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Please don’t dismiss this post as too long to take a shot on reading through. The debate it features promises to be candid and thorough and, I hope, thought-provoking for believers and unbelievers alike. I hope you find it as worth your time to read as I found it worth mine to write. It set [...]
Archive for the ‘Disambiguating Faith’ Category
Disambiguating Faith By Soul Searching With Clergy Guy
September 7th, 2009 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Atheism, Disambiguating Faith, Faith, Featured, Jesus, New Atheism, Why I Am Not A Christian 
Tags: Doubt, The Existence of God, Tradition, Yahweh 
13 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting
September 5th, 2009 Daniel Fincke On Unreasonable Faith, there is thread chatting about doubt in the context of discussing a quote from Descartes about the necessity to thoroughly doubt at least once in one’s lifetime. In the ensuing discussion, Clergy Guy writes: Just wanted to chime in to say that I think one can have faith and doubts at the [...]
Posted in Atheism, Disambiguating Faith, Faith, Featured, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Doubt No Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity
August 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In a previous post, I wrote the following of Rod Dreher’s decision to inculcate in his children a faithfulness that would safeguard their faith against intellectual faltering: I can say that it is utterly depressing you could be so self aware about inculcating your children to believe regardless of truth or falsity, to put faithfulness [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemology, Ethics, Faith, Featured, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Metaethics, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Religion, Secularism, Spinoza, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Deism, Experience of God, Ground of all being, Irrationalism, Kierkegaard, Knowing God, Objectivism, Personal God, Relativism, Rod Dreher, Subjectivism, Suicide Bombers 9 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment
August 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Earlier today, I challenged Rod Dreher’s recent post wherein he lamented the difficulties we have in overcoming our minds’ propensities for rationalizations. In that same post he had argued from the experience of his own loss of Catholic faith that the intellect was an insufficient ground for religious beliefs and that the will needed to [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Daniel Dennett, Disambiguating Faith, Faith, Featured, Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, Religion, Secularism, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Affective Value Perception, Atheist Alliance, Crunchy Con, Dale McGowan, Emotional Reasoning, Laci Green, Parenting, Parenting Beyond Belief, Rationalization, Reason and Emotions, Rod Dreher, The Heart, Value Perception 12 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason
August 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In reply to Rod Dreher’s recent post explaining his decision to train his children’s wills to be faithful since the intellect was not a firm foundation of faith, I critically characterized his position as essentially boiling down to the following: So, the solution is not to train your children to be intellectually scrupulous but to [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Cultural Secularism, Daniel Dennett, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemology, Faith, Featured, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Religion, Religious Secularism, Secularism Tags: Affective Value Perception, Authority, Belief Proportionate To Evidence, Emotional Reasoning, Reason and Emotions, Value Perception, Will To Believe 6 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization
August 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In a previous post, I discussed how theist Rod Dreher was led to some introspection and cultural criticism based on reading he was doing about the pervasiveness of distortive rationalizations in our thinking. In that context, he tried to compare religious and atheistic rationalizations as similar in kind, as both kinds of faiths. In that [...]
Disambiguating Faith: Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion
August 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Rod Dreher confronts psychological research which illustrates the pervasive role of rationalization in our thought processes, which leads us reflexively to seek out information that confirms preexisting beliefs rather than challenges them among other techniques for seeing only what we want to see. Turning to the implications of the realities of rationalization for the religious [...]
Posted in Atheism, Christianity, Disambiguating Faith, Divine Intervention, Epistemology, Faith, Featured, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Metaphysics, Miracles, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Spinoza Tags: Crunchy Con, Gods of the Philosophers, Ground of all being, Materialism, Paul Tillich, Rationalization, Rod Dreher 10 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Can Rationality Overcome It?
August 28th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Evangelos asks another excellent question in reply to my latest installment of the ongoing “Disambiguating Faith” series: I hope you can do an entry on the practicality of rationality. As you know, human beings are by default not rational beings; as a psychology professor once told me, “our brains have evolved for survival, not calculus”. [...]
Disambiguating Faith: Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious
August 25th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In previous posts (which you will not need to have read to understand this one, but which I recommend you catch up on if you have the time now or later), Adam has tried to argue that irrational ways of thinking may be indispensable means of getting at truth. In response, I have tried to [...]
Posted in Arts, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemology, Faith, Featured, Music, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion Tags: Arists, Art, Discursive vs. Non-Discursive Thinking, Emotional Logic, Irrationalism, Metaphor, Myth, Painting, Poetry, Religious Imagery, Religious Myth, Religious Symbols, Subconscious, Subconscious Reasoning, Symbolic Thinking, Symbols, Unconscious 9 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively
August 24th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In this third reply to Adam (you can read the first two here and here, but need not in order to follow this post), I will examine his following suggestions: When I asked if it is rational to cease rationality, what I meant was the following. Since it is only rational to explore all possible paths [...]
Posted in Disambiguating Faith, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Ethics, Featured, Philosophy, Probability, Religion and Science Tags: Biblical Genocide, Brainstorming, Counter-Intuitive Reasoning, Counter-Intuitive Truths, Eucharist, genocide, Hell, History of Science, Hypotheses, Hypothesis, Irrationalism, James Clerk Maxwell, Laws of Electricity, Philosophy of Science, Rationality, Religious Ethics, Religious Rationalization, Richard Feynman, Transubstantiation 7 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?
August 24th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In reply to my latest installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series in which I replied to Adam’s query about whether an episode of House M.D. provided an example in which a choice to think irrationally (to eliminate symptoms when diagnosing an illness) might prove the more rational course. I argued that if eliminating symptoms helped [...]
Posted in Disambiguating Faith, Epistemology, Evidence, Faith, Featured, Philosophy Tags: Cognition, Confirmation, Dreams, Epiphanies, House M.D., Hypotheses, Perceptual Beliefs, Preconscious Reasoning, Sense Beliefs, Subconscious Reasoning, Thinking While Dreaming, Unconscious Reasoning 10 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Guessing
August 24th, 2009 Daniel Fincke On Facebook (where you can also be my friend if you’d like), Adam replies to the latest installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series with this question: Hate to be corny, but in an episode of House M.D., every rational road runs out and a case is seemingly unsolvable. Finally, by eliminating a symptom (which is [...]
Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True
August 19th, 2009 Daniel Fincke We hold beliefs with various degrees of justification and the demands of rationality dictate to us that we proportion our degree of belief to the degree of our justification. If I am looking at evidence for two sides of a position and I find that 60% of the evidence seems to favor side A, whereas [...]
Posted in Disambiguating Faith, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Ethics, Evidence, Faith, Featured, Philosophy Tags: Emotions, Emotions In Reasoning, Ethical Justification, Fear, Hope, Rational Actions, Rational Beliefs, Rational Emotions, Rationally Calibrating Beliefs To Evidence, Weighing Evidence 13 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless
August 14th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Faith is a form of loyalty. But more than that, faith is a form of trust which does not calibrate itself to objective standards of trustworthiness but trusts people despite their limitations as provably trustworthy people or even despite counter-evidence to the notion that they are worthy of trust at all. Even more than that, however, faith [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Authority, Disambiguating Faith, Ethics, Faith, Featured, Fundamentalism, Moral Psychology, Philosophy, Religion, Religious Moderates, Secularism Tags: Faithfulness, Faithlessness, God as Personification of Tradition, God as Proxy For Tradition, Godlessness, Loyalty, Morality as Tradition, Religious Liberals, Tradition, Traditionalism, Trust 19 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty
August 14th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Tuesday, I began my series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith, to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]
Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Tradition
August 14th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Earlier this week I began this series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith in order to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]
Posted in Disambiguating Faith, Ethics, Faith, Featured, Moral Psychology Tags: Community, Faith Traditions, Group Dynamics, Orthodoxy, Rites, Symbols, Tradition 7 Comments »Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy
August 12th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Yesterday I began my series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith, to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]
Disambiguating Faith: Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty
August 11th, 2009 Daniel Fincke The word faith is an ambiguous one and its various connotations get hopelessly confused with each other in ways that muddle many arguments about the ethical and epistemological justifications for holding beliefs on faith. Because of this, I want to write several posts here which disambiguate faith’s various senses and evaluate the worth of each [...]
Posted in Contemporary Ethics, Disambiguating Faith, Ethics, Faith, Featured, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Virtues Tags: Faithfulness, Honesty, Loyalty, Trustworthiness 11 Comments »
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