Bill's Notes

I always thought that you were more of a mystic, Bill (because of the various things you've said about the faith being unbelievable apart from grace).

However that goes, I don't think that any usual reading of the bible would lead one to believe that there's going to be a philosophy test in heaven. Indeed, a lot of what Jesus said doesn't show the highest regard for the learned; he certainly preached to ordinary people rather than searching out the learned and holding conference with them.

You can only draw so much from what Jesus did and did not do while he walked on the earth — he was a man in a particular place and time, and had work to accomplish beyond merely setting up the material to occur in the gospels — but I don't think that the evidence is very good that scholarship or even wisdom contributes very much towards sanctity. Philosophy is my first love, so I can't help but be scared by Matt 11:25, "At that time Jesus exclaimed, 'I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.'

I think if you get asked that question in the afterlife, you can relax, because your answer won't matter - you will be in Heck.

I think if you get asked that question in the afterlife, you can relax, because your answer won't matter - you will be in Heck.

Heck? In that case, I'd take my time coming up with an answer in Hell's library.

Now seriously, isn't Dante asked a question prior to ascending into Paradise. He's asked what is true faith, and he gives the answer, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Which I still can't figure out. What is the substance of something hoped for ... it's just abstract. evidence of things unseen? huh? But it's the right answer, and Dante gets in.

Bill,

As to Dante's answer, while I've never read the original (still less in the original language), I would guess that the meaning is that faith consists roughly of inferred knowledge. You know that God loves man, so when you see a blind man, you have faith that God must love this blind man, and somehow his blindness must be compatible with God's love. Now, the word faith is used in all sorts of senses, and is indeed often used to mean a lot more like a man's creed than anything else. I.e. my "faith" is what I believe, in the sense of what I will verbally assert to be true. This is mostly used to describe others, and their "faiths".

But to try to simplify, knowledge is the conformatiy of a mind to reality, and certainty is the feeling we have, as real beings, when our mind conforms to reality. It's a bit like how comfort is the feeling we have when our body conforms to the chair, or all of our joints are in their sockets, etc. As I've described it here, knowledge is not here verbal; it's not the stuff of formal logic. (Since all words are inherently abstractions, true knowledge can't be.)

Now, our mind is informed by only limited contact with reality (some would suggest this is an effect of the fall; I'm not sure how far down that path I would go). We have our five senses and that's about it, at least that we can easily recognize. But we're also more connected to other real things because, along with them, we actually exist. Possibly through other methods, but also through introspection, we can learn about others because they share in the nature which we have. Knowing our own nature, we know other people's natures to the degree that they share ours. God having created us, everything we are we share with God, though of course God is greater than us, and so he has things not in common with us as well.

Faith, then consists of that knowledge that we have by being real creatures that is not pointed to by our limited senses. God loves, and we know that love, even when we can't see it. Our knowledge is no less real because it is not obviously confirmed by our senses, or may even appear to be contradicted by it. God's love is real, and so our knowledge of it is real, regardless of the evidence of our senses. I'm not here indulging in mysticism, rather just working with the idea that knowledge is the correspondence of our minds to reality. You only really get the difficulty if you try to define knowledge to be our minds correspondence to our senses.

So when he says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, he means (I believe) that faith is our knowledge of the reality which we can't observe — which is none the less real for us not having observed it. The evidence of things not seen likewise means that faith is that knowledge we have through memory and sharing in reality that may sometimes be denied, or at least unconfirmed, by our senses.

I think that this makes more sense when you consider the practical, prosaic sort of faith that we live with every day and take for granted. When you go off to work, you take it as a matter of faith that your house will be there when you drive back to it. I don't mean that you have faith that your house wasn't hit by an asteroid, or a fallen airplane, or whatever. I mean that you know without seeing it that your house didn't turn into a giant chicken and walk off. It didn't relocate itself to Russia. Now, you're so habituated to this sort of faith that you don't even notice it, but it's exactly the same sort of faith, except with a different object, than is faith in God. Until you turn that corner, you may know that your house didn't walk off to Russia, but you have no empirical proof of that. Your senses leave you completely in the dark on that question. You must turn to your knowledge of the world, which you've gathered through experience of the world and being a real creature in the same creation as your house, of a similar substance (matter subject to all of the "laws" of physics) to tell you that your house hasn't done any of these things.

The only major difference is that your faith in your house, and other such prosaic things, gets constantly confirmed by your senses, while God doesn't walk around for us to touch and see and hear and crucify very often.

But faith operates in exactly the same way in both cases. The difference is purely the frequency of verification by our senses. It's just that in the case of your house, you have your faith verified by your senses so often, and so rarely see things which make you doubt it, that your animal nature becomes habituated to it, whereas many people never become habituated to faith in God.

To take an example somewhere in the middle, consider a lover. I think that everyone has had the experience of a lover being late. Our mind immediately starts reaching to explanations, at first reasonable, and as time wears on more far-fetched. At first we think that they might have been delayed. Then we wonder if they forgot about us, or something came up. Maybe they were killed in a car crash? Perhaps they've left us for someone else. I don't mean that we entertain all of these wild speculations as likely; merely that they occur to us. Through it all, some part of us knows that nothing dreadful has happened, and life is OK. And a while later the lover shows up and that part of us was vindicated.

This is an imperfect example, of course, because there's nothing inherent in a lover which makes them invincible to car crashes; mostly our faith in this case is in the fact that driving is pretty safe, and so car crashes aren't that likely.

With God, things become more absolute, since God can't cease to exist in a car crash, or anything else. There's more to believe in and less unambiguous evidence for our eyes. But faith in God is not of a different species from faith in your toaster oven.

Bill, I am suprised at you: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen" is just Hebrews 11:1, King James: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Of course I am told by my postmodernist professor that the authorship of Hebrews is in some doubt. The language is kind of funky, as you noted...

Youngs has "And faith is of things hoped for a confidence, of matters not seen a conviction"

The NRSV has "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.", which is easier to understand.

So basically, according to Hebrews, faith is believing in the word of God.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. [...] And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

I think that faith is more than belief, but the additional qualities are the Je Ne Sais Q that makes Thai curry better than most indian curries. -So part of it is coconut, and part of it is those spicy lime leaves.
:)

Bill,

"There is a lot of interesting evidence one way, but we can't really know without having seen it."

The entire point of faith is that we can really know without having seen it.

oh wait, i see what you mean. nevermind.

"But I am not so sure. I don't mean to promulgate guilt, but I suspect we crucify God rather often. In a whole variety of ways."

Your mistaking the dependent clause for the independent clause. I'm not at all claiming that our sins are not bad, or that God's death was not for our sins or on account of them. But we don't literally crucify God any more, because God is no longer incarnate for us to get our grubby hands on. Plus, we don't literally crucify people any more.

The sentence was about sensory experience, so I meant everything literally. Obviously in some sense we see God in all good parts of creation. When you know enough, you can see some aspect of God when you look at a tree. But that's because your mind can infer. All the photons entering your eye have reflected off of was a tree. You can know some aspect of God through looking at the tree, but we're not pantheists — the tree is separate from God — so we have to do it by inference. We can see God in a tree only metaphorically. Unless God works some miracle, such as a burning tree that isn't consumed. Then all bets are off, of course.

p.s. Chris: had enough brain cells left this morning to read your 'entirely too long and cerebral post' above, and I quite liked it. Tx.