Faith is a choice. It's different than mere belief. To put your faith in Jesus is to choose to become his follower and to trust him for your eternal well-being. You can do that even if you lack certainty about whether he will deliver.
It's similar to hiring a lawyer. When you hire a lawyer, you put your faith in that lawyer to do a certain job for you. You pay the lawyer and you agree to take the lawyer's advice. But you can choose to do this even if you have doubts about your lawyer's abilities.
While faith is a choice, belief is not a choice. You can't simply choose, by an act of will, to believe one thing instead of another. For example, if a cat appeared in front of you, you couldn't just choose whether to believe you're seeing a cat or not. You can't simply choose to believe there's a polka dotted elephant flying around outside above your house.
I suspect you can choose to put your faith in somebody even if you didn't believe they could deliver on what you were trusting them to do. It may seem unreasonable to do that, but there are situations in which it's not unreasonable. For example, you might be in some kind of danger, and somebody offers to rescue you if only you'll take hold of a rope or get behind them or something. You might not believe they can save you, but since you have nothing to lose, you put your faith in them by trusting them to save you. That's something you choose to do. But if you choose to put your faith in somebody when you are very unsure they can deliver, that's what I would call taking a leap of faith.
I'm not sure you can put your faith in Jesus without believing in God, though. Putting your faith in Jesus means trusting in the things he taught. To trust Jesus that he taught the truth (especially about judgment and salvation) entails believing in God. And since trusting in Jesus means becoming his follower, and being his follower entails adopting his worldview, then you can't put your faith in Jesus without also believing in God.
Besides that, there wouldn't be much point in putting your faith in Jesus if you didn't believe in God. Unless you believed there was a judgment and Jesus offered salvation, there would be no reason to put your faith in Jesus.
I don't think it's possible to believe in God without having some kind of reason to do so. A lot of people believe in God but can't put their finger on why. So they say they have "blind faith" and they don't even try to justify their belief. But I think what is going on in those cases is that God has changed their hearts. He has done something to cause them to have a belief. He has given them the gift of faith. The belief then becomes basic in the way that we have a basic belief that our senses are giving us true information about the external world. Nobody can prove that their senses correspond to a real external world. It's just an automatic belief we have that causes us to affirm that when we see things, there are really things out there to see. For example, when I see my cat, I automatically form the belief that my cat is there, even though it's possible the cat is only a perception that exists in my mind.
Whether you call this kind of justification "evidence" or not is a matter of semantics. Some people would say you can be justified in believing things without evidence provided they are hardwired into your brain in the same way that your belief in the external world or other minds is hardwired into your brain. Other people say these kinds of beliefs are self-evident. That is, the evidence is just in the appearance or apprehension. To some people, the existence of God is self-evident because when they pray, read the Bible, or just think about God, God presents himself to them in a way that they cannot deny anymore than they can deny the existence of the external world.
But for a lot of other people, there are evidences and arguments for the existence of God that depend on observations and reasoning. For me personally, it's both.
7 comments:
Is faith an emotion?
No, I don't think so.
I admit I hadn't considered the possibility until I was looking up the conceptual act model of emotion. The wiki entry for 'theory of constructed emotion' had a list of emotion words, and there nestled between 'excitement' and 'fear' was 'faith'. So then I started thinking more about it and suspect I am coming round to the idea.
There were some other interesting emotion concepts and phrases, I particularly liked a transliterated 'mono no aware' which is a Japanese concept of a sensitivity to ephemera.
That's an interesting article. I just read it. It does make more sense to me that emotion would be something that arises out of pre-existing stuff in the brain than that there would be particular emotion circuits that activate. On the other hand, there are certain hormones that are associated with emotions, so those emotions aren't entirely emergent from what's already in the brain. I think emotions are complicated and often hard to express in words. The typical words we use, like anger, fear, excitement, happiness, etc., are just approximations, so I agree with what the article said when it compared emotions to a spectrum of wavelengths (a rainbow) where we designate whole ranges as being a certain color.
I've always thought it a little strange that "desire" is considered an emotion.
Interesting, what is it about desire in particular? Perhaps its relation to its more cognitive-leaning cousin, motivation?
It's hard to explain, but when I put "desire" besides things like "fear," "anger," "joy," "sadness," etc., it just seems like one of these things doesn't belong. Desires doesn't strike me as being a feeling in the same sense as these other things. When I fear something, then I desire to avoid it. Or when I'm smitten with somebody, I desire to be around her. When my desire gets fulfilled, it causes me to be happy. When my desire is denied, I'm disappointed or sad. So desire is involved with emotions, but it doesn't strike me as being an emotion.
So, whilst that 'one of these things is not like the other...' song rattles round my head, I've been trying to figure out what difference you are tracking. I think it might be a language thing? It might appear that desires are different because they can be fulfilled or thwarted, whereas emotions like anger or joy can't. When either fulfilling or thwarting occurs, that elicits an emotion and in reverse, an emotion can elicit a desire (to be with, to avoid).
A counter to this is that you can desire x or fear y and then cascades of emotions and behaviour follow depending on how states of affairs involving x or y unfold. I might fear that Jones will leave me. If they do I might feel sad. How is desire any different?
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