Yeah, Bill. ;-) I thought you might show up in response.

What I was doing was talking about the actual nature of faith itself. Not just religious faith, but faith, period. Religious faith is one form of it. Faith in political institutions, leaders, national identities, and cultural norms are other forms of it. Faith in various philosophical outlooks on life is/are other forms of it. And so on, ad infinitum...

It is essential that people recognize where they are employing faith...and where they are dealing with certain knowledge of something...and what the difference is.

It isn't faith that tells a scientist that a certain combination of chemicals will result in a specific chemical reaction, and I never asserted that it was. That's knowledge, based upon past experience and observation. It would be faith on the scientist's part to assume that only science can tell him everything worth knowing about life...but that's another matter entirely. He has no confirmation of such a proposition...only an opinion about it, based on his likes and dislikes and familiarities more than anything else...and that's what people's faith is usually based on: likes, dislikes, and familiarities.

You say that "trust" and "confidence" are better terms for what I'm speaking of? As far as I'm concerned, they are synonyms for what I'm speaking of. That's what faith is...it's trust and confidence in an unproven (or perhaps a mistakenly assumed to be proven) proposition, that trust being based on familiarity more than anything else. The more familiar people are with a proposition they happen to already agree with...even in the complete absence of undeniable evidence....the more trust they have in it, and the stronger is their faith.

The proposition may either be a positive one: "There is a God."

Or it may be a negative one: "There is no God."

Either way, it's a faith-based assertion. I grew up in an atheistic family. so my faith-based opinion about it when I was young was most definitely "There is no God." I felt quite sure of it, but not on the basis of evidence. On the basis of automatic assumption...I figured my parents were right.

I later came to a somewhat different conclusion, based on a variety of my own personal experiences and feelings....but I certainly don't think of "God" as...

- a male entity
- a larger humanlike being of some kind
- a separate powerful entity who judges and punishes
- an old patriarch with a beard
- a guy who made the world in 6 days
- a guy who made a whale swallow Jonah and spit him out 3 days later
- a guy whose only official book is the Christian Bible
- a Deity whose only Son is Jesus Christ
- a guy who designated the Children of Israel as his Chosen people

And so on, and so on...

(I do greatly appreciate and try to emulate the ethical and moral principles Jesus is reputed to have given and demonstrated in the writings we have about him...but that's another matter.)

In other words, I don't take a fundamentalist viewpoint. But I do think there's a higher purpose to life, a higher intelligence within everything, and that we are all connected to it in a spiritual and moral sense, and attempting each in our own way to enhance that connection, whether we know it or not. And from that comes our instinctive search for knowledge, beauty, grace, justice, honesty, truth, and love. We use every way we can to get there, including both science and religion.

That's why I don't see them as opposed in any way. They are 2 different paths to the same objective, which is to reach our highest potential. We envision perfection. We reach for it in every way possible.