Maybe I was too hard on Schopenhauer?
Or a continuation of: What is faith? And how does it relate to knowledge?

by Tom Crawford

7/22/2007

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In my post,  What is faith?  And how does it relate to knowledge? (7/21/2007), I made the point that faith in the truth is proportional to my knowledge about that truth.  But there are cases where increasing my faith or belief in a subject is inversely proportional to my knowledge on that subject.  This is obviously the case when the faith is in something that is not true.  When I was a kid, I wanted to believe in Santa Claus.  A lot of people (adults, peers, relatives, TV and radio, books, etc. – not my parents by the way) told me about Santa Claus......  But as I got older, I learned the truth about Santa Claus, and it destroyed any faith that I had in him or wanted to have in him.

Now, I claim to have faith that God exists.  From the definitions in my previous post, this means that I am firmly convinced that God exists.  My atheist friends however are firmly convinced that God does not exist.  (If they were not firmly convinced, then they would be agnostic, not atheist.)  In other words, they have faith that God does not exist.  The fact or truth is however, either there is a God, or there is no God.  At least one of us, me or the atheist, is exercising blind faith – a faith not based on knowledge – the type of faith that Schopenhauer was really talking about.  There are even people that have a faith in God or a god, but it is not a faith based on knowledge of the truth.  The Apostle Paul in the Bible talks about this type of person:

“For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge.”  Romans 10:2  NASB^®

The question therefore becomes, “What is the truth about God?”  And then, “Is my faith in line with that truth about God?”  If it is not, then at some level, I am exercising blind faith.

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