HardRockGTR said:
I wholeheartedly agree. Phlogiston (in the domain of science) has been proven wrong, and yet, it wasn’t an unreasonable theory at all.
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What?? So when the tire shop charged me an extra $10 to fill my tires with dephlogisticated air so they woudn’t catch on fire, that was just a scam??
 
Aloysium said:
That is the nature of science and other systems of thought that deal with things that can be proven: construct facts and rearrange them in the way they most make sense. Ever shifting, there is always something new, never quite the truth.
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Imagine scientists 50 years from now.

“People in 2013 believed that gluons and quarks are elemental particles? Hahahaha, what a joke.”

Seriously, if someone asked me to figure out why something combusted or rusted, without prior knowledge of oxidation, I’d probably come up with the same theory.
Bobby_Jim said:
What?? So when the tire shop charged me an extra $10 to fill my tires with dephlogisticated air so they woudn’t catch on fire, that was just a scam??
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loool.
 
ShameonMe said:
Hello

I’m making my way back to faith after dwelling in Atheism for a while.

I’m a Psychology major and sometimes I feel like faith is nothing more than what has been contemptuously described as “wishful thinking” and “delusional thinking”

I’m curious if there are any other Psych’s here that have more insight into this than I do.
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If you are using your feelings as a guide, I wish you well on your quest.
 
The expression “wishful thinking” can be applied to any ideology including materialism, physicalism, positivism and behaviourism. Faith is also a component of any interpretation of reality. Even agnosticism is based on faith in one’s judgement.

To claim religion is a form of delusion implies a degree of certainty that is unattainable by human intelligence. In fact it suggests that those who make that claim are deluded about their insight into the nature of reality, notably Richard Dawkins and his disciples…
 
IF there were no evidence of God, then faith would certainly be a delusion. Delusion is simply someone believing in something that is not true.

IF you truly believed that all miracles can be explained away by science, that all folks who performed miracles were charlatans, and Jesus was just a crazy person who let himself be assassinated or totally made up, then faith may be simply be mass hysteria.

Freud call us religious folks obsessive compulsive deurotics. That would be a valid diagnosis IF everything we believed in were not true. BUT the fact that many or even all of the things that we believe in are true, makes us nothing like that.

THroughout Jewish and CHurch history there have been many prolific miracle workers, St Padre Pio being one of the latest in the 20th century. IF indeed all of these wonder workers were frauds (including Jesus) or delusional, then yes, one could conclude that faith, Our faith in particular is delusional. I happen to believe that many of these saints, especially Jesus and the Apostles were the real deal. Some of the things that the more famous miracle workers did is really amazing. Read up on a few, I think it will help you regain some of the faith you once had.
 
Sorry I haven’t had much else to contribute but I do appreciate all the replies.

I did recently find a book at a used book store that looked intriguing; It’s a part of a series of books sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences. It’s titled Neuroscience and the Person and it’s part of a series titled Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action.
 
You said that you were majoring in Psychology. The word itself means study of the soul. The church teaches that it is spiritual, and the mind and the will are its’ faculties. The spiritual can be understood by the effects it has on the physical world and can’t be understood by emperical scientists or material evolutionists because their hang-up is that can.t transcend the physical realities. Not physical therefore not real. They will never find the soul by a blip on the osciloscope. Nor would the conventional modern psychology really provide the real cure that people need which is deeply spiritual. Christian psychology can. Thank you for your food for thought and God bless you on your journey
👍

quote: You were made to the image of God, God is Pure Spirit, and you are matter and spirit Jesus took on our nature and brought us back to our Father.
 
The word faith comes from the Latin word fides which is derived from another Latin word, fiat, which means command. Faith is obedience to a command. The command is obedience to God. The command is affirmed by scripture and tradition. So, either you find the evidence compelling (scripture, history and philosophy are my trident of evidence) or you lack faith. Faith and reason go hand in hand then. With reason you examine evidence and determine the validity of any decree or command.
 
I think faith is a kind of inner “knowing”. When we can’t really reason or explain something, we just “know” it somewhere deep inside…so we call it “faith”.
Wishful thinking is when we hope for something to be true. I think our wishes can change, we might want different things to be true throughout our life. For example many years ago I was very ill, I hit rock bottom when my “wishful thinking” was non-existence. I wanted to be an atheist, I really wanted to believe that I’m only materia and dying would be the end, I just wanted the pain to stop…But no matter how hard I was trying to believe that I would not exist after death I could NOT. So we don’t always believe what we want to belive. I think we belive what we already “know” somewhere deep inside…
 
ShameonMe said:
Sorry I haven’t had much else to contribute but I do appreciate all the replies.

I did recently find a book at a used book store that looked intriguing; It’s a part of a series of books sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences. It’s titled Neuroscience and the Person and it’s part of a series titled Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action.
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Why does it look intriguing? Have you warmed up to science in any way?
 
I thought that perhaps faith in God is a delusion until I studied the history of philosophy and the history of the scientific method. I began to understand the necessity of synthetic-a priori judgments, which in my estimation, equates to an act of faith. Without many acts of faith, the scientific method is not to be considered valuable in ascertaining truth. If you want to get scientific about what we can and can’t know about the world outside of our own minds, take a class in Renaissance-Enlightenment philosophy while at school. I suspect that an understanding of philosophy and what it contributes to psychology and science will be very useful to you.
 
Atheism is definitely a delusion. It is ignoring and denying what is real and true. That is the very definition of a delusion. Depending on whether or not God exists, either they are or we are. There is no middle ground here.
 
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