What is "faith" and "belief"?

Hey, if anyone is still reading this, there's one thing I'd like to discuss a bit, since I have a little bit of time (woo hoo!).

Jessica had brought up a question about what faith is. That's a good topic to bring up because there are a lot of misunderstandings. Often, many people mentally define the words "belief" and "faith" as meaning "things that have no evidence" or "non-science things". However, I think they are wrong. Faith and belief are sooo much more than being limited to the invisible... it even includes the visible. Keep reading...

Is faith simply believing that something exists that we don't see? Not quite, because I have faith that I'm typing on a computer right now; I have faith that my eyes aren't tricking me; I have faith that I'm surrounded by walls and windows right now (oh, and some doors too!); scientists have faith that they are seeing chemical reactions when they mix two substances; people have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow.

When the word "belief" comes up, many people quickly associate it with religion. One of the professors here at UNLV is an atheist, and in conversation (I think we were talking about what knowledge is) and although for most things we can't say we know with ABSOLUTE certainty, we can have a "justified true belief". Automatically he brought up religion and how people will invent a god and then get others to believe in it. That wasn't what I was talking about at all.

The important word is "justified".... do I have good reasons for believing something? Do I have good reasons to believe that I existed more than 5 minutes ago? Of course I can be skeptical and say that I don't know with ABSOLUTE certainty that I existed 6 minutes ago, but I have good reason to believe that I really did exist more than 5 minutes ago. Why?

When I am honest with myself, I simply have more reasons to believe that I did. What are my reasons? I have memories of yesterday (youth group, playing dominoes, dancing with HeatherL, etc.) and I can go and find some of the people from yesterday and ask them if my memories are similar to theirs. I can check my clothes that I remember wearing and smell them to see if they no longer have that "fresh and clean" smell. (Yes, I know... ew, yuck... but if you're searching for reasons, here they are)

With all these reasons and more, I think I have enough justification for my belief. Christianity has such a history of giving reasons for believing that God exists, that Jesus existed, that Jesus was God, that he died and rose again, etc. No other religion that I know of has such a history like that. The four gospels and Acts (if read as historical documents) as well as non-Christian writings from that time period give good reasons give a lot of good evidence. There's also a lot of archaeological evidence that show that the places in the Bible weren't simply invented by the writers.

Faith means having good reasons for believing that something (whatever that something is) is, in fact, true. We also aim to match our beliefs as closely to reality as possible. We admit that we could be wrong, and that's when we say, "show me better evidence and I'll reconsider." But the evidence has to be good.... a balance of positive and negative arguments & evidence.

So... everyone has faith: both theists AND atheists.