It's true that many theists will simply throw the word "faith" on the table to trump any reason for doubting their current beliefs, but I think it's also true that many theists (or at least Christians) will insist that it is the others that do this, while they, on the other hand, do not. Their faith is perfectly rational.

(I'm suddenly reminded of an occasion where Dan Dennet said that everyone believes they are an expert on consciousness simply because they have it. I'm willing to bet it works the same way with people who have faith in God).

A true understanding of what "faith" honestly means is not something I have known many theists to think very hard about. (Speaking strictly from experience). They believe that they are experts on what it means to have faith simply because they have it. Consequently, they never get as far as the critical analysis because they never get as far as realizing that a critical analysis might be necessary.

Good piece. Good analogies. Gold star.

Colloquial usages of the word faith are synonymous with 'trust', which can be adjusted based on new experience.

Theistic usages of the word faith are non contingent.

The two usages of the word have nothing in common.

Nice post. I agree that it's good to have faith in humanity and in yourself in times of trouble, but unfortunately, faith has become loaded with connotations of religiosity. This extra baggage that the word "faith" carries has become so conspicuous that secular humanists like me often shy away from using the word, because doing so will almost inevitably draw a bunch of Christians upon us screaming "Faith! Faith! You said faith!! Secular humanism is a religion!!" Anyone know of a better word?

P.S.

I think Kant stated that religious faith (belief in God and an immortal soul) is necesary for morality. That's where I disagree with him. I'm throwing in with Dawkins--I'm pretty sure the "Golden Rule" is an evolutionary by product.

If you like, I can provide you the original German of his terminology. It's all very confusing, but you can rest assured that he didn't think that a belief in God was necessary in the same way that belief in an external world was necessary.

This is a good point and is what I call 'trusting your intuition'. This is in fact the correct rational justification for relying upon intuition when evidence is unavailable and time is too short to search for evidence. However, it is not completely without evidence. And here's why:

Intuition is the natural ability of the brain to make fairly intelligent decisions without conscious thought. Your intuition naturally gets smarter as you experience the world. It is learning from past experiences. So, in this sense, intuition itself is built through an aggregation of evidences.

Also, we can test intuition and see that it indeed does make fairly intelligent decisions. This is evidence of the effectiveness of intuition itself.

So, when you are attacked by a dog, you are relying on a) the evidence of your past experience with similar situations, which has been accumulated by your intuition, and b) the evidence that trusting your intuition tends to lead to fairly good decisions.

So, trusting your intuiton -- when lacking immediate evidence and lacking time to find sufficient immediate evidence -- is justified rationally by past evidence (as compared to the lack of immediate evidence). Basically, we have evidence that intuition works, so there's your rational justification of trusting intuition.

Of course, big caveats. Intuition is no match for direct, immediate evidence. If there's sufficient time and opportunity to investigate, then you should investigate before relying solely on intuition. Intuition is fairly good, but far from perfect. 100% trust (faith) in intuition is not rationally justified.

Intuition is also easily fooled. Logical fallacies are a perfect example. Intuitively, they *seem* like good arguments, but they are not actually reliable. Doubt and inquiry are the best remedies to this kind of self-deception.

When a theist says they have faith, they have essentially said that they place intuition over rational, immediate evidence. That's why theistic faith is not rational. They trust their untrustworthy intuition too much. Intuition is good, and quite powerful, but should not be trusted 100%. Evidence trumps intuition.

However, I do disagree that the example I mentioned is a case of intuition. An intuition, in the sense that you speak of it, is a decision that needs to be made with little evidence and in a split second (or little time). But that's not what I'm talking about. I think you mistakenly took it as an example of intuition because it seems like it needs to be a fast decision. But to that extent, the example is deceptive. This can be seen by the parallel example where I used faith to arrive at the belief-without-evidence that a girl likes me. In both cases, the common theme is that I must trust that what I'd like to be true (either being able to out-pace the dog, or having the pretty girl like me) is indeed true.

This is literally wishful-thinking. That's why it's not intuition. As you said, intuition relies on past experience in subtle ways. However, in my example, there may be no evidence for my being able to outrun the dog, since there may be no past experience where I actually outran the dog! But should the lack of justifying experience keep me from having confidence or trust in my own abilities to outrun the dog? No! I should always keep faith, because it can only help me run faster (even if it has never actually helped me get away in the past). The alternative is either to run slowly (in which case, why run at all?) or just give up. These seem like no alternatives at all.

So, I hope you can see why my example is not one of intuition. Here's why: The belief does not rely on past experience, it does not have to be a decision made in little time, and (insofar as it is a potentially self-fulfilling belief) it is always justified. These characteristics show that it is indeed a belief without evidence, and not merely an intuition.

Prezactly!

Faith meaning "a justfied belief" or "a belief based on some evidence"  vital for operation in the world. If we only acted on things we knew with abolsute certainty then we would be paralysed by inaction. What do you know without any doubt? Not much really when you think about it. Well not much about the external world anyway.

Faith meaning "a completely unjustified belief" on the other hand  is far from useful. In fact its is exactly the oposite. It is a very poor way of deciding which beliefs should be acted upon and whcih should not. 

Much of this equivocates faith and trust which I don't think requires response. They are separate concepts. Trust is evidenced or learned, faith is not.

Now, the problem with faith is not that it can't lead to favorable outcomes as happens in your doctored just so analogies such as the dog, but that it is a wholly unreliable foundation upon which to build beliefs or base decision. Why would this ever be a desirable basis when evidenced reasoned conclusions provide a much more reliable basis?

In the case of the dog, it is not your faith that you can run faster than the dog that helps you get away, it is the fact that you actually outrun the dog. If you have faith that you can outrun the dog and the dog catches you and gnaws on your melon then your faith in outrunning it as opposed to taking some more reasonable action, perhaps climbing a nearby tree, is dangerous. Before the outcome is known one has no ability to discern with any reliability, using faith, which of these two methods is a more reliable means for escaping dogs. 

Willing something to be true may sometimes work but we have no reason to believe that it will. It is just as likely that all we end up doing is deluding ourselves and placing ourselves into undesirable or dangerous circumstances. Faith should be avoided at all costs. If there is any basis to make a reliable decision then faith is an undesirable foundation for making decisions. If there is no basis for making a reliable decision this does not rescue faith from it undesirable nature. Though it might make it more appealing, one who bases a decision on faith should never expect a reliable outcome.

No, you missed an important point that perhaps I didn't emphasize enough to make clear, but if you go back and read it, it's there.

The point is that intuition builds experience from *similar* situations, not identical situations. You may not have seen *this* dog before, but you've seen dogs before, or you've seen animals that try to bite/hurt you, etc. This is a very important part of intuition, and is why it's so useful. Our brains naturally make pretty good generalizations which can be applied to broader situations than the few situations upon which the generalizations are based.

As for the situation with the girl, that's an example of not being able to acquire evidence, either due to lack of time to investigate, or due to the fact that the girl will try to hide the fact that she likes you.

At this time I should mention that I'm still working on my conception of intuition, so I may revise what I said in the past. Don't take this as backtracking, think of it instead like this: I have an intuition about intuition and I'm trying to turn that into a conceptualization of intuition. So, when my conceptualization is exposed as insufficient, I'll revise it to closer match my intution about intuition.

So, here's an example of me 'backtracking' (revising what I've stated here): The most essential part of my intuition about intuition is that it is the natural ability of the brain to make good guesses. Again, it's not perfect, but it can be trained. When you train your intution (either consciously or subconsciously), you are basically applying a system on top of your intuition. This is important. In my view, rationality is a system built on top of natural intuition.

Thus, I view intuition as the foundation for all decision making. But it is trained intuition, and trained intuition may appear to be quite different than inborn intuition. Rational thinkers think very differently than the average person who hasn't trained in logic, science, etc. But at the foundation, both are relying upon inborn intuition.

So, when you use the example of flirting with the girl, the decision to use 'faith' is itself an act of intuition. Either the idea just pops into your head (raw intuition, natural ability of brain to make good guesses) or you have had past experiences where flirting with girls improved your chances (subconsciously trained intuition) or you read in a book or website that it's a good idea to flirt with girls (consciously trained intuition).

Now, here's the main point of this post. I want to say that when you say you are using 'faith', what I interpret that to mean is that you are making a choice to rely upon untrained or subconsciously trained intuition. The whole point of me bringing up the word intuition is to demystify your word 'faith'. I'm saying that having faith in such situations is really just relying on your brain's natural ability to make good guesses, i.e. what I call 'intuition'.

Now, the kind of faith that a theist uses is based on *deceived* intuition. Remember I said intuition is not perfect? Well it in fact has built-in biases, such as how people tend to believe what the majority of others say (argumentum ad populum). While this may be a good heuristic, it can lead to wrong conclusions. All of the logical fallacies are good examples of the inherent biases of human intuition and are examples of how to deceive people who haven't trained their intuition to be wary of such fallacies.

Religions work by directly exploiting those inherent biases in order to decieve untrained human intuition. Faith in this instance does not rely upon ANY evidence. It instead relies upon the natural faults and biases of our intuition. It is 'trusting your untrained intuition 100%, without regard for the possibility that your intuition could be wrong or deceived'. 

I'm rambling a bit (sorry), but essentially, my idea of intuition is at the heart of human cognition, so no I don't agree that the dog or girl situations do not use intuition. They do use it, in my opinion. 

Hmm...this is reminiscent of A. C. Grayling's argument that Kant was really an atheist, though he went along with the practices of his time and location. I'm not sure how much evidence he has to back his claims though; I'm quite certain that he came from a very strongly Christian family and he sought to preserve traditional Christian belief systems. If by "the original German of his terminology" you mean "ding an Sich" and stuff like that, could you explain it to me? I don't really understand what he meant by "the thing in itself" and "the thing as it appears to me"...but that might not be related to his moral philosophy. Lastly, I'd like to see the evidence you have to back the statement that Kant suggested that we need to pretend that we are under constant divine surveillance. Thank you.

I would never be so presumptuous as to say that Kant was an atheist. Kant was much more nuanced than to summarize his ideas about theology in one line.

Also, God is not active, for Kant. So God is not constantly on duty like a Christian surveillance camera. The kind of God that Kant is dealing with is purely a deistic notion of "God." That is, it is a God that completed his job a long time ago.

Kant's technical term for thinking is "denken," which means to imagine something. But the proper way to think about his belief in God is not illuminated by this term (as I previously suggested). Rather, it is through Kant's distinction of a regulative and constitutive use of ideas. For Kant, God is a "regulative" idea only, not "constitutive." That is, it is not to be taken as representing some metaphysical being or entity whose reality is supposed to be demonstrable, but rather it is a way of imagining the world as the result of a higher intelligenc for the sake of allowing us to look for the maximum in order and connectedness, which is beneficial (or so Kant thought) for the organization of whatever empirical knowledge we do acquire.

More clearly, Kant says (Critique of Pure Reason, B709), "[God] is postulated only problematically (since we cannot reach it through any of the concepts of the understanding) in order that we may view all connection of the things of the world of sense as if they had their ground in [it]... In thus proceeding, our sole purpose is to secure systematic unity..."

For a more detailed analysis, see this website on Kant's ideas about God. 

Indeed 

I think you have given some examples of some useful beliefs that are unjustified. But I've yet to see an example of a justified belief without evidence. There is a whole world of difference between having a justified belief and having a belief that is useful. Now sure justified beliefs do on the whole turn out to be more useful that positions of faith but this is not ALWAYS the case (as you have shown in your examples). It depends on circumstance. With you Dog example it is more useful to have a position of faith as it is perhaps in the "does she fancy me?" example. But the fact that they are potentially useful does not make them justfied beliefs. In both cases not acting on the "faith" automatically results in failure anyway so they are nothing to loose cases.

Oh, I see. Okay, thank you for clearing that up. I wasn't entirely sure as to what he thought, though it appears I was somewhat mistaken. I have basically no knowledge of German, but thanks for teaching me about the meaning of the word he used to signify "belief".